Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Pierson, Danielle (Dani)
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Understanding rest and care as integral parts of activist and community organizations has been central to Black feminist and disability activist spaces for many years. Written from my perspective as a Métis-settler student and researcher invested in activist projects, this thesis intends to articulate a theory of Rest as Resistance from a Métis-feminist perspective. In this theory, I intend to illuminate a response to the deeply exhausting ways that the settler state has (historically and presently) attempted to harm Indigenous communities. This response sees rest not as succumbing to these oppressive powers but as a tool to actively resist them. In using the reflective and feminist methodology of auto-theory, combined with practice-based methods where rest is both the topic and the methodology, I aim to elucidate how a theory of Rest as Resistance may support ongoing anti- and de-colonial action. I begin with a thorough synthesis of the work of scholars, writers, and artists who have been grappling with questions of productivity and rest through varied theoretical and personal lenses. Next, utilizing reflexive methods, I name two tenets of a distinct Métis theory of Rest as Resistance: first, following Black feminist theories of Rest as Resistance, rest becomes resistance when it refuses colonial and capitalist standards and expectations of productivity. Second, rest becomes resistance when it centres knowledge and relationships that colonial capitalism attempts to devalue, discredit, or destroy. I explore these tenets through critical and creative considerations of visiting with Land and artmaking as practices of rest.
REST AS RESISTANCE: A MÉTIS-FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF THE RELEVANCE OF REST IN ACTIVISM by Danielle (Dani) Pierson B.A., University of British Columbia (Okanagan), 2022 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) (Power, Conflict, and Ideas) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) April 2024 © Danielle (Dani) Pierson, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Rest As Resistance: A Métis-Feminist Analysis of the Relevance of Rest in Activism submitted by Danielle (Dani) Pierson in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts . Dr. Ilya Parkins, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisor Dr. Gabrielle Legault, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Onyx Sloan Morgan, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Anita Girvan, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies University Examiner iii Abstract Understanding rest and care as integral parts of activist and community organizations has been central to Black feminist and disability activist spaces for many years. Written from my perspective as a Métis-settler student and researcher invested in activist projects, this thesis intends to articulate a theory of Rest as Resistance from a Métis-feminist perspective. In this theory, I intend to illuminate a response to the deeply exhausting ways that the settler state has (historically and presently) attempted to harm Indigenous communities. This response sees rest not as succumbing to these oppressive powers but as a tool to actively resist them. In using the reflective and feminist methodology of auto-theory, combined with practice-based methods where rest is both the topic and the methodology, I aim to elucidate how a theory of Rest as Resistance may support ongoing anti- and de-colonial action. I begin with a thorough synthesis of the work of scholars, writers, and artists who have been grappling with questions of productivity and rest through varied theoretical and personal lenses. Next, utilizing reflexive methods, I name two tenets of a distinct Métis theory of Rest as Resistance: first, following Black feminist theories of Rest as Resistance, rest becomes resistance when it refuses colonial and capitalist standards and expectations of productivity. Second, rest becomes resistance when it centres knowledge and relationships that colonial capitalism attempts to devalue, discredit, or destroy. I explore these tenets through critical and creative considerations of visiting with Land and artmaking as practices of rest. iv Lay Summary Black feminist and disability justice community organizations and spaces have been considering rest as an important community building tool for many years. As a Métis-settler student who engages in different forms of activism, I am interested in the ways that this thinking could be brought over to Indigenous community organizing. I begin by tracing the connections between the various thinkers taking up rest as an activist tool. Then, I make clear how understanding rest is relevant to Métis community organizing through reflecting on personal experience. In these reflections, I emphasize how rest turns into a form of resistance against expected and exhausting standards of productivity when resting reveals our inherit value as living beings and connects us to our cultures, knowledges, and communities. I use the restful practices of spending time with Land and engaging in art to fuel these reflections. v Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... viii Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... x Introduction: Falling Into Rest ........................................................................................................ 1 Belonging ............................................................................................................................ 2 Rest and Exhaustion in Métis Communities ....................................................................... 5 Defining Rest ...................................................................................................................... 6 Two Tenets of a Métis Restful Resistance .......................................................................... 8 Framing the Thesis ............................................................................................................ 11 PART ONE ................................................................................................................................... 19 Chapter One: All The Rest – A Literature Review ........................................................... 20 Rest Denied ........................................................................................................... 23 Exhaustion ................................................................................................. 23 Exhaustion from Validation ...................................................................... 25 Women’s Labour ...................................................................................... 27 Time .......................................................................................................... 28 Leisure ....................................................................................................... 30 vi Black Leisure and Hypervigilance ............................................................ 32 Being Awake ............................................................................................. 33 Moving From Individual to Collective ..................................................... 36 Burnout in Activism .................................................................................. 39 Rest Reclaimed ..................................................................................................... 41 Expansive Rest .......................................................................................... 42 Rest as More than Luxury ......................................................................... 43 Anti-Capitalist Self-Care .......................................................................... 45 Towards Community Care ........................................................................ 46 Balancing Work and Rest ......................................................................... 48 Strategies for Viewing Rest Differently ................................................... 50 Shaping Restful Futures ............................................................................ 53 Rest in Action ....................................................................................................... 54 The Nap Ministry ...................................................................................... 54 Black Power Naps ..................................................................................... 55 Performance Art ........................................................................................ 56 Representations of Belonging ................................................................... 57 Poetry ........................................................................................................ 58 Conceptual Provocations .......................................................................... 59 Concluding Thoughts ............................................................................................ 60 vii PART TWO .................................................................................................................................. 63 Chapter Two: Visiting With Land .................................................................................... 64 Muskoseepi Park ................................................................................................... 72 Woodhaven ........................................................................................................... 75 The Black Path ...................................................................................................... 78 Walking On ........................................................................................................... 83 Chapter Three: Artful Repose ........................................................................................... 86 Beading Moccasins ............................................................................................... 89 Hide Tanning ........................................................................................................ 95 The Final Stitches ............................................................................................... 100 Conclusion: Dreaming Forward .................................................................................................. 103 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 107 viii Acknowledgements The most daunting section of this thesis writing process for me has been the acknowledgements. I struggle to conceptualize a way to express my deep and never-ending gratitude for all of the people who cared for me and supported the materialization of this thesis. In many ways, this whole thesis is just a giant acknowledgement section – a love letter to all the people, beings, knowledges that have cared for me and taught me the power of rest. Despite my shyness, my self-professed introvert tendencies, my deep need for daily “no talking time,” it is my family, my friends, my community that keep me living, breathing, writing. It is the joy in shared laughter, in being silly, in never-ending card games and teasing that I become a person capable of moving through the world in all its intricacies and complications. For many years I sought an identity not tied to another person, always being known in my tiny town of Sexsmith as somebody’s granddaughter, daughter, or sister. Now, I crave the ways people know me through webs of relations – understanding that I only exist through the love and care of all the people around me. What a gift to be firmly cemented in galaxies of connections that teach me how to love and care. I am also eternally grateful for my supervisor, Dr. Ilya Parkins, committee members, Dr. Onyx Sloan Morgan and Dr. Gabrielle Legault, and other academic mentors who supported my research. It would not be possible to take on research about rest without being surround by mentors who firmly believed in the project. These mentors offered such significant care – far beyond the requirements of their roles. I would not have survived the undertaking of graduate school without their kindness and attentiveness. I also want to extend a special thank you to Dr. ix Astrida Neimanis who had no institutional obligations to me but offered thoughtful and meaningful guidance through the whole process. In an emotional conversation about my experiences in graduate school, my mom reflected on her own gratitude for these academic mentors, saying “as your family, we have to love you, care for you. But your supervisors don’t, they chose to.” Whether this care came from sharing raspberries or demanding that I take time off, it was such a significant part of my ability to be successful. I know this is a unique experience and there are not enough words to thank you for it. The thesis I wrote is filled with all my love and care that I learned to hold through all my relations. I hope that as you read, you feel these things swirl around you and settle into your heart, too. Thank you for giving me the space for reverie, contemplation, rest, so that I could write this thesis and begin to extend this space towards others. Lastly, I am grateful for the financial support I received from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), and Rupertsland Institute. x Dedication To my nieces, Evie and Remi. You are the light of my life and the purpose driving my work. You have such thoughtful and imaginative little souls, which inspires me to act with greater kindness and intention. I hope you know that whatever you do in the world, you will always be enough. Love, Auntie Dani 1 Introduction: Falling into Rest For many years now, my sister has been posting pictures of me across many social media sites napping in weird places. Often my parents’ kitchen floor, sometimes on an uncomfortable chair, lately with one of my nieces snuggled into me. This is where my thesis begins – in my desperation for a nap, to take a break from the weariness of the world, to recover a bit of energy from my ongoing mental illness and undiagnosed chronic health issues. These beginnings were focused on individual rest and a self-centred desire to take the edge off my exhaustion. I quickly realized, though, that exhaustion is a tool of the colonial, capitalist, ableist, white-supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchy, and thus requires collective and structural interventions. It also prompted the acknowledgement that exhaustion falls on us all differently and distinctly according to our social positionings. These realizations were aided by the long lineages of theory that have been naming Rest as Resistance (in these explicit terms and others) for many years. Black activists and scholars, like Black womanist Tricia Hersey, and disability activists and scholars, like Korean-American Johanna Hedva, have long ruminated on the political potentialities of rest to intervene into capitalistic pressures of pace and productivity. Influenced by these legacies and my experience as a Métis-settler, queer person-researcher-writer, this thesis will articulate a Métis-feminist theory of Rest as Resistance. In this theory, I intend to develop a response to the deeply exhausting ways that the settler state has (historically and presently) attempted to oppress, assimilate, and annihilate Indigenous communities. This response sees rest not as succumbing to these oppressive powers but as a tool to actively resist them. In using reflective and practice-based methods, I aim to elucidate how a theory of Rest as Resistance may support ongoing anti- and de-colonial action. It is my hope that the critical and analytical observations and arguments I offer here might provide 2 my Métis kin specifically and Indigenous neighbours and relatives more broadly with an alternative way of incorporating meaningful and collective rest into our organizing spaces and communities. Belonging Speaking of Métis kin, I find it necessary to follow protocols of introductions and outline my connections to familial and geographical Métis communities so that you understand from where my work emerges and to pay respect to the people and places which informs it. I am Métis and settler (mostly Ukrainian) from Treaty 8 Territory. Being both Métis and Ukrainian has saturated me with a spirit of resistance against colonizing powers which attempt to destroy culture, Land, and life. Growing up, I had a strong sense of what it means to be Ukrainian as my family was (and still is) connected to the Ukrainian culture organization, Troyanda Society of Ukrainian Culture and Heritage. While I am careful not to romanticize the connection between Indigenous communities and Ukrainian settlers to these Lands (as their settling was and is a violent process that displaced and disconnected Indigenous communities), there remains a certain solidarity between these communities.1 I think very deeply about what it means to be part of both communities – and the responsibilities this gives me to hold fellow Ukrainian settlers accountable for the ways that we act on these Lands and the ways we are complicit in projects of Canadian colonization. Generations of both my Métis and Ukrainian family felt deep shame about their cultures that are directly related to the harmful racist and colonial practices of colonizing governments.2 Every 1 Avery Shtykalo, “The Kokum Scarf as a Symbol of Early and Contemporary Ukrainian-Indigenous Relations in Canada,” Unpublished Manuscript, 2023, 5. 2 Shtykalo, 4. 3 day, I feel extremely privileged to celebrate these parts of myself. While my Ukrainian identity does not get as much airtime in this thesis, I understand all the time spent celebrating my Ukrainian culture as an act of restful resistance – in these boisterous, colourful, and loud celebrations I connected with people and knowledge that was intended to be destroyed. As I continue on in this thesis speaking of restful practices like artmaking and visiting with Land from a Métis perspective, I hold with me the knowledge of Ukrainian embroidery and stories of forest spirits. I was born and raised on Cree, Beaver, and Métis Lands in a town colonially known as Sexsmith, Alberta, near the city of Grande Prairie. Both my Métis and settler parents and grandmothers were raised on denedeh (Dene Land), in a town colonially known as Fort Nelson, BC. My dad’s family, my Métis family, understand their Métis-ness and Indigeneity as coming from and emerging through their connection to Old Fort Nelson. This is the place that my Grandma Clara was born, where my Great-Grandmother Fee was a midwife, where the Land and waters cared for my family. Simultaneously, our genealogy explains that prior to Fort Nelson, my Great-Grandmother Fee Gairdner was born in what is now called Fort Simpson, NWT; her mother (Julie Lafferty) and father (Archibald Gairdner) were born in Fort Providence; and like all Métis families, a few generations before these places they came from the Red River in Manitoba. While I know that there was a significant Métis community in what is now called the Old Fort, I recognize that the stories from my dad, my grandma, and other relatives make clear that these distinctions were not always important back in the day. They lived together, in community. I also know that ongoing colonization means that distinctions must be made, and responsibilities must be clear. I know that my connection to these Lands and communities do not come from a 4 colonial assertion of “rights” that are forced through to gain access to the economic benefits of pipeline agreements and crown recognition.3 My connections to these Lands come from generations of my family and ancestors humbly, respectfully, and collaboratively living in community with the Cree and Dene people on denedeh. I know that if I purport to continue to have connections to these Lands, then I must also live humbly, respectfully, and collaboratively with Dene and Cree relatives and neighbours who cared for these Lands long before my Métis kin joined them. My Great-Grandfather Angus Harrold came from Spirit River, a tiny town only forty minutes from where I grew up in Sexsmith. It is unclear whether the Harrold family is Métis or mixed Cree-settler. Angus Harrold’s father, Alexander Harrold, has ties to Manitoba and records name his mother, Nancy, as a “Halfbreed.” Angus’s mother, Rosalie Testawich, and her family have been in the South Peace Region (Spirit River, Dunvegan, Sturgeon Lake) for many generations with names that are typically Cree. While my dad’s family understands their Métis community connections as being in Fort Nelson, since my parents’ move to Grande Prairie in the early 1990s, my dad has formed a strong connection to the Lands in the South Peace Region. These are the territories that he hunts on, and that he knows inside and out. While we do not claim these Lands as our “homelands,” our family has significant emotional, spiritual, and familial ties to these Lands. 3 Stephen Mussell, “In Defence of the Integrity of Our Nation: Métis Colonialism West of the Rocky Mountains,” Yellowhead Institute (blog), April 6, 2021, https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2021/04/06/in-defence-of-the-integrity-of-our-nation-metis-colonialism-west-of-the-rocky-mountains/. 5 Rest and Exhaustion in Métis Communities These relations, human and Land alike, guide the purpose of this research and the reflections I make throughout. As I begin this research, I ruminate on my dear friend and Métis scholar Hanna Paul’s assertion that “Métis culture values reciprocity and community cohesion; therefore, it is vital to make time to recharge and reground ourselves.”4 With this reminder, I recall the ways that rest has always been a significant tool for wellbeing and community connection in Métis communities. This can be seen in the reflections in Métis authors Bailey Oster and Marilyn Lizee’s book Stories of Métis Women: Tales My Kookum Told Me, where Oster and Lizee write that Métis communities “always take time to gather, share food, play music, sing, dance, laugh and tell stories.”5 I understand this centring of rest as a value in our communities to be an intervention to the ways that the Canadian state weaponizes exhaustion against Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. As nēhiyaw poet and community organizer Erica Violet Lee explains, We are deprived of the basic necessities of life: food, clean water, safe housing. We are kept poor and we are kept out of school. We are locked in jails, raped, and stolen. We are monitored in our homes. We are deprived of sleep. This is what a failing colonial empire does to people whom they are afraid will rise like a full moon if we are given the chance to think about something more than survival.6 While the weight of this reality falls on Indigenous peoples differently depending on our proximities to privileges like whiteness, cisness, and wealth, Lee’s observations outline what our 4 Hanna M. Paul, “Sharing Métis Women’s Stories about Moon Time and Colonial Body Shame through Visiting and Berry Picking in Buttertown, Alberta” (University of British Columbia, 2023), 79, https://doi.org/10.14288/1.0434188. 5 Bailey Oster and Marilyn Lizee, eds., Stories of Métis Women: Tales My Kookum Told Me, Spirit of Nature Series (Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Durvile & UpRoute Books, 2021), 30. 6 Erica Violet Lee, “In Defence of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide,” GUTS, November 30, 2016, n.p., https://gutsmagazine.ca/wastelands/. 6 communities are facing. Lee’s scrutinization of this reality propels me to consider the radical potential of centring contemplative rest in community organizing. Defining Rest When I speak about rest, I call upon an expansive understanding of rest that sees itself as anything that operates as a break from everyday stressors or routines, a break that soothes and rejuvenates our physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional selves. This definition of rest is influenced by many scholars, authors, and activists who work to, as Filipina-American author Jenny Odell states, “question what we currently perceive as productive.”7 Odell utilizes the language of “doing nothing” to denote “an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change.”8 Similarly, Hersey defines rest as “a generative space” where “your brain is processing new information. You are connecting with a spiritual practice. You are honoring your body. You are being present.”9 These methods of rest do not retreat from the world to escape feeling but gives oneself the space to process the feelings the world brings. Alison L. Black (Land relations unspecified)10 explains that submerging oneself in “meaning, care, attention, pleasure, enjoyment, reflection, dialogue, creativity and dwelling contemplatively in emotional and intellectual space” are methods to restfully process what we experience.11 Sometimes, rest under these terms is sleep, a moment to rest your eyes. Sometimes, rest under these terms ask for creative and contemplative engagement 7 Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2019), xii. 8 Odell, 22. 9 Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, First edition (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022), 153. 10 Throughout this thesis, I utilize Max Liboiron’s practice of explicitly naming author’s Land relations and utilize the phrase “Land relations unspecified” in brackets when an author leaves their Land relations unsaid in their work and publicly available biographies. A further explanation of this practice is in the section “Framing the Thesis.” 11 Alison L. Black, “Responding to Longings for Slow Scholarship: Writing Ourselves into Being,” in Women Activating Agency in Academia (Routledge, 2018), 26. 7 with our communities to open space for deep reflection. Under these terms, it is not that restful methods are not work, but they open space for reflection, reverie, and connection. My definition of rest as connecting with our physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional selves reflects Medicine Wheel teachings that are present in many Indigenous communities. Mohawk primary care doctor Louis T Montour explains: The Medicine Wheel concept from Native American culture provides a model for whom we are as individuals: We have an intellectual self, a spiritual self, an emotional self, and a physical self. Strength and balance in all quadrants of the Medicine Wheel can produce a strong, positive sense of wellbeing, whereas imbalance in one or more quadrants can cause symptoms of illness.12 Rest as a method of resistance provides the opportunity to connect with and tend to these different parts of ourselves. While this teaching in explicit terms was not part of my life growing up, I understand its significance to many Indigenous cultures across Turtle Island, including some Métis people and communities. So, while I do not utilize the Medicine Wheel throughout my thesis, I find it important to note how my understanding of rest connects with this teaching. This connection is especially made clear in Métis therapist and scholar Cathy Richardson Kinewesquao’s statement: I must respect people’s sovereignty and dignity, aligning with them without becoming responsible for their journey. Mentally, I try to think about beautiful things everyday, including listening to music, beading, appreciating nature and sending loving thoughts to others as a daily practice. It is important to bear witness to one’s thought process and to balance ‘heavy thinking’ with times of lightness and presence (rather than over-thinking and worry). The medicine wheel guides me to take care of each of these aspects of self while reminding me that I am on someone’s unceded Indigenous land and that responsibility accompanies that privilege.13 12 Louis Montour, “The Medicine Wheel: Understanding ‘Problem’ Patients in Primary Care,” The Permanente Journal, January 1, 2000, 34, https://doi.org/10.7812/TPP/98-040. 13 Cathy Richardson/Kinewesquao, “Burning Bright, Not Out! Therapist Well-Being in the Face of What We Face,” Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice 6, no. 1 (April 23, 2023): 42, https://doi.org/10.28963/6.1.7. 8 Richardson Kinewesquao’s practices of the Medicine Wheel reflect what I understand to be acts of restful resistance. It is through connecting with Land, community, and culture that we open up space to work through the heaviness of colonial capitalism. Importantly, it is also through Richardson Kinewesquao’s balance between individual and community care that restful resistance emerges. As Métis scholar Kathy Hodgson-Smith and Breton scholar Nathalie Kermoal state, Métis communities have long understood that “everyone has a role to play in the well-being of others.”14 This understanding exists alongside the teaching from our Cree relatives that individuals, especially women, need to be encouraged to take the time and space to heal themselves before others.15 While at times throughout my thesis I reflect on the ways that scholars across identities speak about the particular ways that women experience exhaustion, I feel the need to make clear, here, that this is not exclusive to cis-women. Trans-women experience this form of gendered exhaustion and others. Similarly, trans, non-binary, and two-spirit folks across gender spectrums-galaxies-expressions experience compounding forms of exhaustion that stem from the white-cis-hetero-capitalist patriarchy. Two Tenets of a Métis Restful Resistance With this understanding of rest, I ruminate on similar questions to Erica Violet Lee: I wonder how our bodies would function if they weren’t tasked with survival in an occupied state. What if our muscles did not have to stay braced for battle even as we sleep? How would we relate to one another if we were able to let down the weight of anti-colonial armour from our skin?16 14 Kathy L Hodgson-Smith and Nathalie Kermoal, “Community-Based Research and Métis Women’s Knowledge in Northern Saskatchewan,” in Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place, ed. Nathalie Kermoal and Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez (Athabasca University Press, 2016), 161, https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771990417.01. 15 Dionne Gesink, Lana Whiskeyjack, and Tim Guimond, “Perspectives on Restoring Health Shared by Cree Women, Alberta, Canada,” Health Promotion International, January 3, 2018, 457, https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/dax099. 16 Lee, “In Defence of the Wastelands,” n.p. 9 These questions alongside the definition of rest I outline allow me to trace two tenets of a Métis theory of Rest as Resistance. First, following Black feminist theories of Rest as Resistance, rest becomes resistance when it refuses colonial and capitalist standards and expectations of productivity. What is distinct for Métis people specifically and Indigenous peoples more broadly as we untangle ourselves from the morals of colonial capitalism is the way we must grapple with harmful colonial narratives that stereotypes Indigenous peoples as lazy and the reality that we are working extraordinarily hard for our communities. Robyn Taylor-Neu (Land relations unspecified), nehiyaw-métis scholar Tracy L. Friedel, scholar Alison Taylor (Land relations unspecified), and Plains Cree scholar Tibetha Kemble explain that the stereotype of laziness “has been damningly effective” at portraying Indigenous peoples as unproductive and undeserving (of welfare, of leisure).17 Part of extricating ourselves from colonial capitalism’s unrealistic expectations is to remind ourselves we cannot be everything for everyone. This is a struggle that falls particularly hard on women; as Hanna Paul notes in her master’s thesis, Métis “women tend to take care of themselves last, which can result in burnout.”18 As Métis scholar Kim Anderson argues, “Acting on responsibility to family or nation doesn’t mean that we deny our own needs or undermine our responsibility to take care of ourselves.”19 When I reflect on this statement, I think about how disentangling these notions of value and productivity is often offered more easily to our more-than-human relations, who we know have more value than colonial capitalism’s resource approach assigns them. Yet, we continue to struggle to bring this acknowledgement inward and truly know and feel that we are worth more than we what we do. 17 Robyn Taylor-Neu et al., “(De)Constructing The ‘Lazy Indian’: An Historical Analysis of Welfare Reform in Canada,” Aboriginal Policy Studies 7, no. 2 (January 1, 2019): 66, https://doi.org/10.5663/aps.v7i2.29340. 18 Paul, “Sharing Métis Women’s Stories about Moon Time and Colonial Body Shame through Visiting and Berry Picking in Buttertown, Alberta,” 78–79. 19 Kim Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2016), 207. 10 The second tenet of a Métis restful resistance asks that we centre knowledge and relationships that colonial capitalism attempts to devalue or discredit. A version of rest that centres relationality acts as an antidote to the hyper-individuality that colonial capitalism fosters. Métis Elder George McDermott exemplifies this in his story about his grandmother: “My grandmother told us exciting stories. … we liked to listen to her stories because it opened our minds to another world.”20 When we rest in ways that connect us to other beings and the multitudes of ways we hold knowledge, we make room for contemplation and reverie that is more holistic. As Métis Elder Rose Richardson reminds us, Métis people have long carried knowledge in and through Land and art.21 We can find pathways for self-care and wellbeing when we come back to these forms of knowledge – and this is an act of resistance. Métis artist and scholar Presley Mills and Penetanguishene Halfbreed artist and scholar Justine Woods identified this in their experience in beading circles: “when we come together and engage in Indigenous internationalism, it is a threat to ongoing colonialism in what we now refer to as Canada.”22 Additionally, part of this returning to knowledge and relationships is centring the values that Métis lawyer and historian Jean Teillet describes as the social glue of Métis communities – sharing, equality, and liberty.23 It is with these two tenets that I understand the possibilities of restful resistance in Métis communities and begin to enact them in my research. 20 Métis Centre, National Aboriginal Health Organization, “In the Words of Our Ancestors: Métis Health and Healing” (Ottawa: National Aboriginal Health Organization, 2008), 19, https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/30596/1/TK_IntheWordsofOurAncestorsMetisHealthandHealing.pdf. 21 Christi Belcourt, Medicines to Help Us: Traditional Métis Plant Use: Study Prints & Resource Guide, trans. Rita Flamand and Laura Burnouf (Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2007), 10. 22 Presley Mills and Justine Woods, “Beading Is Medicine: Beading as Therapeutic and Decolonial Practice,” in Fashion and Feeling, ed. Roberto Filippello and Ilya Parkins (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2023), 126, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19100-8_7. 23 Jean Teillet, The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation, First edition (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2019), 16. 11 Framing the Thesis This thesis is structured in two parts. Part One provides an extensive understanding of the ways that theories of Rest as Resistance has emerged in other areas of theory – like Black feminist theory and disability studies. In this section, I use an analytical and critical voice to understand how Rest as Resistance has already been conceptualized. Part One is split in three sections: Rest Denied, Rest Reclaimed, and Rest in Action. These sections separate theory based on its perspective on rest rather than on areas of theory, to work with the ways that many of the authors I bring into conversation inhabit and move across multiple areas of theory. This part of the thesis pays homage to the origins of Rest as Resistance theory which grapple with the white supremacist systems of pace, perfection, and productivity. It is essential to understand these origins for two reasons. First, as I expand on this theory through a Métis-feminist lens in Part Two, it is important to give room to the varied perspectives that critique the systems which foster exhaustion – like capitalism and white supremacy. Second, as a person who exists in the intersection of an Indigenous-white-settler identity, I must think deeply about what my responsibilities are to interrogating and intervening into systems and methods of oppression – like pace, productivity, and perfection. How can I utilize privileges – like whiteness, middle classness, and urban-ness – to intervene into these oppressive notions? In settler scholar Alexis Shotwell’s piece “Claiming Bad Kin,” Shotwell suggests that instead of denying connection to whiteness and its privileges, white settlers should claim whiteness in ways that directly opposes white supremacy and directs power to Black and Brown folks.24 I ruminate on Shotwell’s provocations as I think about my responsibility in this project to fulfill Hersey’s prescription that “anyone attempting to create and expand on our rest message must reach deep 24 Alexis Shotwell, “Claiming Bad Kin,” Alexis Shotwell (blog), March 1, 2018, https://alexisshotwell.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/claiming-bad-kin-mcmaster.pdf. 12 into the cracks to study and uplift Black liberation. It is the North Star for an exhausted world.”25 So, I look towards Black Feminist Audre Lorde’s statement that “to acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use.”26 Similarly, Black Caribbean community organizer Emanual Brown argues that “your first step of accountability for lineages of harm, that are cause for institutions and structures that continue to cause harm today, is when you center care, both for yourself, for your family, for your people, and then extending that out.”27 Thus, I hold all of these thoughts together to utilize the space of a literature review to uplift systemically marginalized voices as I critique the systems which weaponize exhaustion. In Part Two, I explore the ways that the two tenets of a Métis restful resistance that I outlined above manifest in two resting methods: visiting with Land and artmaking. This section centres practice-based methods where rest is both the topic and the methodology. To align my life with my research,28 I engage in a consistent and reflexive practice of rest that is part of my research. To accomplish this, I utilize a narrative voice that reflects the feminist methodology of autotheory. Autotheory is a feminist methodology where theory is combined with and emerges through personal stories. White settler scholar Lauren Fournier explains that “autotheory points to modes of working that integrate the personal and conceptual, the theoretical and the autobiographical, the creative and the critical, in ways attuned to interdisciplinary, feminist histories.”29 I am cautious of the ways this method of writing seems to reflect (and perhaps co-opts) well-established Indigenous practices of storytelling – Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn 25 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 78. 26 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer (Ithaca, N.Y: Firebrand Books, 1988), 124. 27 Allen Kwabena Frimpong, Centering Care, YouTube Video, June 8, 2021, n.p., https://nonprofitquarterly.org/centering-care/. 28 Shawn Wilson, “Indigenous Research Methodologies” (Class Lecture, IGS 503, UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, BC., January 30, 2023). 29 Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2021), 7. 13 Wilson describes the storytelling practices I utilize as storying personal experience or experiences of others to support the learning of others.30 Nonetheless, autotheory provides a useful way of phrasing what the personal nature of this research is intending to accomplish. Particularly useful is Fournier’s description of autotheory as a theory that comes from the body and is connected to “longer histories of aesthetic experimentation and activism.”31 As I work through my experiences of methods of resting like beading, hide tanning, and visiting with Land as part of my research and activism, I will require creative ways of expressing the theoretical underpinnings. Therefore, in Part Two, my writing will combine a reflective (and sometimes lyrical) tone with theory. Throughout the process of writing my thesis, I have thought very deeply and seriously about the politics of citational practices. Wilson asks that we think about kinship in citational practices – what does it mean to cite knowledge and how do we show these relationships?32 Wilson explains that “we need to name that relationship, so that, well, we’re not claiming it [the knowledge], but saying where it came from and what those relationships were that went into making it.”33 As I consider my research to be informed by Land and Place, I must find ways to engage in “(site)-ations” to name the relationship with Land and Place that went into my learning and research.34 This practice is necessary as I engage in research and resting practices like visiting with Land so that the agency and knowledge of Land is properly recognized and 30 Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2008), 98. 31 Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, 35. 32 Shawn Wilson, “Indigenous Research Methodologies” (Class Lecture, IGS 503, UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, BC., February 6, 2023). 33 Wilson, Research Is Ceremony, 115. 34 Wilson, “Indigenous Research Methodologies,” February 6, 2023. 14 acknowledged. This practice is also a response to colonial approaches to research which abstract and obscure the ways that Land gifts us with place specific knowledge. Enacting these kinship practices also asks that I consider who the person I am citing is and if I want to be in relationship with them and their knowledge. This follows Pakistani-British-Australian scholar Sara Ahmed’s refusal to cite the “institution” of white men in her book Living A Feminist Life so she could prioritize the genealogy of feminist scholarship.35 Ahmed writes that “citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured.”36 Thus, in Part One, I prioritize voices and perspectives of those who experience systemic exhaustion and are systemically decentred. While I do not enact a policy of refusing to cite the institution of white masculine theory, I am careful about who and how I cite. Another part of this critical citational practice while doing feminist and Indigenist research is making clear the relationships to Land/Place of all the scholars, authors, and artists I cite. Indigenous authors are often introduced with their community connections and affiliations noted, but other authors have these relations unnamed. While Indigenous authors introduce themselves and fellow Indigenous authors this way to follow essential protocols of introductions, when Land relations of settler scholars are left unnamed, it follows white supremacist logics that serve to place settler knowledges as all-knowing-all-reaching and Indigenous knowledges as less valuable in their specificity. Naming all Land relations, then, acts as a way to highlight the particularity of all knowledges – to acknowledge the ways that all knowledges come from specific places and perspectives. Therefore, following the practices of Métis scholar Max Liboiron in Pollution is Colonialism, when I introduce new authors, I will note their relationship 35 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 15. 36 Ahmed, 15–16. 15 to Land and Place using the language the author uses to describe themselves.37 As Liboiron explains, noting this allows readers to understand where authors are speaking from, what ground they stand on, whom their obligations are to, what forms of sovereignty are being leveraged, what structures of privilege the settler state affords, and how we are related so that our obligations to one another as speaker and listener, writer and audience, can be specific enough to enact obligations to one another. (emphasis original)38 When this description is absent in authors work or publicly available biographies, Liboiron utilized the term “unmarked” to emphasize the ways that leaving the settler unnamed serves to naturalize the settler position.39 While Liboiron denotes these unnamed relations through the word “unmarked,” I chose to use the phrase “Land relations unspecified” as an attempt to grapple with the ways that Black and Brown authors who do not (perhaps cannot) name their Land relations are always marked by systems of white supremacy and colonialism. While this practice is necessary to disrupt the naturalization of white settler positioning, it is nonetheless a fraught process. There is a lack of critical conversations taking up this dilemma of naming all Land relations of the authors we bring into academic conversation. Throughout the process of writing my thesis, I had to rework this practice over and over again to become something that feels supportive and essential in the work, and still, it feels imperfect. Through conversation with Dr. Anita Girvan, I am able to illuminate some of these struggles.40 Part of this struggle is unpacking the ways that naming Land relations seems to set up a binary of Indigenous or settler, which does not fulsomely engage with the realities that these identities cannot be neatly separated or parceled out, nor do they encompass all of the perspectives and identities 37 Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021), 3–4, https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021445. 38 Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, 3–4. 39 Liboiron, 3–4. 40 Anita Girvan, Personal Communication, April 5, 2024. 16 from which people come to this work. Part of this struggle is reckoning with the ways that simply naming Land relations positions Black folks descended from African people stolen from their Lands and sold into chattel slavery as landless without grappling with the white supremacist, colonialist, and imperialist systems that violently enforced their landlessness. Part of the struggle is knowing that the word “unmarked” invites white settlers to think carefully about what happens when they leave their whiteness unnamed and replicates violent tactics that forced Black and Brown folks to into “unmarked” Land relations and reminds them, without care, of this landless relation. This is especially relevant when author note themselves as people of colour – is this a Land relation? If white is a Land relation and Black is a Land relation, then is being of colour a Land relation? It certainly denotes a different relationship to Land and to place than whiteness. But does naming this difference replicate isolating and extractive practices of tokenization? How do I grapple with the ways that a protocol of introduction that protects my community harms other communities? These struggles are ones not generously engaged with in academic texts considering Liboiron’s work. Reviews of this text, like from diasporic Indian scholar Vasudha Chhotray laud this practice as a method of calling scholars in to think deeply about how relationships to Land impacts all research.41 Yet, I hear and understand the critiques from scholars like Cæcilie Kramer (Land relations unspecified) that “despite this tremendous effort at taking difference seriously, Liboiron risks essentializing complex cultural relations, communities and different ways of belonging, while assuming cultural homogeneity.”42 So I struggle, continuously, with how to 41 Vasudha Chhotray, “Book Review: Max Liboiron. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, no. 3 (October 2021): 465–68, https://doi.org/10.1177/00699667211068450. 42 Cæcilie Kramer, “Pollution Is Colonialism,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 88, no. 2 (March 15, 2023): 413, https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1974510. 17 approach and enact this practice. I come back to the ways that this is, first and foremost, a practice of community protection emerging from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island and exists outside of academia.43 I think about how community wants to know why you are here and from who or where you are speaking from. Answering this question is about building trust in the work. Sometimes this question comes in a forceful way – it might feel like you are being asked to defend yourself. But I understand it as a practice of protection for our communities. The answer does not necessarily need to be simple – something that easily fits into brackets or footnotes – but must show thought and connection. Wedging this community practice into academic work might not always translate and may emphasize difference in harmful ways. We have to have these conversations, together, so we can understand the ways that this is an essential community protocol and we need new ways of doing-speaking-writing this so all relations are held with care. So, this is my best attempt – one with many caveats and hesitations. One that looks outward to other scholars who may also take up this practice and move it further into projects of coalition and solidarity. This naming of Land relations is not a perfect system, and not one that is doled out evenly or enacted precisely across all authors. Yet, despite these struggles, it is not a practice I can abandon. I know that protocols of introduction must extend outward so we can think communally and critically about what collective liberation means on stolen Lands. I hope that an acknowledgement of my struggles can offer a new place for other scholars to start from – to expand these conversations and come to understand what it means to have responsibilities to 43 Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts, Second edition (Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 146. 18 these Lands informed from how and where we come to them. Perhaps using new words, other words, or different ways of relating. In Part two, I attempt to prioritize Métis knowledges and perspectives to resist a pan-Indigenous approach to articulating this theory. At times, I also look towards Cree and Dene knowledges and perspectives to honour the Cree and Dene relatives I have and whose Lands I humbly live on. Additionally, I take seriously my position as an uninvited visitor to Syilx territories and think deeply about the ways Syilx knowledge keepers have generously shared knowledge to visitors, guests, and settlers to their Lands as prompts in how to act in their territories. Syilx Knowledge Keepers Jeanette Armstrong and Delphine Derickson, Stó꞉lō writer and activist Lee Maracle, and Cree-Chinese writer and editor Greg Younging share that “good government, to the syilx, means that we carry the laws inside us. It means that we know how to act and live right without having someone force us.”44 I understand these words as a prompt for how to act in accordance with Syilx laws and knowledges. I understand that the ways in which I live, work, and research on Syilx Lands must also consider the laws and knowledges the Syilx people share with visitors. Also, at times, I look towards other Indigenous neighbours for their insight and reflections on the political potentialities on rest as I understand that in building bigger webs of relations, we can find new ways to attend to our responsibilities that take into consideration what we learn from others all of the time. 44 Jeannette C. Armstrong et al., “Original People,” in We Get Our Living Like Milk From the Land (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1994), n.p., https://www.syilx.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Original_People.pdf. 19 PART ONE: 20 Chapter One: All the Rest – A Literature Review My intentions in this literature review are to listen, consider, and synthesize understandings of rest from those who face exhaustion often and have other identities than my focus of Métis people - like Black, queer, working-class and underclass folks (and the intersections of these identities). This practice of directing care and attention to voices most overlooked is critical in feminist and Indigenist approaches to research. I learned this practice in part through a class with Syilx scholar Dr. Bill Cohen who shared the Syilx Nation’s story How Food Was Given; in this story, there is an emphasis on how all voices must be heard in community.45 With this story alongside feminist calls to centre marginalized perspectives in mind, in this literature review, I follow Pakistani-British-Australian scholar Sara Ahmed’s act to prioritize voices not typically centred in academia’s white masculinist canon.46 Both of these research practices reflect my attempts to engage in a literature review process that trawlwulwuy scholar Lauren Tynan and Gamilaroi scholar Michelle Bishop define as a relational approach where the goal is to “[pay] respect to knowledge and who keeps it.”47 They explain that this approach differs from a traditional academic literature review as it is not attempting to “establish authority” or “identify gaps” but is enacting “an obligation to extend your relations, and therefore your work, for future generations.”48 In my understanding of this approach, it seems to ask scholars to not see themselves as an “expert” of knowledge, but a gatherer of knowledge.49 A relational literature review aligns with my framing of my research as 45 Bill Cohen, “How Food Was Given” (Oral Retelling, Okanagan College INDG 100, Syilx Okanagan Nation, October 22, 2019). 46 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 15–16. 47 Lauren Tynan and Michelle Bishop, “Decolonizing the Literature Review: A Relational Approach,” Qualitative Inquiry 29, no. 3–4 (March 2023): 500, https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221101594. 48 Tynan and Bishop, 506. 49 Tynan and Bishop, 500. 21 articulating, rather than creating, a Métis-feminist theory of Rest as Resistance – this word choice is specific to reflect the ways that I see my thesis work as offering an alternative way to speak about rest that already occurs in Métis communities rather than seeing this research as inventing a concept. Engaging with the literature review as a process of respect and responsibility is especially important for the topic of rest, as theorizing rest as a political act emerges from Black feminist theory – like Black feminist Audre Lorde’s 1988 proclamation that self-care “is an act of political warfare.”50 My research is deeply indebted to Black feminist and womanist traditions that have long understood the political potentialities of rest. Black womanist and activist Tricia Hersey furthers this rooting of rest in Black feminist and liberationist theory as she asserts that “anyone attempting to create and expand on our rest message must reach deep into the cracks to study and uplift Black liberation.”51 Consequently, I have a particular investment in understanding and foregrounding the Black feminist theory that shapes Rest as Resistance theory. Alongside Black feminism, disability studies and crip theory have engaged significantly with questions of rest, productivity, and labour that inform the building theory of Rest as Resistance. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (Land relations unspecified) explain that “disability studies explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the concept of disability and what it means to be disabled.”52 This area of theory understands our environments, institutions, spaces as creating barriers that are disabling rather than normative 50 Lorde, A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer, 125. 51 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 78. 52 Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, “Introduction,” in Keywords for Disability Studies (New York, NY and London, UK: New York University Press, 2015), 2, https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479812141.001.0001. 22 and pathologizing understandings of disability as a lack and in need of cure.53 Victoria Ann Lewis (Land relations unspecified) explains that Crip theory is an artist and activist-born segment of disability studies in explicit conversation with queer theory to “spin mainstream representations or practices to reveal dominant assumptions and exclusionary effects.”54 Both of these areas of theory take up questions of Rest as Resistance as it troubles colonial and capitalist assertions of value as attached to pace and productivity.55 Often, Black feminism, disability studies, and crip theory are intertwined with one another and anti-capitalist critique as they speak to the intersections of identity and resting. The analyses that consider multiple social structures are most consequential for my research as I seek to trace the solidarities and affinities in our collective (restful) liberation. As Dean Spade (Land relations unspecified) contends, “solidarity across issues and populations is what makes movements big and powerful.”56 In the spirit of this solidarity, I divide this literature review not according to categories of identity or theory, but according to themes. I use the major themes of denial, reclamation, and action and break them into smaller sub-categories (like time and morality) that work through intricacies of Rest as Resistance. I take this approach rather than dividing by areas of theory to consider the ways that these many theories and theorists interact and engage across identity and disciplinary boundaries in their considerations of rest. The authors that I bring into conversation in this literature review use a variety of words that I 53 Adams, Reiss, and Serlin, 2. 54 Victoria Ann Lewis, “Crip,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York, NY and London, UK: New York University Press, 2015), 47, https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479812141.001.0001. 55 Tala Khanmalek and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed: A Compendium Incomplete of Sick and Disabled Queer Brown Femme Bodies of Knowledge,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 41, no. 1 (2020): 52–53; Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” The Anarchist Library, 2020, 10, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/johanna-hedva-sick-woman-theory; May Chazan, “Crip Time and Radical Care in/as Artful Politics,” Social Sciences 12, no. 2 (February 2023): 1–2, https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12020099. 56 Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during This Crisis (and the Next) (London ; New York: Verso, 2020), 15. 23 connect under the concept of rest. For example, while Hersey explicitly theorizes about rest, Jonathan Crary’s (Land relations unspecified) analysis focuses on “sleep” whereas Jennifer Smith Maguire (Land relations unspecified) considers “leisure.” As I define rest for my purposes as that which provides a break for mental, emotional, spiritual, physical respite, I see these other concepts of sleep, leisure, etc. as methods of rest – they offer a form of relief to our lives. As I will delve into in this chapter, the accessibility of these different forms of rest and the possibilities to reclaim them differ depending on our social identities and histories. I bring analyses of these different methods of rest together to understand and illuminate the varied conceptualizations and intricacies of denial, reclamation, and activation of rest and the possibility for resistance through rest. Rest Denied Exhaustion Exhaustion is a tool of the colonialist, capitalist, ableist, white-supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchy. Thus, exhaustion (and our ability to resist it) falls on us differently and distinctly according to our social positions and the histories we inherit. Rest is denied through varied and layered processes of social power that dispossess us of the ability to rest – to sleep, dream, play, create, etc. Sarah Sharma (Land relations unspecified) explains that “everyone might be sick and tired, exploited and exhausted by the machinations of capitalism, but this fatigue feels radically different depending on who you are and how you labor.”57 Similarly, Margrit Shildrick (Land relations unspecified) contends that “labor wears us all out, albeit with differential impact in 57 Sarah Sharma, “Because the Night Belongs to Lovers: Occupying the Time of Precarity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 6, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2013.828384. 24 every register of inequity.”58 Exhaustion, then, is not a neutral experience – it is political and discriminatory. Filip Vostal (Land relations unspecified) reflects this sentiment as he argues that “social acceleration is asymmetrically distributed and manifests differently in different social arenas.”59 Hersey is more specific in her consideration of this unevenness as she describes the palpable exhaustion Black and Indigenous peoples experience as they “labored without rest for centuries as [America] built its economic power.”60 All of these authors make clear that fatigue impacts marginalized people in specific ways. There is a particular exhaustion that comes from the labour of simply existing as a marginalized person. In “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer,” Audre Lorde writes that despite efforts to reduce stress and find rest, being a Black woman in America requires a near-constant reckoning with violence the white supremacy inflicts on to herself and her community.61 Black feminist bell hooks mirrors this argument as she writes that “much of the stress black people experience is directly related to the way in which systems of domination—racism, sexism, and capitalism, in particular—disrupt our capacities to fully exercise self-determination."62 There is even a representational disparity in the bodies most likely to be seen resting and fully submerged in leisure and relaxation – it is often only white people who are shown resting.63 Considering this, Black scholar Josie Roland Hodson writes that historical imagery of Black people sleeping 58 Margrit Shildrick, “Neoliberalism and Embodied Precarity: Some Crip Responses,” South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 3 (July 1, 2019): 601, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-7616175. 59 Filip Vostal, “Slowing down Modernity: A Critique,” Time & Society 28, no. 3 (August 2019): 1049, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X17702163. 60 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 33. 61 Lorde, A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer, 119. 62 bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 3rd edition (New York: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 40. 63 Somnambulations Panel 4: Arts of Rest and Resistance, 2022, 9:40-9:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=124mdy1p4w4. 25 showed “sleep only accessed amidst acts of industry and labor – unsanctioned sleep always in precarious circumstance.”64 Furthermore, in interpersonal relationships, activists and scholars argue that white people place undue labour onto people of colour as they request that people of colour point out any harm they might be causing and educate them on how to adjust.65 So not only is there the exhausting experience of being harmed, but also of attending to this harm. In academia, for example, this is evidenced in Crystal Shelby-Caffey, Lavern Byfield, and Edwin Úbeda’s “‘Black Sheep’ in the Ivory Tower: Academics of Color Explore Racial Battle Fatigue and Microaggressions in ‘Postracial America’” where they write that “it is commonplace for white faculty to encourage a colleague of color to, “please, don’t hesitate to tell me if I say or do something that’s offensive, because I don’t mean to be. I’m not racist. I’m just ignorant to some things.””66 Similarly, Black scholar G. Michelle Collins-Sibley narrates the palpable exhaustion she experiences from being treated like “a mirror” for white folks to see their “best selves, nonracist selves, nonsexist selves.”67 Using the example of academia, these scholars show how people of colour are expected to deal with white people's feelings of guilt and exceptionalism. Exhaustion from Validation 64 Somnambulations Panel 4, 9:49. 65 Crystal Shelby-Caffey, Lavern Byfield, and Edwin Úbeda, “‘Black Sheep’ in the Ivory Tower: Academics of Color Explore Racial Battle Fatigue and Microaggressions in ‘Postracial America,’” in Racial Battle Fatigue: Insights from the Front Lines of Social Justice Advocacy, ed. Jennifer L. Martin (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2015), 149; G. Michelle Collins-Sibley, “‘Becoming the Bear’: A Meditation on Racial Battle Fatigue, Resistance and Grace in Academia,” in Racial Battle Fatigue: Insights from the Front Lines of Social Justice Advocacy, ed. Jennifer L. Martin (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2015), 53. 66 Shelby-Caffey, Byfield, and Úbeda, “‘Black Sheep’ in the Ivory Tower: Academics of Color Explore Racial Battle Fatigue and Microaggressions in ‘Postracial America,’” 149. 67 Collins-Sibley, “‘Becoming the Bear’: A Meditation on Racial Battle Fatigue, Resistance and Grace in Academia,” 53. 26 Alongside this experience, is the exhaustion that comes from needing to “validate” one's presence in spaces. For people experiencing houselessness, this exhaustion manifests through what scholar Christopher Daniel Giamarino (Land relations unspecified) describes as the constant policing of and exclusion from public space to engage in rest in particular and other life-sustaining activities in general.68 Giamorino explains that people experiencing houselessness experience lasting “psychological and material affects” from the “constant policing and harassment” that arise from the capitalist (and I suggest colonial) understandings of what public space, like parks, benches, walking trails, etc., should be used for.69 Marginalized folks regularly come up against the exhausting discriminatory powers that demand they elucidate their value and validity to colonial capitalism. For people of colour in academia, for example, Shelby-Caffey, Byfield, and Úbeda contend that their “lives were overloaded with emotional, psychological, and physical stressors triggered by the constant requirement to justify [their] presence in the cloistered white spaces of the ivory tower.”70 Iranian scholar Tala Khanmalek and Colombian/Latinx scholar Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes also consider this exhausting and isolating process of validation that disabled and chronically ill people experience as they work to counteract capitalism’s assertion that there is not value in life outside of ableist expectations of labour.71 Despite the differences between these examples, they all note the impossibility of colonial capitalisms expectations of engagement and how its constant questioning and inevitably of falling short is exhausting. 68 Christopher Daniel Giamarino, “Planning ‘Just’ Public Space: Reimagining Hostile Designs through Do-It-Yourself Urban Design Tactics by Unhoused Communities in Los Angeles” (Dissertation, Los Angeles, CA, University of California, 2023), 7–8, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gn2j60q. 69 Giamarino, 28. 70 Shelby-Caffey, Byfield, and Úbeda, “‘Black Sheep’ in the Ivory Tower: Academics of Color Explore Racial Battle Fatigue and Microaggressions in ‘Postracial America,’” 142. 71 Khanmalek and Rhodes, “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed,” 44. 27 Women’s Labour These interactions place undue labour onto marginalized folks who are often socialized to take on additional labour to begin with. In her book Saving Time, Filipina-American author Jenny Odell explains that men wait to offer help when they are with women as both men and women expect women to volunteer first.72 For Black women in particular, hooks explains that most people depend on them to “bear all the burdens” and overextend themselves to educate, advocate, and more.73 Existing as a woman, then, demands a draining dedication to labour. In Feminism is for Everybody, hooks explains that when (as is generally expected) “women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.”74 hooks explains that despite a mainstream understanding of participation in the workforce as liberating, many women are still expected to maintain the household, and these unbalanced expectations from men create an exhausting and overwhelming life.75 Danielle Drees (Land relations unspecified) contends that when we understand burnout as a feminist concept, it underscores “both the outcome of unrealistic demands on women’s labor and the inability to recover from this labor each night through normal amounts of sleep.”76 72 Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life beyond the Clock, First Edition (New York: Random House, 2023), 59. 73 hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 35. 74 bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 50, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315743189. 75 hooks, 48–50. 76 Danielle Drees, “Burnout Dramaturgy: Revaluing Sleep in Caryl Churchill’s Sleepless Plays,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 35, no. 1 (2020): 48, https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2020.0019. 28 Therefore, tackling burnout as a feminist issue requires enacting strategies of self and community care that centre rest and ask that we regularly reflect on the labour we ask of others. However, as Emma Dowling (Land relations unspecified) notes, asking “everyone to ‘care more’ does not address the structural inequalities that impose the burden of care on some shoulders more than others.”77 Marginalized people experience a tangible exhaustion from existing under colonial capitalism – and then these systems create barriers to rest. Time In the colonial episteme, time is often conceived of as an undiscriminating and linear modality in which we all march towards the same ends in the same pace. This is particularly evident in the saying that “we all have the same twenty-four hours in a day.” This understanding of time ignores the complex ways that time, under a white supremacist, colonial, capitalist patriarchy, is unjust and discriminatory. Under capitalism, it is suggested that “each individual has an equal ‘supply’ of these fungible hours to exploit.”78 Within this logic, time becomes an individual responsibility where productivity must be maximized for personal and corporate fulfillment. Scholar in settler-colonialism, Timothy R Maton (Land relations unspecified), explains that this logic emerges from historic and continuing colonial and Christian ideology that particularly targets Indigenous peoples and sees idleness requiring punishment (often conceptualized as punishment from “God” through colonial policy).79 This understanding of productivity and time management was part of racist and white supremacist ideologies that emboldened settlers to destroy Indigenous communities and their ways of life to annex Indigenous Land (also known as 77 Emma Dowling, “Dilemmas of Care,” Take Care, 2017, 10. 78 Odell, Saving Time, 49. 79 Timothy R. Maton, “How the Protestant Work Ethic Injures the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island,” Journal of Multidisciplinary Research at Trent 2, no. 1 (January 14, 2020): 204. 29 “manifest destiny”).80 This basis of the colonial capitalist work ethic continues to bleed into current understandings of time and time management that fall particularly hard on Indigenous peoples through racist stereotypes that call us “lazy.”81 With these ideological assertions behind the conceptualization of time, Michelle Shir-Wise's82 (Land relations unspecified) emphasizes how time management, for all of us, becomes about individual ability through her observation “that a failure to manage time efficiently may be experienced as personal failure. Time management is thus perceived as being linked to competence and facilitating productivity.”83 Thus, in current configurations, managing time has become an industry itself where time is a scarce resource that must be utilized efficiently – which usually suggests finding ways to rid oneself of “the useless time of reflection and contemplation.”84 The desire to reduce reflection and contemplation even crops up in meal kit services, like HelloFresh, where part of the draw is offloading the labour of contemplating what to eat.85 Under this conceptualization of time, any amount of resting available serves the sole purpose of recharging to increase productivity.86 Sleep, which is generally understood to be a necessary and unchangeable part of life (and perhaps the only barrier to total corruption of time 80 Maton, 207. 81 Taylor-Neu et al., “(De)Constructing The ‘Lazy Indian,’” 65–66. 82 When doing the final revisions for my thesis and reviewing the scholars that I noted as “Land relations unnamed,” I discovered that Shir-Wise shares xenophobic and Zionist articles on her LinkedIn. I use the space of the footnotes to vehemently disagree with the views shared by Shir-Wise and to express my regrets for not catching this earlier in my thesis writing process so that I may have removed her work entirely from my thesis. Michelle Shir-Wise, “LinkedIn Profile,” LinkedIn, accessed April 11, 2024, https://il.linkedin.com/in/michelle-shir-wise-921bb0139. 83 Michelle Shir-Wise, “Disciplined Freedom: The Productive Self and Conspicuous Busyness in ‘Free’ Time,” Time & Society 28, no. 4 (November 2019): 1679, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X18769786. 84 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, paperback ed (London: Verso, 2014), 40. 85 HelloFresh’s hook of saving time and energy shows up in many of their advertisements, like one video advertisement from HelloFresh UK in 2019 where the narrator suggests that their meal kit service allows customers to “focus on what’s really important” Enjoy Delicious Moments with HelloFresh | HelloFresh Advert 2019 | HelloFresh, YouTube, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRyi0_hDrxs.. 86 Vostal, “Slowing down Modernity,” 1048. 30 outside of labour) becomes a commodified, timed, and parcelled experience meant to further productivity.87 This scarcity mindset is particularly relevant for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses as life under capitalism “is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy. It costs you to do anything: to get out of bed, to cook for yourself, to get dressed, to answer an email.”88 This time management industry becomes built upon a predatory stance tapping into the desperation for more time. Yet, as Oliver Burkeman (Land relations unspecified) points out “techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.”89 Consequently, when you consider the ways that existing as marginalized increases the amount of labour (physical, emotional, etc.) you are urged to take on, then capitalist expectations of time management unload unequal judgements onto marginalized people. Leisure This disparity then manifests in part through the differential experience of leisure time and work time. Even at the most basic level, distinctions between leisure and work have eroded as expectations of productivity and self-improvement spill out into all parts of our lives.90 Thinking through this lens, Shir-Wise demonstrates how “free time” is thought of “as a site for authenticity and autonomy” but its uses are oriented towards actualizing specific colonial capitalist understandings of “a desirable self” that are shaped through self-surveying conformity to 87 Crary, 24/7, 74; Danielle Drees, “Napping in Public: Feminist Practices of Care in Sleep Performance Art,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 41, no. 3 (2020): 13, https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2020.0040. 88 Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” 4. 89 Oliver Burkeman, “Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives,” The Guardian, December 22, 2016, sec. Technology, n.p., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives. 90 Crary, 24/7, 58. 31 consumption-based logics of self-improvement.91 This is also reflected in Jennifer Smith Maguire’s “Leisure and the Obligation of Self-Work: An Examination of the Fitness Field,” where she contends that fitness activities are often understood to be “leisure” activities despite being imbued with notions of obligation, productivity, and self-optimization.92 This is further exacerbated by the productivity logic that suggests we turn hobbies – leisure activities – into side hustles. These days “every area of interest [is] turned into a potential moneymaker.”93 The suggestion is that we should not fill our time with activities that do not add to or improve our finances and fitness. Being busy bettering yourself becomes a badge of honour. Shir-Wise contends that the symbol of leisure used to designate privilege and respect, but now the opposite is true – she argues that being booked and busy is now a sign of status.94 It is admirable to fill free time with self-optimization. Simultaneously, though, there is a tension between this understanding of leisure and the lingering impact of traditional understandings of leisure, as rest continues to be only accessible through luxury. This is most significantly noticeable in the attachment of consumption to rest/leisure/care – this can be seen particularly in brands like Saje Natural Wellness who market self-care and holistic wellness as entirely possible through the purchase of their essential oils and room sprays.95 Scholar Bridget Conor (Land relations unspecified) uses the term “cosmic wellness” and the example of the brand Goop to describe how luxury products and media are sold to wealthy white women as a means of achieving the “moral necessity” of 91 Shir-Wise, “Disciplined Freedom,” 1673. 92 Jennifer Smith Maguire, “Leisure and the Obligation of Self‐Work: An Examination of the Fitness Field,” Leisure Studies 27, no. 1 (January 2008): 14, https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360701605729. 93 Erin Lowry, “Analysis | Don’t Turn Your Hobby Into a Side Hustle,” Washington Post, December 26, 2022, n.p., https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dont-turn-yourhobby-into-a-side-hustle/2022/12/26/0214300e-851e-11ed-b5ac-411280b122ef_story.html. 94 Shir-Wise, “Disciplined Freedom,” 1670. 95 Saje, “Introducing the Pocket Farmacy - Mindful Edition Essential Oil Kit,” June 15, 2023, https://www.saje.ca/blogs/essential-oils-101/introducing-the-pocket-farmacy-mindful-edition-essential-oil-kit. 32 being well.96 This connection between luxury and leisure is especially true when we consider Odell’s argument that engaging in leisure requires more than just time and money – it also requires social systems that do not interpret some bodies being visible in public spaces “as an invitation to violence.”97 Leisure is still a luxury, not just because of time or finances, but because we have built communities that criminalize and brutally punish non-cis-straight-white bodies for resting in public. Black Leisure and Hyper-Vigilance As I reflect on Odell’s argument, I think somberly of O’Shae Sibley, who was the target of a fatal hate crime for embracing Black, queer, joyful leisure in public. Sibley’s murder becomes a horrifying example of the phenomenon that Odell outlines. In a New York Times article, O’Shea Sibley’s neighbour (who is also gay) is quoted as warning Sibley to be discerning of how he expresses his sexuality as the rise in queer hate crimes makes it particularly dangerous to be openly queer (and Black).98 This need to be vigilant to protect one’s life steals the ability to rest fully – especially in public. Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that this is particularly salient for Black people as “the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.”99 Jamaican scholar Jason Allen-Paisant echoes this argument as he contends that for Black people “racism pushes us into an attitude of always 96 Bridget Conor, “‘How Goopy Are You?’ Women, Goop and Cosmic Wellness,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 6 (December 1, 2021): 1262, https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211055735. 97 Odell, Saving Time, 100. 98 Maria Cramer and Wesley Parnell, “Man Fatally Stabbed in Confrontation as He Danced at a Gas Station,” The New York Times, July 31, 2023, sec. New York, n.p., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/nyregion/stabbing-gas-station-brooklyn.html. 99 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, First edition (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 91. 33 reacting: to hurt, anger, provocation, exclusion. This is a theft of time, a robbery of the connection we are meant to have, as humans, with real life.”100 As Sibley attempted to reclaim radical queer rest through voguing with friends in spite of these systems that steal time and ability for rest, he was met with a violent and fatal denial of that rest. Hyper-vigilance becomes a necessary and exhausting state of being that robs people systemically marginalized of the capacity to rest without worry. As Crary notes, if our social structures not only inhibit but violently deny the access for some people to rest, their humanity is also withheld.101 Being Awake Those who are denied rest are forced into a position of constant wakefulness that demands a direct witnessing of ongoing structural violence. Being “woke” or awakened is a metaphor that has a long history in Black liberation – as Black writer Ishena Robinson explains, this metaphor of waking up has been used as far back as the 1920s to “urge Black people to be aware of the systems that harm.”102 Black author Bijan C. Bayne notes that this call to wake up was an antidote for Black communities “conditioned into philosophical slumber by centuries of oppression, intimidation, miseducation and social frustration.”103 For some marginalized folks, though, this wakefulness is not a choice but a necessary and exhausting requirement of existing in the world104 – a cruel and sadistic instrument to orient the marginalized gaze to that which violently marginalizes it. It is not enough to be tortured – you must witness it as well. 100 Jason Allen-Paisant, “On Blackness and Landscape: Reclaiming Time,” PN Review 257 47, no. 3 (2021): n.p., https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10904. 101 Crary, 24/7, 18. 102 Ishena Robinson, “How Woke Went From ‘Black’ to ‘Bad,’” Legal Defense Fund (blog), August 26, 2022, n.p., https://www.naacpldf.org/woke-black-bad/. 103 Bijan C Bayne, “How ‘Woke’ Became the Least Woke Word in U.S. English,” Washington Post, February 2, 2022, sec. Opinions, n.p., https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/02/black-history-woke-appropriation-misuse/. 104 Lorde, A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer, 119. 34 For those with access to certain privileges based on social identity, there is a choice to “opt-in” to this witnessing. Robinson explains, though, as well-meaning white liberals and leftists began attempting to see themselves as implicated in issues of racism, they co-opted this metaphor of waking up and divorced it from the original context.105 Being “woke” became a political orientation where one refuses to look away as an attempt to appear socially concerned – Black scholar in linguistics Nicole Holliday illuminates how its proliferation in the mainstream diluted its original meaning that was enmeshed in Black liberation and abolitionist work.106 Holliday continues that “the appropriation of woke has lulled it into a complacent, apolitical slumber where, ironically, it simply means ‘awake’.”107 For white liberals, woke became a synonym for aware.108 Holliday’s explanation of white liberals’ appropriation of “woke” reflects Crary’s criticism that there exists a “frustrating inefficacy of an ethic of watchfulness; the act of witnessing and its monotony can become a mere enduring of the night, of the disaster.”109 In other words, we become desensitized and immobilized in inaction. As Spade states, “keeping people numb to the suffering in the world – and their own suffering – is essential to keeping things as they are.”110 Black writer and activist Malaika Jabali emphasizes that for Black communities, being “woke” was a call to action.111 Thus, as Black activists have been telling us, it is not enough to be aware, we must act as well.112 I learn this particularly from Grace 105 Robinson, “How Woke Went From ‘Black’ to ‘Bad,’” n.p. 106 Nicole Holliday, “How ‘woke’ Fell Asleep | OxfordWords Blog,” Oxford Dictionary (blog), December 27, 2016, n.p., https://web.archive.org/web/20161227055631/https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/11/woke/. 107 Holliday, n.p. 108 Joshua Adams, “How ‘Woke’ Became a Slur,” Colorlines, May 5, 2021, n.p., https://colorlines.com/article/how-woke-became-slur/. 109 Crary, 24/7, 19. 110 Spade, Mutual Aid, 28. 111 Malaika Jabali et al., “We Need to Discuss the Word ‘Woke,’” The Guardian, November 9, 2021, sec. Opinion, n.p., https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/09/woke-word-meaning-definition-progressive. 112 Adams, “How ‘Woke’ Became a Slur,” n.p. 35 (@pastahgigi2.0 on TikTok)113 who regularly shares the importance of moving to action (in many forms) when learning about anti-racism. As Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt reminds us, though, this moving to action must also coincide with a careful consideration of what action is being asked for.114 We enter murky and contradictory territory here. In a thesis about rest, it seems antithetical to suggest more action, more doing. Yet, if our awareness never manifests in reflection or contemplation, especially in community, we have no way to work through what is happening and how we may be complicit. Odell explains that we require time and distance for reflection to be able to understand “the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to.”115 A participant in Paul C. Gorski’s (Land relations unspecified) study “Fighting Racism, Battling Burnout: Causes of Activist Burnout In US Racial Justice Activists” explains that white allies who resist engaging in self-reflection harm activist spaces and activists of colour as well-meaning white people often recreate white supremacist logics.116 This is why I am invested in expansive forms of rest that open space for contemplation. Simultaneously, though, the liberal appropriation of wokeness that asks for awareness of all social issues begins to reify capitalist self-optimization logics that hold unreachable standards for morality. As Black writer Joshua Adams explains, this appropriation of wokeness becomes more about virtue signalling than resistance.117 It creates constantly moving, increasing, ideals for what a good activist thinks and does – for what a good person thinks and does. It becomes saturated in capitalist judgements of moral productivity that 113 Grace [@pastahgigi2.0], TikTok, n.d., https://www.tiktok.com/@pastahgigi2.0. 114 Sarah Hunt, “Speaking For, Speaking Beside: Thoughts about Consensual Allyship,” The Becoming Collective (blog), July 12, 2013, n.p., https://becomingcollective.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/speaking-for-speaking-beside-thoughts-about-consensual-allyship/. 115 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 60. 116 Paul C. Gorski, “Fighting Racism, Battling Burnout: Causes of Activist Burnout in US Racial Justice Activists,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 5 (April 4, 2019): 680, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1439981. 117 Adams, “How ‘Woke’ Became a Slur,” n.p. 36 have from the beginning defined idleness as sinful.118 As Shir-Wise explains, these judgements define value in personhood through the time dedicated to improvement, particularly to the self.119 All time must be dedicated to advancement and refinement, lest you be seen as lazy – or in these terms, complicit. This doesn’t mean that we should abandon this entry point of “waking up,” but we need to build communities that allow for a moving between restfulness and wakefulness. In some ways, this call to move between states reflects Crary’s rumination on Hannah Arendt’s120 argument that “for an individual to have political effectiveness, there needed to be a balance, a moving back and forth between the bright, even harsh exposure of public activity and the protected, shielded sphere of domestic or private life.”121 hooks similarly called for this ability to retreat into rest as she explains that “this stillness, this quietude, needed for the continued nurturance of any devotion to artistic practice – to one’s work – that remains a space women (irrespective of race, class, nationality, etc.) struggle to find in our lives.”122 This should not mean a looking away or a denial but finding protections for full communal the rest. 118 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001), 104, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203995808. 119 Shir-Wise, “Disciplined Freedom,” 1687. 120 There is some controversy and contention around Hannah Arendt’s views on Israel and Zionism. She is described in many places as being both anti-Zionist and pro-Zionist. Shiraz Dossa writes that “Arendt's attitude to Zionism may seem confused, if not illogical. In an obvious sense Arendt was being inconsistent, but on the deeper level she was not. Though she was tormented by the palpable unrealism and irrationalism of Zionist ambitions, Arendt was totally committed to the primordial aspirations of political Zionism. Indeed, Arendt was tormented precisely because she shared so thoroughly the political ideal of Zionism. Her scathing critique of political Zionism was the lament of a loyalist infuriated by the political naivete of her fellow Zionists. This is the underlying motif of her less than flattering dissection of mainstream Zionism.” I once again must express my own dissent for Zionism while I continue to grapple with how citation offers power and representation to scholars with political views that may not come up in the work that I cite and differ from my own. Shiraz Dossa, “Lethal Fantasy: Hannah Arendt on Political Zionism,” Arab Studies Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1986): 220. 121 Crary, 24/7, 21. 122 bell hooks, “Women Artists: The Creative Process,” in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 1995), 126. 37 Moving from Individual to Collective It is essential, yet difficult, to do this not in a self-sacrificing or saviour-esque manor; as Gorski explains, when one is “perpetually attuned to racism, it is difficult … to detach from the culture of martyrdom, despite the stress it induces.”123 Hersey makes the need for this clear as she argues that “all of culture is in collaboration for us not to rest. There is no system in our culture that supports and make space for us to rest. This culture does not want you rested unless it is attached to your increased labour and productivity. No one will give you rest.”124 No amount of sacrificing oneself will create an appearance of “worthiness” to rest under capitalism. Attempting to “earn” rest risks co-opting self and community care into depoliticized consumption where care, mindfulness, and rest becomes a retreat from the “real” world.125 When this occurs, self-care is weaponized as an excuse to turn away from the world and maintain discriminatory barriers to rest.126 This practice, of course, is only attainable for those who have the privilege of social power and capital. The white-supremacist, colonial, capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy is invested in consumption-based, individualistic productivity that inhibits collective interventions into wakefulness. Muslim Bangladeshi author Fariha Róisín contends that what capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy want you to believe is that you don’t have a responsibility to think deeply about your existence. It encourages listlessness, severing from instinct, and exaggerates a devotion to self that is based on accumulation of material gain with no focus on the spiritual. It prioritizes self-optimization at the expense of community wellness.127 123 Paul C. Gorski, “Racial Battle Fatigue and Activist Burnout in Racial Justice Activists of Color at Predominately White Colleges and Universities,” Race Ethnicity and Education 22, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 9, https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2018.1497966. 124 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 94. 125 Sarah Sharma, Lynx Sainte-Marie, and Lauren Fournier, “Antinomies of Self-Care,” 2017, 14; Miranda Dottie Olzman, “Collaging Educational Orientations: A Whitening of Mindfulness,” Western Journal of Communication 86, no. 2 (March 15, 2022): 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2021.1949032. 126 Olzman, “Collaging Educational Orientations,” 8. 127 Fariha Róisín, Who Is Wellness for? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind, First edition (New York, NY: Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2022), 54–55. 38 This idea similarly reflects Odell’s argument that distraction is a tool capitalism utilizes to “prevent meaningful action.”128 Thus, built into our communities must be structures for communal contemplation and reverie. The centering of community is an essential antidote to the hyper-individualism that is the core of colonial capitalism. In colonial capitalism, well-being is framed as a lifestyle that individuals must work towards and achieve through consumption-based self-improvement. It insists that it is attainable through hard work and dedication no matter your body.129 Yet, as Shea Pederson (Land relations unspecified) asserts, “moving more and eating well are reasonable ways to nurture the mind-body but these alone can only do so much. As long as our culture values money over life, people will suffer regardless of how much yoga they do.”130 Like Black scholar Altheria Caldera notes, capitalism “forces us to neglect our personal and communal well-being for the sake of thriving industries and robust economies.”131 The possibility of rest is only conceived through individual actions. The individualistic nature of this is evident in Arnold B. Bakker (Land relations unspecified) and Patrícia L. Costa’s (Land relations unspecified) analysis of burnout in workplaces, where it is conceptualized as an individual problem with individual solutions.132 They assert that “burnout is a syndrome characterized by chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and a lack of personal accomplishment” with no engagement with how social structures impact the burnout someone may experience at work.133 Instead, they offer strategies 128 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 81. 129 Shildrick, “Neoliberalism and Embodied Precarity,” 599. 130 Shea Pederson, Mettanoia: Mental Health and Self Care Strategies, vol. 10 (Microcosm Publishing, 2020). 131 Altheria Caldera, “Challenging Capitalistic Exploitation: A Black Feminist/Womanist Commentary on Work and Self-Care,” Feminist Studies 46, no. 3 (2020): 712, https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2020.0049. 132 Arnold B. Bakker and Patrícia L. Costa, “Chronic Job Burnout and Daily Functioning: A Theoretical Analysis,” Burnout Research 1, no. 3 (December 1, 2014): 112–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.burn.2014.04.003. 133 Bakker and Costa, 113. 39 that centre individual intervention, like goal setting or increased feedback.134 This reflects Vostal’s argument that a call for slowness (in academia, food, or fashion, etc.) is really just a call for “temporal autonomy” that maintains expectations of output-based productivity.135 Slowness remains invested in individualism instead of imagining different futures. Understandings of crip time also grapple with the individualist nature of time and productivity. In her book Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer (Land relations unspecified) explains that crip time asks for more and flexible time not concerned with punctuality to allow disabled people to cope with “ableist barriers over which one has little to no control.”136 Kafer emphasizes that this is a collective endeavour that challenges normative understandings of pace; she explains that “it requires reimaging our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of “how long things take” are based on very particular minds and bodies.”137 Ableism is structural, so requires collective action to resist. Considering this, Jewish settler scholar May Chazan explains that through crip time “we are called on not only/necessarily to slow down, but, collectively, to actively imagine the crip futures we are striving to make along any/all trajectories and temporalities available to us.”138 So, slowing down may be part of a reorientation to time, but requires further “exploding” to resist capitalist logics of pace and productivity that are ableist.139 If we do not explode this orientation to time, our value stays attached to numerical measurements that foster competitiveness and isolation rather than a radical reorientation to communal rest for rests sake. 134 Bakker and Costa, 117. 135 Vostal, “Slowing down Modernity,” 1050. 136 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 26, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/monograph/book/23617. 137 Kafer, 26–27. 138 Chazan, “Crip Time and Radical Care in/as Artful Politics,” 2. 139 Alison Kafer, “After Crip, Crip Afters,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (April 1, 2021): 421, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916158; Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 27. 40 Burnout in Activism The impact of this is particularly felt in activist communities. As Spade writes, “capitalism makes us think about short-term gains, not building the long-term capacity for all of our well-being.”140 The stakes of activism feel extremely high as the weight of injustice is often intimately felt. Annemarie Vaccaro (white) and Jasmine A. Mena (Land relations unspecified) explain that queer students of colour engaged in activism “described a heightened sense of responsibility to others and difficult multiple minority identity explorations which left them experiencing burnout, compassion fatigue, and in some cases suicidal ideation.”141 Jennifer Alzate González echoes this in her personal experience of organizing with fellow queer activists of colour who “unsustainably organiz[ed] on adrenaline and stress until their bodies caved in.”142 Gorski explains that this approach to organizing often manifests “because long-term activists tend to understand the structural, mass-scale implications of injustice, they often self-inflict pressure to expend as much time and energy as possible on their activism, sacrificing their own well-being and hastening burnout.”143 Black feminist and activist Karla D. Scott’s experience of organizing reflects this, as she writes that Black women “often feel obligated to answer every call to activism and to literally put our bodies on the line for others—no matter what, no matter how long, and no matter how deep our pain.”144 These experiences can be 140 Spade, Mutual Aid, 66. 141 Annemarie Vaccaro and Jasmine A. Mena, “It’s Not Burnout, It’s More : Queer College Activists of Color and Mental Health,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 15, no. 4 (October 2011): 340, https://doi.org/10.1080/19359705.2011.600656. 142 Jennifer Alzate González, “Anti-Racist Activism and Community Self-Care at the University of Michigan,” Souls 17, no. 1–2 (April 3, 2015): 16, https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2015.998569. 143 Gorski, “Racial Battle Fatigue and Activist Burnout in Racial Justice Activists of Color at Predominately White Colleges and Universities,” 4. 144 Karla D. Scott, “Black Feminist Reflections on Activism,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 3 (September 1, 2016): 129, https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2016.5.3.126. 41 compounded by in-movement tension, often ignited by white allies and activities who impede action by centering guilt and shame, seek validation from people of colour, and attempt to commandeer organizations.145 Thus, despite best intentions from activists to create sustaining movements, Spade argues that “we often do the work in ways that further harm ourselves and impede our contribution to the resistance.”146 With this in mind, a different orientation to rest may support interventions into these structures that foster precarity and hyper-productivity. As we will see in the section below, turning to rest to support social and political existences has long histories and many interpretations. Rest Reclaimed When exhaustion begins to feel like an unavoidable symptom of life, some radical interventions into well-being are necessary. This is an observation that activists and scholars have been making for decades and particularly useful are the political potentialities of rest. Calls for rest – and especially care – emerge significantly from Black women activists who feel the heavy weight of needing to be everything for everyone.147 As Hersey reminds, “yes, the system continues raging and destroying but we will not be able to tap into spaces of freedom, joy, and rest by pushing our precious bodies and minds in abusive ways.”148 Embracing rest, then, offers opportunities to soothe ourselves amidst these harmful systems. Sleep is a compelling political intervention as it is a part of our lives that is extremely necessary and relies on certain levels of community care and vulnerability to be sustained.149 Even though the ways we rely on others for 145 Gorski, “Fighting Racism, Battling Burnout,” 672. 146 Spade, Mutual Aid, 108. 147 Scott, “Black Feminist Reflections on Activism,” 131; Layli Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 0 ed. (Routledge, 2012), 44, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203135938. 148 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 59. 149 Crary, 24/7, 25. 42 careless sleep may be obscured in our hyper-individualized lives, it still encapsulates the ways we depend on community care for effective and soothing rest. As Crary argues, “sleep is one of the few remaining experiences where, knowingly or not, we abandon ourselves to the care of others. As solitary and private as sleep may seem, it is not yet severed from an interhuman tracery of mutual support and trust, however damaged many of these links may be.”150 As I have mentioned repeatedly, though, Rest as Resistance encompasses more than sleep. Especially, as Odell notes, the harms of exhaustion cannot be circumvented through retreating to self-centred sleep that ignores the ways exhaustion permeates all parts of our social structures.151 Expansive Rest As I noted in the introduction, I conceptualize rest as an expansive experience that allows for the manifold manifestations of pauses that comfort our physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional selves. This kind of rest works to, as Odell points out, “question what we currently perceive as productive.”152 As Hersey explains, “It’s counterintuitive to believe rest to be not a place to waste time but instead a generative place of freedom and resistance.”153 Understanding the expansiveness of Rest as Resistance brings into view the ways that colonial capitalism is maintained through its ability to keep people numb and without space for contemplation.154 These methods of resistance thus centre contemplation that supports us in feeling the world. Having this space for contemplation is vital for people who are continually subjected to colonialism who need significant space to “gather all the bits we deleted and strayed from, the 150 Crary, 126. 151 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 198. 152 Odell, xii. 153 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 27. 154 hooks, “Women Artists: The Creative Process,” 126; Odell, How to Do Nothing, 81; Róisín, Who Is Wellness For?, 55. 43 parts of us that our ancestors were killed for and were forced to forget, the parts we purposely discarded as an act of survival” as a part of rest.155 This act of gathering and reflecting gives space to navigate the fraught and complex relationships with colonialism that weigh heavily on our psyches. Contemplative resistance also requires an investment in relationships to centre an ethic of community care. As Pederson notes, “when we only take care of ourselves, we are missing a huge part of the equation for true wellness.”156 Thus, Spade names individual and collective playful engagement with “exercise, body-work, spiritual exploration, art practice, gardening, and building meaningful relationships” as acts of resistance since they “practice doing things because they feel good rather than because they accomplish something.”157 This reflects Hersey’s assertion that “rest is radical because it resists the lie that we are not doing enough.”158 Rest as More than Luxury This assertion that we are not doing enough is often felt deeply by those who internalize it. When value is tied to productivity and productivity is tied to survival, rest may seem frivolous. Rest is dismissed as a luxury – one for people who have more time, more money, more resistance to the debilities of moral judgements. hooks considers this as she writes that “within white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, black people are not supposed to be “well.” This culture makes wellness a white luxury.”159 To counter this understanding of rest, authors like Jenny Odell and Tricia Hersey frame rest as an inherent right of existence. Odell argues that “just because this 155 Róisín, Who Is Wellness For?, 55. 156 Pederson, Mettanoia: Mental Health and Self Care Strategies, 10:6. 157 Spade, Mutual Aid, 118. 158 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 8. 159 hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 19. 44 right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important.”160 Hersey similarly rejects the notion that rest is superfluous through her assertion that Rest isn’t a luxury, but an absolute necessity if we’re going to survive and thrive. Rest isn’t an afterthought, but a basic part of being human. Rest is a divine right. Rest is a human right. We come into the world prepared to love, care, and rest. The systems kill us slowly via capitalism and white supremacy. Rest must interrupt. Like hope, rest is disruptive, it allows space for us to envision new possibilities. We must reimagine rest within a capitalist system.161 Framing rest as a right portrays it as something worth defending and fighting for. On the other hand, I think that framing rest through liberal rights logics is somewhat limiting as I think of Dahr Jamail’s statement “The single biggest thing I learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent, Stan Rushworth, who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of “I have rights” and an indigenous mindset of “I have obligations.” Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I am born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.”162 However, framing rest through liberal rights logic does an effective job at asserting that rest is more than luxury. Rest is more than luxury because it helps us understand the world around us. Audre Lorde writes about this in relation to poetry in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” where she contends that poetry “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”163 Reading and writing poetry gives space to the contemplative necessities of life – it provides a possible course of action to reflect and muse on our lives to be engaged community members. As 160 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 12. 161 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 60. 162 Hal Atwood, “The End of Ice - Lions Roar,” October 2, 2019, n.p., https://www.lionsroar.com/the-end-of-ice/. 163 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Crossing Press Feminist Series (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 32. 45 Khanmalek and Rhodes write, “rest, like poetry, is not escape or luxury or relinquishing political life or accountability to the world.”164 Asserting the essential nature of rest and reclaiming rest is extremely political when most of the world is conspiring against it. hooks contends that space for self-care and recovery is indispensable when attempting to engage in social justice movements to heal the wounds that come from living within exploitative systems that coerce us to act in harmful ways towards one another.165 She continues that for Black women, “choosing “wellness” is an act of political resistance.” 166 This sentiment echoes Audre Lorde’s famous proclamation that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”167 Anti-Capitalist Self-Care This version of self-care and rest is decidedly different from the gentrified, consumption-based, aesthetically pleasing variety of self-care most often touted on social media. As Hersey states, “I don’t believe we will get to freedom from grind culture by doing more of the same and aligning ourselves with any corporate wellness message that does not get to the root of the issue. To not illuminate the systems making us unwell is to bypass the heart and soul of justice work.”168 For rest to be resistance, it needs a strong anti-capitalist stance to resist the ways care gets coopted into economic structures. Róisín centres this concept in her consideration of wellness, where she contends that “our position has to shift in order to start thinking of wellness as something larger, more robust than just a movement for the rich and wealthy. We have to shift toward a more 164 Khanmalek and Rhodes, “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed,” 52. 165 hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 7. 166 hooks, 7. 167 Lorde, A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer, 125. 168 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 66. 46 united care, one that is inherently without greed. Wellness is a revolution – of communal support, of liberation.”169 This anti-capitalist version of self-care rejects the definition of a valuable life as only one that reaches neoliberal standards of productivity. This anti-capitalist version of self-care rejects the expectation that rest must be earned. Self-care under these parameters embraces alternative modes of existence not dependent on productive value. Khanmalek and Rhodes grapple with this idea as they write of the ways rest reaches “for pleasure and expressions of want outside and away from the commodification of our bodies as perpetual and simultaneously configured labor, product, and marketplace.”170 This argument reflects diasporic Korean writer Juhee Kwan’s ruminations on her experience on making a teapot for the first time in a pottery class she took for fun – she illustrates that capitalist expectations of perfection and output reduce the spiritual transformation of trying.171 When our value as beings is tied to what we produce, and what we produce is held against impossible standards of success where we must both stand out and reflect what is nominally defined as “good," trying becomes a fraught exercise in judgement disguised as care. A version of self-care that does not subscribe to these capitalist convictions gives way to ethics of care not concerned with material wealth and ability. Towards Community Care Even though these ruminations on self-care provide an excellent starting point to conceptualizing political rest, remaining tied to individual strategies for resistance, as many scholars note, 169 Róisín, Who Is Wellness For?, 52. 170 Khanmalek and Rhodes, “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed,” 52–53. 171 Juhee Kwan, “We Are Not Machines,” Rest For Resistance, January 5, 2017, n.p., https://restforresistance.com/zine/we-are-not-machines. 47 obscure the centrality of community accountability in liberatory rest.172 Odell reminds us that the task of mere survival for those most marginalized under colonial capitalism leaves little time and space for acts of care, so it requires community members who do have the space to take on the work of opening up rest to others.173 Thus, liberatory rest asks that we act in an unselfish manner to prioritize community. This means that rest cannot be an “escape” from the world. Liberatory rest must be deeply invested in the communities we are (willingly or unwillingly) a part of. In the depths of burnout and despair, it seems desirable to abandon the world and retreat into idyllic isolation filled with rest (I still regularly reference a meme I came across ten years ago describing an escape to an assumed wondrous life of being an Icelandic goat farmer with no friends). However, as Odell asserts while considering the commune movement in the 1960s, “the impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in, it is largely unfeasible.”174 She continues that it is unfeasible because without a radical reckoning with how these systems reach deep into our psyches, as a collective, they will continue to impact any engagement we have with others.175 What I find most compelling, though, is this suggestion that we have a responsibility to support rest in our communities. Similarly thinking through this responsibility, Róisín asks “is it really freedom if it is only for some?”176 Restful resistance, then, cannot be centred on the self. Centring community in projects of rest confronts the ways we often default to prioritize the self under capitalism. As hooks argues, “the focus on building community necessarily challenges a culture of domination that privileges 172 Briana M. Bivens, “Burnout, Self-Care, and Neoliberalism: Tracing the Promise of Relational, Emergent Ontologies for Sustainable Community Organizing” (Ph.D., United States -- Georgia, University of Georgia, 2021), 6, https://www.proquest.com/docview/2570985594/abstract/7409501690674FEFPQ/1; Josie Roland Hodson, “Rest Notes: On Black Sleep Aesthetics∗,” October, no. 176 (June 20, 2021): 24, https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00422; Odell, How to Do Nothing, 24. 173 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 94. 174 Odell, 30. 175 Odell, 40. 176 Róisín, Who Is Wellness For?, 165. 48 individual well-being over collective effort.”177 Sharma reflects this as she writes that “self-care isn’t about the private domain of the self, but about the maintenance of the conditions of possibility for people to be cared for in common.”178 Dean Spade notes the importance of this as “burnout is prevented or lessened when we feel connected to others, when there is transparency in how we work together, when we can rest as needed, when we feel appreciated by the group, and when we have skills for giving and receiving feedback.”179 Black scholar Rochelle Davidson Mhonde and Indian scholar Aayushi Hingle reflect this need in defining rest as “the collective taking turns of performing those rituals of resistance so that the burden is shared.”180 Being able to call on others to perform acts of care may allow us to feel secure in our communities – it may allow us to know that work will continue and be supportive even if we take a step back. This understanding reflects hooks’s argument that “life-sustaining political communities can provide a … space for the renewal of the spirit. That can happen only if we address the needs of the spirit in progressive political theory and practice.”181 Political organizing can be life-affirming work, but it needs to have room to care for all parts of the self and community. Simultaneously, Jen Plyer (white) reminds us that No one ‘activist community’ can encompass the social needs of all community organizers, and complete entrenchment in activist spaces and discourse can be exhausting. But organizations that do not create spaces in which members can support each other through friendship and celebration seem to have a harder time holding onto organizers in the long-run.182 177 hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 117. 178 Sharma, Sainte-Marie, and Fournier, “Antinomies of Self-Care,” 14. 179 Spade, Mutual Aid, 108–9. 180 Rochelle Davidson Mhonde and Aayushi Hingle, “Resistance, Reflexivity, and Rest: Critical Pedagogical Rituals of ‘Ubuntu,’” Communication Education 70, no. 3 (July 3, 2021): 337, https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2021.1912793. 181 bell hooks, “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” in Outlaw Culture, 0 ed. (Routledge, 2015), 295, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203822883. 182 Jen Plyer, “How To Keep On Keeping On: Sustaining Ourselves in Community Organizing and Social Justice Struggles,” Upping the Anti: A Jounral of Theory and Action 3 (2009): n.p., https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/03-how-to-keep-on-keeping-on. 49 These reminders signal the responsibility we have to build organizations and resistances that centre balance between rest and action – and understands rest as action. Balancing Work and Rest The political work that we take on in our many communities often gives our lives meaning and passion. It is important to remain connected to those feelings and communities, and ensure that we care for ourselves and others in the process. Caldera contends that “meaningful work and self-care are not antithetical principles” and for women of colour specifically, finding a balance between the two is a formidable way to “challenge capitalistic exploitation.”183 This reflects Odell’s argument that “we have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.”184 hooks similarly concludes that doing good work relies on having space for “contemplation and reverie.”185 Khanmalek and Rhodes exemplify this in their work as they embrace stillness and rest as much as action and participation, and our ethics contravene the notion that the two are mutually exclusive. A sense of the playful, of what is at play and in play in an anti- capitalist and decolonial sense of playfulness with which we meet each other’s ramshackle bodies also means that despite what is difficult, we make room for abiding laughter, shared delight, and tinkering for its own sake.186 This sentiment from Khanmalek and Rhodes also shows how finding balance in rest and action also changes the morals attached to rest. When resting is a valued part of the work taken on, it weakens the attachment to shame and inadequacy. Capitalism demands that we believe our value and “goodness” as people comes from our productivity. This also seeps into activist and community spaces where martyrdom is valorized 183 Caldera, “Challenging Capitalistic Exploitation,” 716. 184 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 61. 185 hooks, “Women Artists: The Creative Process,” 126. 186 Khanmalek and Rhodes, “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed,” 38. 50 and expected. Therefore, as Hersey reminds, resting as resistance requires a radical reckoning with the logics of white supremacist, patriarchal, colonial capitalism that finds value only in productivity.187 It is from this logic that hooks states “since society rewards us most, indicates that we are valuable, when we are willing to push ourselves to the limit and beyond, we need a life-affirming practice, a counter-system of valuation in order to resist this agenda.”188 Dedicating time and space to rest assists in creating a practice that shifts where we find value. Odell puts this bluntly in stating that “there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning – and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.”189 Hersey explains that engaging in a practice of rest encourages a focus “on knowing that our bodies and our worth are not connected to how many things we can check off a list.”190 Caldera identifies that for Black women in particular, committing to a practice of rest rejects capitalistic messages of inherent expendability and unworthiness.191 Strategies for Viewing Rest Differently Reflecting on the art installation Black Power Naps, Julia Halperin (Land relations unspecified) explains that reclaiming rest in a public forum as a Black person reconfigures the values attached to resting as it offers a way to “claim your inherent dignity, to be unapologetically, rather than to do.”192 Yet, even as this art installation offers this dignity, it grapples with the question of who 187 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 122. 188 hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 41–42. 189 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 18. 190 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 83. 191 Caldera, “Challenging Capitalistic Exploitation,” 713. 192 Julia Halperin, “When Sleep Becomes an Art Form,” The New York Times, May 1, 2023, sec. T Magazine, n.p., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/t-magazine/sleep-rest-protest-art.html. 51 gets to access public space for rest and sleep. Even though there is a sign at the entrance of the exhibit that reads “if you see a Black person sleeping, don’t call the police,” an unnamed visitor called security on Ghanaian artist Heather Agyepong, who was participating in the exhibit.193 An exhibition that centres public rest also prompts reflection on privilege – what about those who have no choice but to engage in public rest and the subsequent non-consensual voyeurism of this public rest? What about those who are explicitly denied and displaced from places of public rest and leisure? Giamarino suggests that utilizing just public space designs through DIY approaches that incorporate the perspectives and demands of people experiencing houselessness offers interventions into hostile built environments that inhibit public rest and survival.194 These suggestions points to the need for more and varied interventions into understandings of rest, who gets to rest, and how rest happens. To get to a different understanding of rest and value, we need strategies to conceptualize rest differently. Thinking through a practice of restful resistance requires strategies that engage with the personal and communal to regularly give space for contemplation and reflection. For Caldera, these strategies include questioning how our communities continually rely on the labour of Black women and women of colour and how we can better affirm value for this labour outside of capitalistic exploitation.195 Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” offers a way to reconfigure how we understand rest through intimate spaces – she explains that embracing (rather than suppressing) the erotic as a creative force in women’s lives points to a method of reimagining how we move through the world to increase “capacity for joy.”196 She writes, “once we begin to 193 Halperin, n.p. 194 Giamarino, “Planning ‘Just’ Public Space,” 40–41. 195 Caldera, “Challenging Capitalistic Exploitation,” 711. 196 Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 51. 52 feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”197 Ellen Samuels (Land relations unspecified) uses the concept of “crip time” to demonstrate how people with disabilities have to attune to “new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world.”198 For Samuels, embracing crip time provides a strategy to move through the world valuing the breaks and pauses necessary for existence.199 Also thinking through a disability studies lens, Black scholar Kemi Adeyemi asks how conceptualizing politics beyond vertical orientations and finding ways to do politics through other angles can support a more inclusive and restful organizing space.200 Similarly, Hodson demands that Black sleep (and Black laying) should be witnessed and understood “as a function of Black aliveness, as a function of being human.”201 These prompts from Hodson and Adeyemi offer strategies to conceptualize how angles beyond vertical are still politically engaged. Alison L. Black writes how choice becomes a strategy to engage in a practice of rest as social structures continue to demand high levels of productivity and efficiency.202 So, remembering that rest under these terms will not come uninhibited, but will insist on a continued choice is a strategy to implement a forgiving and persisting practice of rest. Black feminist June Jordan similarly reflects that a practice of self-love requires “inordinate, hourly vigilance” and constant defence.203 While there is certainly a tension between the goals or purpose of rest and 197 Lorde, 52. 198 Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (August 31, 2017): n.p., https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824. 199 Samuels, n.p. 200 Kemi Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Women/Lean,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 9–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2019.1571861. 201 Somnambulations Panel 4, 16:50-17:00. 202 Black, “Responding to Longings for Slow Scholarship,” 26. 203 June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (New York: Basic/Civitas Books, 2002), 261. 53 this call for vigilance and defense, it reflects the reality that rest is not easily attainable. It is easy, almost instinctual, to subscribe to what Hersey names as “grind culture” – the culture that demands we prioritize labour and productivity over wellbeing.204 It requires effort to continually resist this culture. This effort, as Jordan describes, requires protection of time and energy – it is a choice to step outside of colonial capitalisms expectations of labour and one that requires attentiveness.205 González finds ways to do this through explicitly naming everyday joyful and restful actions as part of our social movements.206 She states that we can find strategies of rest in “a movement which uplifts not only our rallies and marches, but also our Snapchat selfies, our drag balls and House trophies, and our after-hours grad lounge bachata parties as acts of resistance.”207 These strategies inform the ways we can begin to bring restful futures to fruition. Shaping Restful Futures In utilizing strategies of rest, our social organizations and communities can begin to shape futures where rest is a respected and central part of our lives and work. A dedicated practice of rest may allow us to, as Hersey notes, “slow down enough to listen to what our hearts and bodies want to share with us.”208 In slowing down, there is greater room to imagine what it takes to build a world where rest, for all beings, is not only welcomed but deemed essential. As Crary notes, It is possible that – in many different places, in many disparate states, including reverie or daydream – the imaginings of a future without capitalism begin as dreams of sleep. These would be intimations of sleep as a radical interruption, as a refusal of the unsparing weight of our global present, of sleep which, at the most mundane level of everyday experience 204 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 32. 205 Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die, 261. 206 González, “Anti-Racist Activism and Community Self-Care at the University of Michigan,” 12. 207 González, 12. 208 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 82. 54 can always rehearse the outlines of what more consequential renewals and beginnings might be.209 Dreaming is a central part of building restful futures. Khanmalek and Rhodes contend that “dreamwork reconfigures what it is to know, turning past, present, and future, the grip of settler colonial and capitalist temporality, in and over upon itself, tearing its fabric. Dreamwork feels like a refusal of positivist knowledge production, a tapping into what exceeds the body, a process both of envisioning and revisioning.”210 These imaginings can come in many forms, though – not just in dreaming. For Odell, it is in practicing a commitment to invest attention into the parts of community that support us.211 Kathi Weeks (Land relations unspecified) imagines that investing in the social program of universal basic income will “allow us to consider and experiment with different kinds of lives, with wanting, doing, and being otherwise.”212 bell hooks explains that for Black people experiencing poverty specifically, collective recovery is realized “by making a space for playful engagement, the expression of creativity, for individuals to receive care and attention in relation to their emotional well-being, a kind of care that attends to hearts and minds as well as stomachs.”213 When thinking through Odell’s call to invest attention into the parts of community that support us, Hersey’s reminder to centre and uplift Black liberation in community rest work is essential.214 Allen-Paisant similarly outlines the need for solidarity in bringing restful futures to fruition – he calls for a solidarity and connection with human across different social identities and with the more-than-human world.215 It is through these tactics of imagining restful futures that projects of rest have begun to influence community and activist spaces. 209 Crary, 24/7, 128. 210 Khanmalek and Rhodes, “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed,” 43. 211 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 93. 212 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011), 145, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394723. 213 hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 102. 214 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 93; Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 78. 215 Allen-Paisant, “On Blackness and Landscape: Reclaiming Time,” n.p. 55 Rest in Action The Nap Ministry The ways people are taking up this call to reclaim rest are manifold. Two of the best-known projects attempting to reclaim rest are The Nap Ministry and Black Power Naps. Black womanist Tricia Hersey founded The Nap Ministry in 2016 as a community-focused practice of performance art intended to create space for Black people to rest together as a “radical tool for community healing.” 216 Alongside Hersey’s public performances, workshops, and lectures is a flourishing Instagram page that invites community to think through her provocation of “rest is resistance.” This presence grew into the book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto and The Nap Ministry’s Rest Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture. Throughout The Nap Ministry’s growth, Hersey has embodied what it means to stay committed to a life-long practice of rest that values and protects rest for its own sake. Hersey regularly posts admonishments to those who attempt to pressure her into the “grind culture” mindset that asks for constant labour and productivity through sharing her work – on Instagram she writes: “there is no model for a Black woman who doesn’t want to do shit. Who wants full leisure. Y’all only can dream up an image of a Black woman constantly laboring. I’m attempting to be that model. I’m prepped to do less. I’m collecting reparations for my Ancestors. I’m resting.”217 Black Power Naps 216 The Nap Ministry, “About,” The Nap Ministry, January 5, 2018, https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/about/. 217 The Nap Ministry, “Embody This Message. Actually Go Lay down. Stop Emailing so Much. Stop Adding Labor to Folks Lives. Be Intentional about Leisure and Daydreaming. Slow down for a Few Minutes Each Day. Heal. Rest.,” Instagram, April 3, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/thenapministry/. 56 The art exhibition Black Power Naps created by Black Domincan artist Navild Acosta and afro-sudaka artist Fannie Sosa centres a similar mission to collect reparations.218 In an interview with Vice, Navild Acosta explained that their exhibition, which features many different colourful resting spaces intended for Black people to nap, asks for “energetic reparations.”219 Black Power Naps attempts to create a space where Black and Brown folks feel safe to rest in public – this is done through artistic expression and through gallery staff training that is part of hosting the exhibit. 220 This project seeks to reduce the sleep gap – the term used to define the structural forces which cause Black, undocumented, disabled, and low-income people to experience less or poorer quality sleep. 221 In an analysis of this project, Danielle Drees explains that part of this exhibit attempts to change white spectators gaze on Black rest to centre its inherent value. 222 Both The Nap Ministry and Black Power Naps utilize community-based and practice-based methods of rest to prioritize Black feminine rest. Performance Art Beyond these projects, most engagements with reclaiming rest occur in creative and artistic fields. Also in the field of performance art, Victoria Stanton (white) has engaged in a multi-year project dedicated to “doing nothing” which seeks to “performatively carve out spaces that create intervals in our daily lives and by their very insistence challenge notions of productivity and the value we place upon time or how it should supposedly be spent and therefore not wasted.”223 Her 218 Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa, Black Power Naps, May 19, 2023, Performance, May 19, 2023, New York, Museum of Modern Art. 219 Sarah Burke, “These Artists Want Black People to Sleep,” Vice, January 7, 2019, n.p., https://www.vice.com/en/article/neppam/black-power-naps-fannie-sosa-niv-acosta. 220 Burke, n.p.; Drees, “Napping in Public,” 12. 221 Museum of Modern Art, “Black Power Naps: La Biblioteca Is Open | MoMA,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed July 27, 2023, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5551. 222 Drees, “Napping in Public,” 18. 223 Somnambulations Panel 4, 39:42-40:14. 57 project asks: ““What does it even mean to “Do Nothing?” Is it a state of “pure being?” Or does it simply mean “not working?” (As in, “if I’m not working I’m doing nothing.”) Is it a form of resistance? Is it an assertion of Freedom? Is it necessary for our wellbeing?”224 Stanton’s work asks important questions, but it also leaves me with a few curiosities. While Stanton references the privilege she holds as a white woman engaging in rest work in her later iterations of the performance,225 it remains disconnected from the histories and communities of rest work that approach rest from an intersectional lens. Thus, the tone around Stanton’s performance of rest is decidedly different than that of The Nap Ministry or Black Power Naps. Representations of Belonging In a cross between performance art and photography, Japanese artist Sakiko Yamaoka asks questions about space and belonging through taking public naps in her multi-year art piece titled Best Places to Sleep. 226 In this piece, Yamaoka naps in strange places to problematize what it means to belong in a space – how belonging denotes a commitment to behaving in a specific way. 227 In public, to belong is to be awake, be upright, be active – Yamaoka troubles this through inviting collaborators to rest in public with her. Drees describes this piece as facilitating “many different people reclaiming pockets of time and space for rest.” 228 Similarly taking up questions around belonging, Black artist Ingrid Pollard’s photograph of a Black woman sitting in the English countryside titled Pastoral Interlude is captioned: “it’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District; where I wandered 224 Victoria Stanton, “The First Yearlong Cycle of Doing Nothing Comes to an End,” The Sanctimonious Sect of Nothing Is Sacred (blog), May 4, 2017, n.p., https://nothingissacred.ca/2017/05/04/the-first-yearlong-cycle-of-doing-nothing-comes-to-an-end/. 225 Somnambulations Panel 4, 50:36-51:00. 226 Sakiko Yamaoka, Best Place to Sleep, 2012 2007, Performance, 2012 2007, https://sakikoyamaoka.com/performance/2001-2007/best-place-to-sleep/. 227 Yamaoka. 228 Drees, “Napping in Public,” 10. 58 lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the country is always accompanied by a feeling of unease; dread.” 229 This photograph troubles the typical association of the countryside with ease and leisure. While Yamaoka asks viewers to consider how rest could belong in public space, Pollard puts forward essential questions about who belongs in restful environments. Pollard asks viewers to rethink conceptualizes of the countryside as idyllic and restful – this is only true for some bodies. 230 Black artist Jennifer Packer’s painting Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) also works through this tense relationship between rest and belonging.231 The painting features a Black man napping on a couch in a room peppered with personal belongings – a peaceful scene. Yet, as Hodson notes, “Packer’s memorial invocation of Breonna Taylor’s name reminds the viewer that even in the quiet intimacy of sleepy repose, the threat of violence is never far off.”232 This painting holds the tension that rest for people systemically marginalized is filled with unease and guardedness but is still necessary to dream futures without this sense of impending violence.233 Poetry Black poet jamilah malika provides an intervention into this hypervigilance that Pollard’s and Packer’s art illustrate through her poem Rest/Woke.234 It is a tender poem to guide Black people through rest that is akin to practices of meditation, mindfulness, or progressive muscle relaxations. The poem very explicitly invites readers to take a break from the pressures of the 229 Ingrid Pollard, Pastoral Interlude, 1988, Photograph, 20x24 inches, 1988, http://www.ingridpollard.com/pastoral-interlude.html. 230 Pollard. 231 Jennifer Packer, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), 2020, Oil on Canvas, 2020, Private Collection. 232 Hodson, “Rest Notes,” 20. 233 Hodson, 20. 234 jamilah malika, “Rest/Woke: A Poem for the Anxious and Exhausted,” Vice (blog), January 11, 2019, n.p., https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa5n7m/jamilah-malikah-poem-how-to-calm-anxiety. 59 world to find home in oneself. The podcast The Slowdown: Poetry and Reflection Daily also uses poetry as an explicit invitation to rest. Less explicitly political, but certainly invoking Lorde’s assertion that poetry gives us the room to reckon with the world around us, 235 The Slowdown provides a small space to contemplate our world through art. The Slowdown’s description explains that “in sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery.”236 235 Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 32. 236 The Slowdown, “About,” accessed August 29, 2023, https://www.slowdownshow.org/about. 60 Conceptual Provocations Alongside these artistic practices are more conceptual provocations to implement restful resistance. One of these is Chinese ex-factory worker Luo Huazhong’s social media post titled “Lying Flat is Justice,” which prompted a movement of fellow Chinese youth exhausted from the pressures of life under capitalism to post photos of resting bodies captioned with Luo Huazhong’s title and theorizations of the concept across Chinese social media. 237 The image of lying down became a provocative protest of Chinese labour conditions which glorifies overwork and exhaustion.238 Similarly taking up conceptual ideas to subvert national narratives is Jenny Odell’s concept of “Manifest Dismantling.” 239 Manifest dismantling is meant to counter the concept of “manifest destiny,” which is the racist superiority myth that suggested white European settlers had the divine right to expand and colonize the entirety of North America – it utilized violent projects of “progress” to build nations.240 These projects of “progress” were underscored with the racist understandings of time management, productivity, and labour (which I described in the section “Time” in this chapter) that settlers used to justify acts of genocide. For Odell, then, manifest dismantling is a commitment to “undo” the harms that manifest destiny (or, more explicitly, white settlers) caused.241 It frames undoing as a practice of revision, maintenance, or deconstruction that does not fulfill colonial capitalism’s expectations of constant “progress” and “improvement.”242 While this certainly still requires effort (it is not really an act of nothing), Odell contends that it changes our relationship to what doing is – it asks that we see 237 Natalie Olofsson, “‘After Working So Long, I Just Felt Numb, Like a Machine’: The Disillusionment of Chinese Youth and Crisis of Work,” Asian Labour Review (blog), February 7, 2023, n.p., https://labourreview.org/from-996-to-lying-flat/. 238 Olofsson, n.p.; bugs, “Tangpingist Manifesto,” Bugs (blog), February 22, 2022, n.p., https://chi.st/bugs/tangpingist-manifesto. 239 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 188–92. 240 Odell, 188–89. 241 Odell, 190. 242 Odell, 192. 61 “doing” as acts of care rather than acts of capitalistic advancement.243 Odell’s concept also prompts a questioning of who is responsible for the undoing of harm. The weight of maintenance, change, and care often falls to the most marginalized – and in the context of North American “manifest destiny” this weight falls onto Indigenous peoples. Yet, Odell’s concept of manifest dismantling asks non-Indigenous people to assume responsibility in these acts of change. It does not ask for settler leadership in change, but certainly settler undertaking of manifest dismantling. Concluding Thoughts These restful provocations allow me to think deeply about what a Métis-feminist theory of Rest as Resistance might look like. Especially as a Métis-settler person, I consider intensely what my roles and responsibilities in shaping this theory are. Profoundly influential in my considerations is Emmanuel Brown’s statement that for white folks, individual and collective care is the “first step of accountability for lineages of harm, that are cause for institutions and structures that continue to cause harm today.”244 Practices of care and accountability are thus integral to all parts of my thesis work – including the process of the literature review. My intention for this literature review was to centre other (as in non-Métis) knowledges on rest to provide an understanding of the manifold ways this topic is considered. I am invested in projects of collective liberation, so this literature review works in part to acknowledge and name all the ways that activists, scholars, and authors who are not Métis influence this work. I also learn from Tynan and Bishop that approaching literature reviews from Indigenous methodologies requires that I engage in literature 243 Odell, 191. 244 Frimpong, Centering Care. 62 reviews as a relational rather than individual endeavour.245 This approach is similar to Sara Ahmed’s citational practices that she describes as “how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.”246 Similar to both Ahmed and Tynan and Bishop, I had a previous relationship with most of the texts I draw from, which also guided me to new texts.247 For example, I have been reading and rereading Audre Lorde and bell hooks throughout my entire post-secondary education. This textual relationship led me to their legacy of Black feminists taking up questions around rest and self-care. These textual relationships were also formed in part through peers, mentors, friends, and family sending any and every text they also encountered that mentioned rest. Approaching a literature review in this way is meant to trace my relationship with knowledge rather than criticize or validate it.248 This literature leaves me with a lot of curiosities and questions. I am suspicious of the way my review of literature produced something human-centric and does not grapple with the exhaustion and resting of more-than-human beings. Did this come from my own bias of where I am looking to for “literature”? Is this a bias that emerged from the areas of theory that I prioritized in this literature review? I also wonder why I was thinking of my active practice of resting as separate from my literature review and from my processes of building relationships to knowledge and literature. This pondering asks me to reflect on how I conceptualize who has agency in knowledge and how I may be replicating extractive research practices in my literature review. More traditional literature review practices might ask me to highlight these curiosities I am left with as “gaps,” but Tynan and Bishop’s work encourages me to think about these spaces 245 Tynan and Bishop, “Decolonizing the Literature Review,” 506. 246 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 15–16. 247 Ahmed, 16–17; Tynan and Bishop, “Decolonizing the Literature Review,” 502. 248 Tynan and Bishop, “Decolonizing the Literature Review.” 63 as relationships I need to invest more in.249 In this literature review, I attempt to engage in this process as a “respect protocol,” which Tynan and Bishop explain as “paying respect to knowledge and who keeps it.”250 The rest of my thesis gives me the room to further develop these relationships and add more love and care to the carriers of knowledge I may have neglected thus far. 249 Tynan and Bishop, 503. 250 Tynan and Bishop, 500. 64 PART TWO: Theory comes from the way you lived. It is inside of you. Go home, visit your relatives, visit the land – Maria Campbell in Janice Cindy Gaudet, “Keeoukaywin” 65 Chapter Two: Visiting with Land As I think about deepening the relationship I have with rest, I hold very closely the lineages of knowledge I traced in my literature review. The ways of thinking about and understanding the political potentialities of rest that those scholars and artists offer assist my articulation of a Métis-feminist theory of Rest as Resistance. While I turn more explicitly towards Métis thinkers in particular and Indigenous thinkers more broadly in these following chapters, they build from the theories I traced in my literature review. As I approach this first chapter’s theorizing on potential methods of resting, I will centre the two pillars I argue must shape a Métis restful resistance. First, following Black feminist origins of Rest as Resistance, it refuses colonial and capitalist standards and expectations of what it means to be productive.251 Second, considering principles of Wahkotowin,252 an act of restful resistance centres knowledge and relationships that colonial capitalism attempts to devalue or discredit. Approaching this research with the intent to live this topic and commit to an active practice of resting, I enact the methods of resting that I will analyze in the following chapters, the first of which is the restful act of visiting with the Land. Enacting this method asks that I first make clear what I mean by both “visiting” and “Land.” The kind of visiting I invoke here follows the Métis methodology of visiting. Métis scholar Janice Cindy Gaudet explains how “keeoukaywin [visiting] was, and still remains, at the heart of how my mother, grandmothers, aunties, and sisters anchor a sense of belonging, a sense of self, and sense of responsibility to family, community, and land.”253 The act of visiting is the 251 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 122; Caldera, “Challenging Capitalistic Exploitation,” 713. 252 Maria Campbell, “We Need to Return to the Principles of Wahkotowin,” Eagle Feather News, November 2007, 5. 253 Janice Cindy Gaudet, “Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way - Fostering an Indigenous Research Methodology,” Aboriginal Policy Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 51, https://doi.org/10.5663/aps.v7i2.29336. 66 “process of meeting together over tea, listening to, and talking with, one another, and understanding each other’s point of view.”254 A form of knowledge translation that foregrounds the responsibilities we have in our relationships, according to Gaudet, “visiting creates and fortifies connections that unify and build community from the ground up. It is how humour, silence, news, concerns, pain, knowledge, ideas, and arguments are disseminated at a grassroots/ground level.”255 As Gaudet makes clear, visiting is certainly active work.256 Simultaneously, though, I understand a visiting methodology to be a restful practice as it centres ways of doing research that prioritize relationships and are not based in extraction and productivity. This methodology is one that is embedded in family and community structures – every time I visit my Métis grandmother, Clara, she anchors my understanding of belonging in family as she tells stories and makes little quips about cousins, aunts, uncles, and other relations. It is through visiting that I come to understand my place in our family and community despite the distance that often obscures my sense of belonging. Visiting as methodology and practice reflects and honours the profound power and impact Métis women have on family, community, and culture.257 A Métis-feminist methodology indeed. Visiting as methodology asks that we consider how we are responsible for tending to the spirits of all our relations through connecting with them.258 While the considerations and theorizations of a visiting methodology often are rooted in human-to-human visiting, what I employ in this chapter is human-to-Land or human-to-more- 254 Anna Corrigal Flaminio, Janice Cindy Gaudet, and Leah Marie Dorion, “Métis Women Gathering: Visiting Together and Voicing Wellness for Ourselves,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 16, no. 1 (March 2020): 58, https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180120903499. 255 Gaudet, “Keeoukaywin,” 53. 256 Gaudet, 48. 257 Gaudet, 54. 258 Gaudet, 48. 67 than-human visiting to consider the agency and knowledge that comes from all relations. Visiting with Land as a restful methodology prompts a contemplation of how Land and more-than-human relations care for our spirits and wellbeing in radical ways. This approach to visiting prompts that I make clear what Land means to me. First and foremost, I think of Métis author Maria Campbell’s explanation of Wahkotowin: Today it is translated to mean kinship, relationship, and family as in human family. But at one time, from our place it meant the whole of creation. And our teachings taught us that all of creation is related and inter-connected to all things within it. Wahkotowin meant honoring and respecting those relationships. They are our stories, songs, ceremonies, and dances that taught us from birth to death our responsibilities and reciprocal obligations to each other. Human to human, human to plants, human to animals, to the water and especially to the earth. And in turn all of creation had responsibilities and reciprocal obligations to us.259 This kinship network informs how I understand Land – relationships breathe life into the world. Care and respect for the Land was the first and most important teaching my dad shared with me and my siblings. I hold very tenderly my memories of traipsing through the bush behind my dad as we harvested firewood and spent time with the trails that were sometimes new friends, sometimes old. In these moments, as we would pester my dad with questions and wait for him to point out all the beings whose home we were in, he made sure that we knew we were responsible for acting with love and care toward the Land. While he welcomed our curiosity and acknowledged the propensity kids have to screw around, he made sure we understood that those inquisitive behaviours never infringed on our responsibility to act with care. In fact, the only time my dad ever gave me real trouble was when he found out I had used a glow-stick as a trail marker on a camping trip. He made me walk my sorry arse back to this “special” tree to collect the glow-stick with an admonishment that if I truly cared for the tree I would remember it 259 Campbell, “We Need to Return to the Principles of Wahkotowin,” 5. 68 without a glow-stick. I did – and I do. It is through this relationship with Land that my dad instilled in me that I first began to understand the ways that visiting with Land is a restful act of care. My dad offered us the space to slow down with the Land and spend time with all the beings enveloped in the Land’s care. While my dad never used the word Wahkotowin to describe the deep relationships he has with the world around him, he acted and parented in ways that always centred this notion. Much to my dad’s chagrin, though, I became a bit of a city kid as I got older. A busy (and self-centred) teenage life meant I did not prioritize camping trips and drives into the bush with my dad. As teenagers are wont to do, I distanced myself from my family as I sought out an identity not predicated on being Pam and Dusty’s daughter, or Gilligan’s little sister, or Kailey’s tag-a-long (I am sure both you and I know that this independent identity is never quite possible, nor is it something very comforting, but keep that to yourself because teenage Dani needs to get there by herself). In these city-kid identity searching projects, I fell into the colonial trap of separating capital-L Land and the city. I think of Emily Riddle’s explanation of the prairie propensity to forget that the city is Territory – is Land – too.260 Land, worthy of care, was out in the toolies – out in the bush. It was not the sprigs of grass and rogue dandelions that forced themselves through concrete cracks or even the cedar tree in the front yard of my suburban home. I defaulted on my responsibilities to this precious relationship my dad had centred in our lives. Sometimes I like to imagine that the trees reassured my parents as they waited with a knowing hope for my return to these relationships. Similar to Emily Riddle, it was my experience living on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory that first 260 Emily Riddle, The Big Melt (Nightwood Editions, 2022), 54. 69 shifted my understanding of city as Land.261 These nations’ powerful presence in the city demanded that I reimagine what Land means. This shifting was further shaped by my experience living on unceded Syilx territory. I have been an extraordinarily fortunate student in this territory as I have had many opportunities to learn from Syilx teachers and Knowledge Keepers (like Dr. Bill Cohen, Dr. Jeannette Armstrong, Coralee Miller, and many others) who generously shared the ways that Syilx Lands and people have cared for each other since time immemorial. I think of Jeannette Armstrong’s insistence that “Land as language surrounds us completely, just like the physical reality of it surrounds us.”262 These words remind me that this place, called Ki-low-na, is all Syilx Land – whether I am surrounded by the bush or concrete. Alongside this shift in my understanding of Land through the lived experience of being a visitor on unceded Syilx Land/cities are Métis scholar Erin Konsmo and Cree scholar Karyn Recollet’s insistence that we disentangle ourselves from purity narratives that denote some Land (the bush) as “good” and other (the city) as “bad.”263 Their words ask us to consider who (as in people and more-than-human kin) gets left behind, and hurt, when the only “good” Land is inaccessible bush Land.264 They explain that these purity narratives also spill over into how we view and engage with people who do not fit into purity narratives themselves – as in cis-heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, whiteness, etc.265 Thus, they prompt that “we need to reimagine not only our cities, but also bodies of all abilities as being good on the land/water. We can reimagine these plant medicines that persevere in the ruins of environmental devastation as 261 Riddle, 54. 262 Jeannette C. Armstrong, “Land Speaking,” in Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, ed. Simon J. Ortiz (University of Arizona Press, 1998), 178, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv27jsm69.11. 263 Erin Marie Konsmo and Karyn Recollet, “Afterword: Meeting the Land(s) Where They Are At: A Conversation Between Erin Marie Konsmo (Métis) and Karyn Recollet (Urban Cree),” in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, ed. Linda Tuhiwai Smith Yang Eve Tuck, K. Wayne (Routledge, 2018), 239. 264 Konsmo and Recollet, 240. 265 Konsmo and Recollet, 243. 70 part of our kin, and ultimately still valuable in assisting our bodies and spirits.”266 This prompt is in conversation with nēhiyaw poet and community organizer Erica Violet Lee’s “In Defense of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide,” where she describes what it means and how it feels to live in and be “the wastelands.”267 She writes: the heart of wastelands theory is simple. Here, we understand that there is nothing and no one beyond healing. So we return again and again to the discards, gathering scraps for our bundles, and we tend to the devastation with destabilizing gentleness, carefulness, softness. For those of us in the wastelands—for those of us who are the wastelands—caring for each other in this way is refusing a definition of worthiness that will never include us. To provide care in the wastelands is about gathering enough love to turn devastation into mourning and then, maybe, turn that mourning into hope.268 Wastelands – city Lands – are Indigenous Lands that deserve to be approached with the same love, care, and tenderness that the bush deserves. As I join these scholars and writers in their calls to see city Land as Land worth caring about and caring for, I recognize that a tension emerges through the heightened settler-colonial surveillance that occurs in cities. This surveillance harms Indigenous kin and other marginalized folks in different ways from the social histories we inherit – I think about Filipina-American writer Jenny Odell’s reflection that some bodies are read “as an invitation to violence” when they exist in public spaces and how this inhibits the ability to fully rest.269 For Indigenous peoples in particular, though, Cree-Métis-Saulteaux scholar Jas M. Morgan writes that in prairie cities, this surveillance works to “criminalize Indigenous presence in the city on behalf of white prairie families.”270 Through Morgan’s words, I understand how even the presence of Indigenous bodies threaten the colonial family structure that depends on a belief in terra nullius. While Morgan 266 Konsmo and Recollet, 243. 267 Lee, “In Defence of the Wastelands,” n.p. 268 Lee, n.p. 269 Odell, Saving Time, 100. 270 Jas M. Morgan, “This Prairie City Is Land, Too,” Briar Patch: The Land Back Issue, October 2020, n.p., https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/this-prairie-city-is-land-too. 71 theorizes this surveillance from the lens of houseless youths engaged in projects of basic survival, I also think about how settler city surveillance seeps into projects of cultural connection. The fear of settler city surveillance leaches into my attempts to come back to my responsibilities I have to more-than-human kin and their spirits. I think of the first time I tanned a deer hide and needed to return the parts I was not using to the Land. For me, hide tanning is a restful, meditative practice as it requires repetitive action and opens space for reflection. Hours of love, care, and laughter goes into sloughing off deer hair and membrane as I work to make rawhide with friends and mentors. It can be an enchanting process – watching a hide go from smelly and slimy to strong and flexible. It is mesmerizing to know that my hands that did this work hold the knowledge and memory from my Great-Grandmother Fee who used to do this work too. Here, I think of Narungga scholar Natalie Harkin’s words that “our bodies too are archives where memories, stories, and lived experiences are stored, etched and anchored in our bloodlines deep. They ground our creativity in what become personal and political acts of remembering, identity making and speaking back to the State.”271 The beauty of tapping into this intergenerational bodily archive was dampened with the reality of doing this work in the middle of Okanagan white suburbia. As we began the hide tanning process in my aunt’s backyard in Vernon (shared Secwépemc and Syilx Territory), her neighbours would walk by and gawk, and I felt a niggling sense of discomfort. When the time came to return the deer’s hair and spirit to the Land, I was afraid of inquisitive and policing settlers reprimanding me for enacting a teaching so central to the work but feels unwelcome under settler colonial surveillance. So, under the cover of 271 Natalie Harkin, “The Poetics of (Re)Mapping Archives: Memory in the Blood,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature : JASAL 14, no. 3 (2014): 4. 72 nightfall, my roommate drove far into winding Okanagan hills and parked along an empty trail as I sheepishly hauled a Rubbermaid of deer hair out of the car and sprinkled it back into the trees. In this act, I hoped that my unease would not outweigh the reverence I held for the deer that gave up their life. As I reflect on this experience, I think of Morgan’s insistence “that surveillance and violence against us is a way of continuing to remove us from the land.”272 Morgan is writing from the particular experience of being Indigenous and trans while being surveyed by white settler colonialism. The threat of surveillance and what it produces inhibits our ability to engage with city as Land. Settler surveillance requires that Métis folks, particularly queer and trans Métis folks, and other Indigenous kin, act with hyper-vigilance – we must always be aware of, and fear, the repercussions of transgressing settler expectations of appropriate public behaviour. Lee considers this reality as she narrates the way that settler surveillance impedes the ability to rest, to dream.273 As my whiteness bolsters me with unearned privileges and protections in the city, I think deeply about what responsibilities I have to enact interventions into settler colonial narratives that do not see cities as Indigenous Land. ts’élî-iskwew scholar Anita Lafferty’s words anchor these thoughts: Ask yourself: What happened on this land long ago? Whose footprints were here before mine? Where were the grandmothers and what knowledge did they share back then? What is important today that reflects their teachings? Bring forward your footprints with intention as you unpack the past, the traumas, the notions of heteropatriarchy that exist. Make new trails upon old trails. I know matriarch Dene footprints existed and still exist here, maybe relatives or maybe not. I honour those pathways as the wise paths, as the forgotten paths and now I remember them as I (re)establish my own pathways that allow me to exist here too.274 272 Morgan, “This Prairie City Is Land, Too,” n.p. 273 Lee, “In Defence of the Wastelands,” n.p. 274 Anita Lafferty, “A Poetic Inquiry Into (Re)Connecting With the Language of the Land: Walking with Dįį Ndéh,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 19, no. 2 (June 27, 2022): 58, https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.40711. 73 I hold all these intricacies of Land and relations together as I enact a practice of visiting with Land as an act of restful resistance. These days, I like to call myself a recovering city kid – not to devalue the city as Land but to renounce the ways that being a city kid is mired in colonial conceptualizations of Land and value which damage our relations with the more-than-human world. I continue to live in cities – either as an uninvited visitor to Syilx territory or on (sort of) homelands in Grande Prairie – but I work to repair my relations with Land and all the beings it cares for. Inevitably, as I work to slip back into these webs of relations, I feel all the profound ways that the Land cares for me, too. As I allow myself to be engulfed in this care, I think about how this follows a long tradition of going to Land to care for oneself.275 Engaging in this sort of care is an act of restful resistance as I prioritize relations with more-than-human beings and centre knowledge that colonial capitalism attempts to destroy. Muskoseepi Park While my childhood was certainly interspersed with moments of visiting with Land, I was introduced to this action as an explicit practice through an undergraduate class with Dr. Allison Hargreaves where we were tasked with going to speak and listen to Land as an assignment. It was through this assignment, alongside Métis scholar Janelle Marie Baker’s insistence that “being on the land together … is an act of respect and reciprocity” that I began to take seriously the responsibility I have in spending time with Land and tending to these relationships.276 At the time of completing the assignment, I was enjoying an extended stay in Grande Prairie after an 275 Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, 106. 276 Janelle Marie Baker, “Do Berries Listen? Berries as Indicators, Ancestors, and Agents in Canada’s Oil Sands Region,” Ethnos 86, no. 2 (March 15, 2021): 278, https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1765829. 74 unfortunate rise in COVID-19 cases necessitated a move to online class. So, staying with my sister in the city, I braved the bitterly cold January weather and went to visit Muskoseepi Park. As a kid growing up outside of the city, Muskoseepi Park was always a treat to go to. My parents rarely took us – we would get to go when my siblings and I could sweet talk our Grandma Clara into taking us. This place had everything I could have dreamed of as a kid – an outdoor rock-climbing wall, mini golf, a pool, a pioneer museum, an artificial pond where ducks would swim, and this fantastical playground contraption called a “spica.” Less interesting to me as a child was the expansive green space and long walking trails that followed the park’s creek (Bear Creek) through the city. My relationship to Muskoseepi Park has changed, though, as I have gotten older. This changing relationship was in part prompted by my brief stint working at the South Peace Regional Archives as a summer student during my undergraduate degree, where I had access to innumerable accounts of the ways Muskoseepi Park had been changed over the years. As with a lot of Indigenous histories stored in the archive, tracing Muskoseepi Park’s history was painful.277 Through newspaper clippings, community history books, and meetings with the Archive’s Indigenous History Committee, I learned that the Land now called Muskoseepi Park used to be home for many beings. Its once winding and free flowing creek tenderly held the spirits of those who called this place home. Over time, as settlers straightened the creek, built a recreational reservoir, and then a million-dollar park, most of these beings were forcibly removed.278 The City of Grande Prairie forced the Indigenous peoples living on this Land to 277 Harkin, “The Poetics of (Re)Mapping Archives: Memory in the Blood,” 4; Malea Powell, “Dreaming Charles Eastman: Cultural Memory, Autobiography, and Geography in Indigenous Rhetorical Histories,” in Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, ed. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 116. 278 Mary Nutting, “Explore the History of Bear Creek,” Telling Our Stories, March 2011, 8; “Muskoseepi Park,” City of Grande Prairie, November 2, 2021, n.p., https://cityofgp.com/parks-recreation/parks-trails/muskoseepi-park. 75 leave their homes as this Land was the desired spot for the colonial city park.279 For more-than-human friends, like fish, the rising levels in toxins from highway run off and construction interference made the place inhospitable.280 There is palpable grief in my relationship to this place.281 As I make space for this grief, I think of Cree scholar Billy Ray Belcourt’s statement that it is “possible that the remnants of that violence are still there, in a spectral form, blended into the ecosystem of a river already teeming with NDN history. What happened isn’t nowhere; it wasn’t disappeared. Who listened to the river? Who didn’t?”282 While Belcourt writes about a specific act of violence that occurred in a different body of water, his words remind me that Bear Creek’s water holds knowledge of all that happened here.283 Despite the ways that settlers tore through its creek bed and altered its path to make it more suitable to their needs, I witness its histories in the persistent flow and its attempts to overtake its original paths.284 When the creek floods and threatens to spill over into the Pioneer Museum and Archives, it reminds me that the creek holds agency and power despite all the settler attempts to distort it. I tend to these complicated histories and feelings when I return to Muskoseepi Park for a visit. I bring my nieces along for picnics and playdates and feel the whipping wind pinch our cheeks much like an auntie would after some time apart. Sometimes I feel uncertain whether bringing my nieces to this place to play is giving in to the colonial assertion that this is only a place for recreation. I attempt to trouble this in our visiting as I prompt myself and my nieces to greet all the beings we encounter. Hi little birdie, hi big tree, nice to see you little duck. We say 279 “Muskoseepi Park,” n.p. 280 Hutchinson Environmental Studies, “Bear Creek Water Quality Study,” 2015, iv, https://www.cityofgp.com/sites/default/files/docs/environment/studies/2015_bear_creek_water_quality_study.pdf. 281 Zoe Todd, “Refracting Colonialism in Canada: Fish Tales, Text, and Insisitent Public Grief,” in Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman, ed. Mark Jackson (London: Routledge, 2017), 133, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315686721. 282 Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto: Anansi, 2019), 31. 283 Belcourt, 31. 284 South Peace Regional Archives, “High Water in Muskoseepi,” Telling Our Stories, March 2019, 18–19. 76 hello to the people who continue to live in the park despite the City of Grande Prairie’s harmful anti-homelessness policies and practices.285 I natter on and on about the histories I know about this place as I walk with my nieces (usually I whisper these knowledges into their ear as I am a sucker and will always acquiesce to their requests to be carried). In these little disruptions, I attempt to offer an intervention into the park’s colonial narrative which defines it as a place to pass through. I think of Max Liboiron’s assertion that “relations are happening all at once” as we walk through the park visiting about all the living beings that call this place home in spite of that narrative.286 Woodhaven These days, I live and work in a different park on unceded Syilx territory that is colonially named Woodhaven. Over the course of my master’s degree, Woodhaven (its Lands, Waters, and More-than-Human beings) has cared for me in profound ways. As I am a Métis visitor to these Lands and recovering city-kid, building a relationship to this Place has been a privilege. I am reminded of Métis scholar Janice Cindy Gaudet’s reflection that there is a “complex combination of having both privilege and traditional responsibilities that comes with being Métis and living on a land that is not part of their territory.”287 As I wander around Woodhaven, chatting with the trees and bees, peppering in the few words of nsyilxcən I know, I attempt to return the care. I take seriously Syilx scholar and Knowledge Keeper Jeannette Armstrong’s words that “all my elders say that it is land that holds all knowledge of life and death and is a constant teacher. It is 285 Justine Kelsie, “How Officers Deal with Homeless Camps in Grande Prairie: Explained,” EverythingGP, November 6, 2018, n.p., https://everythinggp.com/2018/11/06/how-officers-deal-with-homeless-camps-in-grande-prairie-explained/. 286 Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, 43. 287 Gaudet, “Keeoukaywin,” 51. 77 said in Okanagan that the land constantly speaks. It is constantly communicating. Not to learn its language is to die.”288 I will never be quite sure if my slow shuffling and reflective routines is enough to reciprocate Woodhaven’s care, but I try. And in this trying, I feel our relationship deepen, strengthen, shift. There is a specific rock that I sit on near Bellevue Creek that runs behind the house. At this rock I often read, write, contemplate, and dip my toes into the water to remind myself of the feeling of this relationship. This rock, this creek, holds me as I return tear-y waters to the Land while I make space for the difficult parts of life. I am reminded of Armstrong’s poem “Grandmothers,” where she writes: I nestle and draw nourishment from voices speaking to me in early morning light glinting off water speaking to me in fragile green pushing upward groping sun and warmth.289 In so many moments, having this relationship with Woodhaven was the only thing that carried me through. The day my grandfather passed away, I paid a long visit to the creek. My grief-filled body was drawn to the creek with the reminder from Métis therapist and scholar Cathy Richardson Kinewesquao “that the antidote to stress can be found outside, in nature. The energy offered by the waters, trees, lands, forests restore mind, body and soul.”290 I watched as the slowly increasing spring freshet dipped into crevices that were usually stagnant and slow. I 288 Armstrong, “Land Speaking,” 176. 289 Armstrong, 176–77. 290 Richardson/Kinewesquao, “Burning Bright, Not Out! Therapist Well-Being in the Face of What We Face,” 41. 78 watched a little squirrel skitter across the rocks and climb the slope behind me. As I followed its movement up, I noticed the little family of deer that often hung around Woodhaven came to mourn with me. These deer, which I lovingly call my roommates and friends, certainly grew braver around me as my time at Woodhaven lengthened. They no longer fled from the yard when I came outside and would let me sit and watch them as they munched on leaves outside my big living room windows. Every time the deer visited, I reacted with a childish joy – greeting them with sheepish words and revelling in the way they meandered across the Land that bore my footsteps, too. So, on this day that I received devastating news with no family around to grieve with, the deer appearing felt spiritual. I thought of Métis scholar Zoe Todd’s insistence that “grief is shared across human/non-human boundaries.”291 While Todd writes about the collective grief we share with more-than-human kin that emerges from the violence of colonial projects, I believe that when we act with relationality and honour the agency that more-than-human kin hold, we can build relationships that recognize each other’s spiritual wellbeing. This belief reflects Métis scholar Monique D. Auger’s finding that central to wellbeing is interconnectedness and reciprocity.292 As I wept, the deer stayed – gently peering down at me. They stuck around in the yard for hours that day – an unusual act for these deer that seemed to use this yard as a place to travel through. In the evening, they were still around, poking their heads out as I said see you later when I left for my aunt’s house. Mourning is tricky work. It is difficult to stay in those heavy feelings, yet they need significant room to be worked through. As I near the sixth month mark of my grandpa’s death as I write this, I continue to be flooded with grief. I find relief and solace in the moments I retreat to 291 Todd, “Refracting Colonialism in Canada: Fish Tales, Text, and Insisitent Public Grief,” 133. 292 Monique D. Auger, “Understanding Our Past, Reclaiming Our Culture: Métis Resiliency and Connection to Land in the Face of Colonialism,” Journal of Indigenous Social Development 10, no. 1 (April 2, 2021): 19. 79 the water and Land – feeling deeply Auger’s assertion that is it “healing and grounding.”293 The comfort I find in the Land also reflects Métis poet Aron Skworchinski’s statement that “when I feel the land’s presence, the search is over. It’s like finding the missing piece. When I make that connection, it’s like we are working to sew back together the torn-up pieces of ourselves. It’s the pieces we know are a bit frayed and jagged.”294 I also think about how it is through my position as a student with an extraordinary supervisor and wonderful mentors that I was able to take time for myself to grieve. Similar to reflections from Black feminists Karla D. Scott, Layli Maparyan, and bell hooks,295 Métis scholars Anna Corrigal Flamino, Janice Cindy Gaudet, and Leah Marie Dorion emphasize that Métis women struggle to find time and space for acts of self-care.296 It is through my and my committee’s collective belief in living this project that I have been able to have so much time to dedicate to visiting with the Land. My mentors’ insistence that I rest from the relentless work of graduate school was a radical intervention into the pace of capitalistic academia that I could not have taken on my own.297 We rely on community, both human and more-than, to find ways to rest during the heavy moments. The Black Path I began missing the care that Woodhaven offered when I was visiting family back up north this summer. Feeling abashed about my lack of relationship with the Land around me, I thought about what places were around me that I could tend to. I pondered over Gaudet’s assertion that “I 293 Auger, 19. 294 Aron Skworchinski, “Love Note to the Land,” Pawaatamihk: Journal of Métis Thinkers 1, no. 1 (September 29, 2023): 2, https://doi.org/10.36939/pawaatamihk/vol1no1/art4. 295 Scott, “Black Feminist Reflections on Activism,” 129; Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 44; hooks, “Women Artists: The Creative Process,” 126. 296 Flaminio, Gaudet, and Dorion, “Métis Women Gathering,” 62. 297 Black, “Responding to Longings for Slow Scholarship,” 24. 80 needed to do the hard work—to slow down, take time, make the effort, knock on the door, sit down, listen, share, go to the land, meditate, empty myself, and be present, as my research on land-based wellness had taught me.”298 I thought first of a path just down the road from my family’s house in the town of Sexsmith. For my family and friends, this path had been named the “Black Path” – a reference to the dark asphalt that paved it and perhaps reflective of the dark, spooky, and nefarious vibes that my mother ascribed to the path. As a child, I was not allowed to visit the path. Best to stick to visible and brightly lit sidewalks rather than mingle amidst the dense trees and troublesome teenagers that laid claim to the path. Even now, as I’m an adult, my mother chastises me when she learns I’ve been to see this path. Thus, the Black Path has always been a bit of a mystery – or perhaps a stranger – to me, despite our proximity. I have managed some glimpses over the years, though. The path walks along a creek that has experienced unforgettable amounts of harm over the years. My dad says it used to flow from a swamp that is now home to a fancy subdivision. To make room for this subdivision, the water from the swamp was diverted into this creek that flows through the town. In the spring, we act surprised when it floods as the swamp attempts to take back its territory in the basements of these houses. I asked my dad if this creek has a name – he was sure there was but no maps or town plans or friends of his know it. Sometimes, I imagine that the heavy spring freshet that pours through is the creek reintroducing itself – a name I can’t quite understand, but feel, nonetheless. When I hear the creek’s water rushing, I think about how “the land speaks to you in ways words and written language cannot.”299 298 Gaudet, “Keeoukaywin,” 48. 299 Métis Centre, National Aboriginal Health Organization, “In the Words of Our Ancestors: Métis Health and Healing,” 84. 81 I used to love to ride my bike down the Black Path. It was the only place in town with hills. It was exhilarating – to sneak my bike into the path and speed through, over rolling hills and around soft bends, hoping that when I’d peak through on the other end, my mother would not be there to catch me breaking this one rule she had for me. My relationship with the Black Path was fleeting. My time spent with it was always predicated on some rule breaking, and thus required vigilance and brevity. I did not spend a lot of time noticing or visiting with the path when I was younger. So, when I came home in the summer, I was pleasantly surprised to meet more-than-human relatives I had only ever known in other places. I escaped to the Black Path often while writing my literature review. Stuck in the heaviness of reading and re-reading the beautiful and thought-provoking theory that informs the necessity of seeing Rest as Resistance, I needed time and space for contemplation, reverie – rest.300 Seeking this space, I wandered toward the Black Path thinking about Kim Anderson’s statement that “foundations of resistance” includes “a close relationship with the land.”301 Coming back here felt a bit like the awkwardness of reintroducing yourself to someone you’ve met multiple times but are not sure if they remember you. In the thick of the path, I began to meet relatives and kin I had never noticed in my childish, speedy encounters. Particularly striking were the fireweed blooms tucked away in the Black Path. I could see their bright flowers and tall stalks, but I could not reach them. I saw their distance as a reminder to keep mine. These blooms were for me to visit, to befriend, but not to harvest. I knew of these blooms because of friends who introduced me to the plant, but like Métis Elder George McDermott says, “I can introduce you to a plant and tell you what it is. It is up to you to get to 300 hooks, “Women Artists: The Creative Process,” 126. 301 Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, 95. 82 know it, to talk to it, to give it an offering.”302 Popping up in different spots among many other plants, lonely fireweed stalks waved softly in prairie winds, allowing me to become familiar with their leaves and flowers. I spent many restful moments getting to know this medicine. My budding relationship with fireweed reflected Christi Belcourt’s statement that knowing the spirit of plant medicines allow her to feel whole, healthy, and able to show up in her relationships.303 As I began forming a relationship with fireweed, I also pestered my family with what I had learned. Similar to Anita Lafferty, While I am on the Land I often think about the future generations. What footprints will follow mine? Will my grandchildren and their children feel the Land as I do? Will they hear the same stories? I seek to understand the Land as a place of knowledge and wisdom, a place where matriarchs and ancestors live among the sights and sounds of the landscapes. Like the breath in my bones, the Land is where the wisdom grows and expands.304 So, I told my family what fireweed looks like and the other places it is likely to call home – like “in open fields, pastures, and particularly burned-over lands.”305 This is typical behaviour for me – to inundate my family with newly gained knowledge whether they want it or not. Amidst their gentle teasing of my new-found obsession with fireweed were reports of their own encounters with it. What began as a simple walk to take a writing break turned into a familial reorientation to Land and life as we collectively took the time to meet and greet all the fireweed we came across. As Elder George McDermott explains, “that plant’s life is a whole new world to people not familiar. It is a different life altogether, it is a different world view.”306 When my sister and I travelled to Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) in July, it became a bit like the game punch 302 Métis Centre, National Aboriginal Health Organization, “In the Words of Our Ancestors: Métis Health and Healing,” 24. 303 Belcourt, Medicines to Help Us, 3. 304 Lafferty, “A Poetic Inquiry Into (Re)Connecting With the Language of the Land,” 55. 305 Lawrence J. Barkwell, “Métis Asparagus: Fireweed” (Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, December 16, 2013), 1, https://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/14273. 306 Métis Centre, National Aboriginal Health Organization, “In the Words of Our Ancestors: Métis Health and Healing,” 24. 83 buggy as we raced to spot and name the patches of fireweed that grew along the highway. We encountered this road that was so familiar to us in new ways as we took the time to notice the beings and medicines that called these Lands home. We began to follow the trails of fireweed that travelled through the places that I have called home. One afternoon, as I took a much-needed writing break to spend time with my nieces, I noticed a singular stalk of fireweed in their backyard. Finding this friend in my sister’s flowerbed-turned-weed garden was a joyous surprise. My sister lives in the heart of suburbia with none of the typical fireweed dwellings close by. We marvelled at this serendipitous bloom and watched as it grew and changed over the summer and I thought about how Auger explains that “Métis people remain adaptable and determined to find creative ways of connecting with the natural environment.”307 I stood in awe as fluffy fireweed seeds slowly cracked open and blew away – beginning to understand the possibility of this friend making its home alongside us; reminding me once again that colonial notions of property will never quell the propensity for all relations to find homes in ours. It remains mysterious to me the ways that seeds which scatter in the fall proceed to enliven again in the spring. Perhaps, spending months being held and protected by Land and snow gives these seeds the power to sprout and bloom. Do the seeds find reverie in this time? Do they relinquish the ever-pressing desire to grow in that time so that they can conserve energy? Do they relinquish control so they can feel deeply the wind blowing them to new homes – new relations? I will have to visit them again to spring to hear – perhaps feel – what they think about rest. As the fireweed seeds began cracking open in Grande Prairie, the Syilx Lands where I attend school were experiencing devastating forest fires. These fires asked that I postpone my 307 Auger, “Understanding Our Past, Reclaiming Our Culture,” 22. 84 typical late-August return to this territory as I somberly hoped for safety and extinguishment. This delay meant I had an unexpectantly longer stay in Treaty 8 Territory. For the first time in eight years, I got to see all the leafy trees in the place I call home turn orange and crispy. It was unexpectedly emotional – seeing these leaves change reminded me that these Lands change, too. A simple reminder lost in my self-obsessed musings on the ways I always come home feeling different. As I took the time to watch leaves fall in blustery prairie winds, I felt of moment of understanding with these trees – there is a spirit of resilience in the ways we change and shed as we bolster ourselves for resistance (to colonialism and cold weather alike). In spending time with these sunset-coloured trees after many years of missing their transition, I thought of Métis scholar Hanna Paul’s statement that “intentionally coming back to ourselves exhibits strength and groundedness.”308 Feeling this strength in my relationship with Land connects with Lafferty’s assertion that “with each inhale of knowledge, it connects me to the Land, and, as I exhale, the fear that contains a dark history is slowly withering away.”309 Through reflecting on Land and life with these trees, this path, and fireweed as my collaborators – or perhaps mentors – I felt, very deeply, the ways that resting with Land impacts our wellbeing. Walking On… These stories I share about visiting with Land reflect the way Métis communities understand the Land as nourishing for the soul.310 It is profound to recentre this relationship to Land while submerged in a centuries-long project to sunder it. It is profound to act with care towards the 308 Paul, “Sharing Métis Women’s Stories about Moon Time and Colonial Body Shame through Visiting and Berry Picking in Buttertown, Alberta,” 79. 309 Lafferty, “A Poetic Inquiry Into (Re)Connecting With the Language of the Land,” 55. 310 Métis Centre, National Aboriginal Health Organization, “In the Words of Our Ancestors: Métis Health and Healing,” 89. 85 Land and ourselves. As Plains Cree scholar Cash Ahenakew states, “our lands, bodies and minds are not empty, not terra nullius. They belong to the land (to all our relations).”311 Resting with Land is an act of resistance because it steadfastly refutes the notion that the only “good” uses of our Lands and bodies are ones that invest in colonial capitalist standards of productivity. From my understanding, though, this relationship to Land is valuable simply because it exists – it prioritizes the maintenance and care of all beings on Land. This conceptualization of relationships mirrors Jenny Odell’s notion of “manifest dismantling”312 – while in the context of my research, the weight of manifest dismantling continues to fall on an Indigenous person, perhaps it can offer a prompt for a different engagement with Land based in care for all of us invested in projects of collective liberation. As I reflect on these stories, I offer grace to the teenage version of myself who was so eager to disentangle myself from webs of relations. As I grappled with my queer identity in a colonial Catholic town with a desperation to see myself as something outside of just the youngest member of the Pierson family who didn’t seem to fit, I unknowingly damaged the relations eager to care for me. Reflecting on these moments now, I am grateful to Opaskwayak Cree scholar Alex Wilson writing on “coming in” to community as a queer person: Our encounters with racism, homophobia, and sexism may disturb our balance and we sometimes lose our place in the circle. For those of us who lose our place, our traditions, history, memories, and collective experience of this world will still guide us. Two-spirit identity is about circling back to where we belong, reclaiming, reinventing, and redefining our beginnings, our roots, our communities, our support systems, and our collective and individual selves.313 311 “Decolonizing Mental Health,” n.p., https://alumni.ubc.ca/event/decolonizing-mental-health/. 312 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 188–92. 313 “N’tacimowin Inna Nah’: Our Coming In Stories,” Canadian Woman Studies 26, no. 3/4 (Winter/Spring 2008): 198. 86 Alex Wilson’s concept of “coming in” helps me work through the ways that I found comfort and confidence in myself and my family when I came back into these relations as a queer person. While coming back into these relations was not always easy, I continue to find comfort in the ways my family reaches out and reaffirms these relations – like in the pictures of trees my dad sends to me while I am away in Kelowna. This digital version of visiting with Land reminds me of the networks of care and responsibility I am firmly planted in even while I am away on other territories. Coming back to these relations reminds me of my friend Kendra Langrish’s (former Kelowna Métis Association Youth Representative) suggestion that when we come together around the fire, we engage in a contemplative rest with Land and community.314 She tells me that when we sit around the fire together and listen to stories and songs, we rest together while learning about the responsibilities we have to one another, more-than-human relatives, the Land, and the intersections of these beings.315 As I look toward writing the next chapter on art as rest, I think about Métis Elder Rose Richardson’s reminder that these stories which are told through Land are held in our Métis artwork.316 These methods of rest are linked together through relationality – between Land, community, and art. 314 Denica Bleau, Personal Communication, December 8, 2023. 315 Bleau. 316 Belcourt, Medicines to Help Us, 10. 87 Chapter Three: Artful Repose Grounding my thesis in an expansive understanding of rest that includes many creative expressions which open up space for deep contemplation and reverie, I find inspiration from the many ways Métis artists have always understood their art practices as a space for connection and reflection. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Land and art have always been intertwined in Métis culture.317 Métis Elder Rose Richardson prompts us to remember that our art holds our stories which emerge through the Land.318 As restful methodologies, then, creating art and visiting with Land are strategies that work together to connect us to knowledge and community. Beading, for example, is a practice that is distinct for each Indigenous nation and these distinctions emerge from the influences of the Land around them.319 Métis people have long been known as the “flower beadwork people,” reflecting the significance of flower motifs and connection to Land in Métis beadwork.320 Cree poet Emily Riddle explains that remaining connected to Land as an urban Indigenous person came through creating art inspired by the Land around her.321 These experiences allowed her to understand that “to make beautiful things, and mistakes, and to experiment are core components of being nêhiyaw as i [sic] understand it.”322 Métis artist Christi Belcourt notes that she finds inspiration in the Land’s ability to counteract the weariness of human conflict.323 317 Belcourt, 10. 318 Belcourt, 10. 319 Jeffrey Ansloos et al., “Beading Native Twitter: Indigenous Arts-Based Approaches to Healing and Resurgence,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 79 (July 2022): 2, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2022.101914. 320 Jodi Beniuk, “All My Relations: Reclaiming the Stories of Our Indigenous Grandmothers,” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice 37, no. 2 (2) (October 28, 2016): 167; Christi Belcourt, “Resilience of the Flower Beadwork People,” New Breed Magazine, February 2001. 321 Riddle, The Big Melt, 56. 322 Riddle, 56. 323 Christi Belcourt, “Purpose in Art, Métis Identity, and Moving Beyond the Self,” Native Studies Review 17, no. 2 (December 2008): 148. 88 In this chapter, I focus on the cultural art practices of beading and hide tanning to understand how Métis communities have turned towards art as a means of connection, belonging, and wellbeing. This approach is decidedly different than capitalist colonial approaches to art that prioritize output and commercialization. This understanding of art also persists in the face of ongoing appropriation and commercialization of stolen Indigenous art. Discussing this problem of appropriation and theft, Dene, Métis, Cree artist Carol Madge explains that “Indigenous artwork is not just a reflection of an artist’s vision but also generations of relationships to the gifts the earth has given us.”324 Also in this chapter, I reflect on how art provides an alternative tempo to engage with the world than the relentless pace of news and media. While many practices of art provide essential interventions to capitalist colonial expectations of productivity while reconnecting us to cultural knowledges and communities, beading and hide tanning are the practices I have connected with most significantly. In this chapter, I meditate on the ways my connections to these art forms have supported my rest and wellbeing throughout the process of completing my master’s degree. I also want to make clear that these are art forms, not crafts. As Métis artist and scholar Presley Mills and Penetanguishene Halfbreed artist and scholar Justine Woods explain, Indigenous women and queer folks “have been taught by society to question our beadwork’s value and authenticity as an art practice.”325 As I name these practices as methods for restful resistance, I want to acknowledge the significant emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental labour they require. Indeed, I know the intense physical labour that hide tanning especially requires. I see this art as restful resistance because in their creation and completion, beading and hide tanning open space for reflection, reverie, and 324 Coral Madge, “Appreciation or Appropriation?,” RAM Blog (blog), June 23, 2023, n.p., https://royalalbertamuseum.ca/blog/appreciation-or-appropriation. 325 Mills and Woods, “Beading Is Medicine,” 133. 89 connection. As Carol Madge writes, “with every stitch and brush stroke, Indigenous artists infuse their work with spirit and use this cultural artistry as an act of peaceful protest for all that is against us as Indigenous people.”326 These forms of art also demand a slow and thoughtful approach - as autistic and two-spirit Métis beading artist Claire Johnston reminds, art (beadwork in their case) is necessarily slow and cannot be rushed.327 Positioning art as a means of connection and wellbeing may echo Western understandings and traditions of art therapy that make space for creative expressions to work through trauma.328 I am reminded by my friend and Métis PhD student Denica Bleau, though, that Indigenous communities have long understood the therapeutic function of art and centre this notion when teaching and practicing our different art forms – like beading and hide tanning.329 As art therapist and member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria Michelle Napoli points out, Western understandings of art therapy suggest “that an art product expresses metaphorical meaning, [while] many [Indigenous] artists have spoken about the way art offers a direct relationship with their spiritual connections, not a metaphorical one.”330 Métis scholar Kim Anderson also contends that “whether at the individual level or the national level, creative expression is essential for the recovery of our identity.”331 As the stories I share in this chapter illuminate, the literal and spiritual healing that creating and engaging in art offers provides a method to reckon with the world around us. 326 Madge, “Appreciation or Appropriation?,” n.p. 327 Monique Mitchelson and Michelle Livock, “Decolonising Neurodivergence with Claire Johnston,” The Neurodivergent Woman, accessed January 2, 2024, https://omny.fm/shows/the-neurodivergent-woman/decolonising-neurodivergence-with-claire-johnston. 328 Linda Archibald et al., “Dancing, Singing, Painting, and Speaking the Healing Story: Healing through Creative Arts” (Ottawa, Ontario: The Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2012), 11–12, https://www.ahf.ca/files/healing-through-creative-arts.pdf. 329 Bleau, Personal Communication. 330 Michelle Napoli, “Ethical Contemporary Art Therapy: Honoring an American Indian Perspective,” Art Therapy 36, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 177, https://doi.org/10.1080/07421656.2019.1648916. 331 Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, 122. 90 Beading Moccasins When I was a young kid, I used to relentlessly lament my lack of creative and artistic ability. Stuck in the trap of colonial capitalistic comparisons, I saw all of the ways my sister was certainly an artist and felt like I could never measure up. I resigned myself to the knowledge that I could be other things, but never creative. In the ninth grade, during my school’s monthly award assemblies, my teacher gave me the award for creativity. With the narrative I had constructed about my lack of artistic skill, corroborated by my friends, I was certain my teacher was playing a cruel trick on me. As I walked up to claim this “award,” I felt a deep shame bloom in my chest that would stop me from being creative for many years. My shame around creative expression reflects the stories many Indigenous women shared with Métis scholar Kim Anderson about how they were also shamed out of creative expression.332 Anderson continues that “resistance comes when they begin to do it anyway, and for many this is the beginning of a journey of discovery about their Native womanhood.”333 As a young adult, I began dipping my toes into different crafty things to attempt to relieve myself from the heaviness of life. But, as the scattered remnants of half-finished projects that continue to clutter up my parents’ house will prove, I was never very good at completing things. These projects were filled to the brim with frustration. As I tried to learn new embroidery stitches, how to purl, how to get fabric paint not to warp, as I cried over yet another broken needle on my sewing machine, I struggled to feel the ways art could open space for contemplation. The fateful time I stabbed myself with a felting needle secured the knowledge, once again, that perhaps I am not cut out for creativity. As Korean writer Juhee Kwan’s 332 Anderson, 120. 333 Anderson, 120. 91 experiences of trying out new forms of art and craft illuminate, being focused on the way the final product will measure up against others distorts the enjoyment of the process.334 When my parents purchased me a beading kit to make an octopus bag as a means to return to cultural knowledge, I thought I could try again. Equipped with this beading kit and a YouTube video from the Métis organization Meeting My Ancestors, I began to try. In these early days of my beading, it was an individual endeavour. Just me and the sound of the same ten seconds of the YouTube video repeating for hours as I learned how to make a five-petal flower. My parents might poke their heads into my space to check on my work, but I was mostly alone in this learning process. I had assumed that some ancestor-spirit might join me and perfect all my stitches – that maybe blood memory335 would come through my hands and all my lines would be smooth and even. While ancestor-spirit-blood-memory was certainly with me, holding me as I tried, they were there to keep me humble. Perhaps remind me that art takes time – that these things cannot be rushed. My lines were wobbly, some stitches were loose, and the amount of knots in my thread was absurd. Despite this, when I held up my five-petal flower’s outline to my parents, they cooed at it the same way they did when I would bring home my wonky elementary school art projects – with love and admiration for the ways that I try. In that moment, a quiet knowledge passed between us. A reminder of things that can’t quite be said out loud, but follow us, nonetheless. This moment did not stop the octopus bag from being relegated to my bin of unfinished projects, though. I would pull it out every now and then to work on in between schoolwork, but it remains unfinished even now. Having these basic skills, alongside Métis artist and scholar Sherry Farrell Racette’s reminder that new beaders “should never feel embarrassed by a lack of 334 Kwan, “We Are Not Machines,” n.p. 335 Harkin, “The Poetics of (Re)Mapping Archives: Memory in the Blood,” 4. 92 skill or knowledge,”336 gave me the confidence to attend beading circles for the first time. Beading in community is an entirely different experience. Even though these first few times I did not know anyone around the circle with me, the energy that passed around a circle can be so profound. In showing up to this space for each other, it is like we are saying “I will hold you and what you bring to the circle.” This never needs to be said, but it is always understood. Mills and Woods reflect this sentiment in their statement that “the unique kinship held within the beadwork community is grounded in mutual respect and relationality fostered through a shared restorative practice such as beadwork.”337 There is a collective act of resistance that emerges in beading circles as we build a powerful energy through our dedication to sharing knowledge and spirit – even if the circle may only last a few hours. Anishinaabe scholar Lana Ray explains that although beading is thought of as an individual pursuit, with credit being attributed to the beader, it is a communal process. Through beading that incorporates the beader’s experience within community and culture, beautiful and innovative pieces of beadwork are constructed that tell the story of the beader in relation to his or her community and culture, enacting a collective framework of interpretation.338 Beading circles become an act of restful resistance because it recentres our relationships to each other and knowledge. As Jeffrey Ansloos (Cree), Ashley Caranto Morford (diasporic Filipina-British settler), Nicole Santos Dunn (Land relations unspecified), Lindsay DuPré (Métis), and Riley Kucheran (Anishnaabe) illuminate, “beading offers a well-rounded nourishing and flourishing of Indigenous knowledges, ways of being, traditions, and hence, sovereignty and life.”339 In these spaces, beading is not always about what is being materially produced. Claire Johnston reflects that beading circles provide important spaces for communities (like Indigenous 336 Sherry Farrell Racette, “Kitchen Tables and Beads: Space and Gesture in Contemplative and Creative Research,” in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada (Routledge, 2022), 88. 337 Mills and Woods, “Beading Is Medicine,” 132. 338 Lana Ray, “‘Beading Becomes a Part of Your Life’: Transforming the Academy Through the Use of Beading as a Method of Inquiry,” International Review of Qualitative Research 9, no. 3 (November 2016): 371, https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2016.9.3.363. 339 Ansloos et al., “Beading Native Twitter,” 7. 93 neurodivergent communities) to gather and build communities as the focus is not performing social norms but on co-creating art.340 Beading extends spaces for connection to community and culture. The reality of this could not have become more clearer than when I was completing the coursework requirements for my master’s degree. My MA coursework was a spirit-shattering experience. At times, the only thing that pulled me through was the knowledge that every other Tuesday from February-April I would join a crew of fellow Indigenous youth to engage in cultural projects for Dr. Gabrielle Legault’s research project. Even though I certainly felt sheepish and shy at the beginning, this group quickly became some of my dearest friends. The project we were tasked with was creating a pair of moccasins – an ambitious project. As I ruminated on who my first pair of moccasins would be for, I thought of my Métis grandma, Clara. Now, my Grandma Clara is a self-described grouchy old woman who has very complicated feelings about my dedication to learning Métis culture and knowledge. It was a risky choice to make these for her, but my heart was compelled. Working on these moccasins was always a welcome reprieve from the difficult parts of my days. Like many Métis artists, I sought out beading as a coping mechanism.341 As Racette explains, there is a powerful healing in “the small precise stitches, the rhythm of stitching, the power of repetitive gesture, the meditative and devotional aspects of the stitch – and the impact that thousands of small actions required to make a single piece might have on the maker.”342 Beading the top portion of moccasins, called vamps, became meditative as my skills improved and I was able to use this time for contemplation. The beads cared for me as we stitched each 340 Mitchelson and Livock, “Decolonising Neurodivergence with Claire Johnston,” 54:20. 341 Racette, “Kitchen Tables and Beads,” 90; Ansloos et al., “Beading Native Twitter,” 4; Mitchelson and Livock, “Decolonising Neurodivergence with Claire Johnston,” 56:55; Mills and Woods, “Beading Is Medicine,” 121. 342 Racette, “Kitchen Tables and Beads,” 89. 94 beaded blueberry into existence. The way these vamps cared for me was so profound that I decided to work on them during my classes to cope. Having resigned myself to the realization that the only thing I was getting out of my classes was an expensive therapy bill, I no longer cared about how bringing beadwork into the class might “appear.” So, each day, instead of pulling out my notebook and pen, I pulled out my needle and thread. I was hesitant to pull out my beading in class, as I know, like Mills and Wood explain, that “beads take in our energy and, with each stitch, become embedded with our intentions.”343 Yet, I needed to survive these classes, and with the knowledge that beading calms our nervous systems,344 I hoped that the beads could help me. My grandma and I have never really been able to talk about our feelings or the ways that anti-Indigenous racism has harmed us. These parts of ourselves stay silent, only glimpsed in moments we trespass345 into each other’s thoughts through gifts and photos, and maybe a story that never intended to reveal something, but did, nonetheless. So, beading these moccasins while I was experiencing the university’s cruelty became a way for me to ask my grandma to hold my feelings with me in a way I could never ask in words. It is as Farrell Racette explains: An invisible strand sometimes comes from the beader to lie alongside the thread, and each stitch can be a transformational action. The gesture of stitching – the tiny, precise movements created by the piercing needle that secures a strand of beads to a surface – can tether emotion and be a gesture of claiming or one of letting go.346 343 Mills and Woods, “Beading Is Medicine,” 121. 344 Mitchelson and Livock, “Decolonising Neurodivergence with Claire Johnston,” 56:55. 345 Michael V. Smith, My Body Is Yours: A Memoir (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015), 170. In Michael V Smith’s book, he talks about how he felt like he was trespassing into his father’s life when he was in the hospital and Smith was tasked with collecting his father’s belongings. It was not a space he was ever invited into, and it revealed much about his father that he did not know. This concept has stuck with me since I first read his book in 2019 as it describes the way I often learn things about my family. It never seems to come directly from the family member themselves, but through context slowly pieced together through connecting photos, stories, gifts, little remarks. It feels like trespassing as what I encounter was not necessarily meant to be shared with me. 346 Racette, “Kitchen Tables and Beads,” 90. 95 I hoped that if she ever slipped her feet into the fuzzy lining, she would know what I was asking, what I was telling her. I hoped that with the moccasins on, she would understand what I felt and offer a hand back to carry these feelings together. It is sad, in a way, that I could not fill these moccasins with positive energies for her. I was not making them in the good moments – I was making them in miserable moments. But making them in this place allowed me to know, to feel, to understand that my grandma had once been a young girl with these feelings too. Making these moccasins became a way to say all these things we will never be able to say to each other. I kept this moccasin making a secret from my grandma – I wanted to surprise her. About halfway through the moccasin making process, I visited home and visited her. My grandma always tasks me with the most bonkers favours when I am home. She has me crawling on top of cupboards to dust, attaching fake greenery to deck posts, sorting through expired food that she will not let me throw away. She knows I will do these things with little grumbling and teasing. And I know that if I do these things well enough for her, she might repay me with a story about her life, her family (and maybe a bit of cash if she is feeling extra friendly that day). On this warm spring day that I came to visit, she presented me with an eleven-foot patio rug, an Exacto knife, and the instructions that she would like me to cut this rug so it will fit on the patch of lawn by her front door. I still do not quite understand why she wanted it, but I did it (with gentle teasing and then her remark that I am beginning to sound too much like my dad). As a thank you for the excellent execution of the lawn rug, she presented me with perhaps the greatest gift I could have wished for: her mother’s sewing kit with her leather awl and homemade sinew inside. I nearly cried. It was such a serendipitous ancestor-spirit moment as my grandma gave me gifts from my Great-Grandma Fee that I could use to finish her moccasins. 96 My grandma has this face that she makes when she’s not quite sure what to say. There is a little shrug and eyebrow raise as she looks at you, her mouth pulling between a frown and a gentle smile. When I handed her the finished moccasins alongside my rambling explanation of what I had made, I got one of those plus a quiet “thank you dear.” This was promptly followed by her inspecting the stitches on the heel and the admonishment that “it doesn’t look like how my mom used to do it.” I put away any feelings of frustration about her critique so I could take it as an avenue to hear more about my great-grandmother. That is what is special to me about art. It is never really about the finished product, but about the connections we build through the process. As Mills and Woods emphasize, “beading holds culture, beading holds stories, and beading carves out spaces of community care (italics in original).”347 In this process, I made lifelong friends, I survived graduate school, I learned more about my Great-Grandma Fee. In between stitches that gave me the opportunity to take a breather and work through the heaviness of my days, I cozied into webs of relational knowledge that will care for me long after I finished the moccasins. Hide Tanning Hide tanning holds a very tender part of my heart. In fact, the moment I started writing this section, I could feel waves of emotion begin to wash over me. These waves brought memories that wanted to lead me down different paths. It was difficult to distill what I want to tell you about the way that hide tanning is an artistic practice that brings about restful resistance as I was pulled into all of the memories that make this assertion true for me. My relationship to hide tanning illuminates the many relationships and stories that my being and identity emerges 347 Mills and Woods, “Beading Is Medicine,” 127. 97 through.348 In all these storied relationships, hide tanning takes shape as an art form that in its creation process and completion channel restful resistance. Over and over again, hides connect me to relationships and knowledge that colonial capitalism attempts to destroy. Over and over again, hides open up space for me to think deeply about my place in the webs of relations that form our communities, our selves. As I explore in this section, every part of the hide tanning process reminds me that I am connected to long and ongoing lineages of relations that care for me, my communities, these Lands. It is through accessing this contemplative space through understanding hides as art that I am able to care for the most tender parts of my heart. As Sherry Farrell Racette points out, hide tanning “was not only important in terms of survival and economic pursuits, it was one of several strategies that women employed to maintain balance with the natural world.”349 The first time I remember the experience of feeling hide was at a summer festival in Grande Prairie as a young child.350 Standing at the edge of a table brimming with beaded treasures, my little eyes spotted a medicine pouch with pink and purple beads decorating the surface. The soft suede kissed my little fingers as I delicately touched it. When my mom purchased it for me (perhaps after a little pleading), it joined all of my special trinkets that would move from my dresser to keepsake chest over the years. When I was feeling sad as a child, I used to pull out my keepsake chest and feel the memories of everything inside. When I would get to this medicine pouch, I would once again rub my little fingers against the suede and feel each 348 Wilson, Research Is Ceremony. 349 Sherry Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories and Unbroken Threads: Museum Artifacts as Women’s History and Cultural Legacy,” in Restoring the Balance, ed. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Madeleine Dion Stout, and Eric Guimond (University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 286, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780887553615-017. 350Dani Pierson, “Archive of Relatives: Curating a Bodily Archive through Indigenous Understandings of Objects,” That’s What [We] Said 4, no. 1 (March 14, 2022), https://ojs-o.library.ubc.ca/index.php/thatswhatwesaid/article/view/484. 98 fibre gently move, while thinking of warm summer days and people who love me. I would tuck it away to comfort me another time – good medicine indeed. Cree-Métis librarian Jessie Loyer reminds that principles of Wahkotowin also extend into these pieces of art which hold the spirits of the beings they are made of, the people who made them, and the people who cared for them.351 Similar to how Claire Johnston names old pieces of beadwork “grandmothers,”352 this little medicine pouch was a relative that cared for my spirit. I am not sure of my dad’s first memory of hide, but I do know that whenever hide is brought out, he brings it up to his nose for a big whiff. The intensely smoky smell brings him back to his grandparents’ house. Something about the softness of the hide softens him up too, and he’ll gift us with another little story about Grandma Fee and Grandpa Angus. When my parents gifted me my first real pair of moccasins made in Fort Nelson a few years ago, my dad held them so close to his face, breathing deeply. As he exhaled, he shared his love for the backroom of his grandparents’ house that stored hides. This was perhaps the best part of learning hide tanning – many moments emerged for my dad to tell me about his family, his life, his memories. While I know, and my dad’s gentle teasing reminds me, that my hides do not quite measure up to my Great-Grandma Fee’s, in trying I feel the way I fall into webs of relations that carry knowledge and story. My dad did not believe me when I said that I was going to take up hide tanning. In the early stages of the “recovering” part of recovering city kid, he doubted my dedication to a task that is so messy, smelly, difficult. He laughed, feeling vindicated, at my first 351 Jessie Loyer, “Collections Are Our Relatives Disrupting the Singular, White Man’s Joy That Shaped Collections,” in The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship, ed. Megan Browndorf, Erin Pappas, and Anna Arays (Library Juice Press, 2021), 10–12, https://mru.arcabc.ca/islandora/object/mru:793. 352 Claire Johnston (@clairejohnston__), “Spotted This Incredible Grandmother While Stopping in at @vantagevintagebtq Today.,” October 7, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/clairejohnston__/. 99 reports on the absolutely foul smell of a bucking hide. As the process went on, my dad’s stories and relentless teasing were merely the first layer of the palimpsest that was my first hide. I embarked on this hide tanning journey with my dear friend Lacy when we were in the thick of the pandemic and desperate for more community connection. I must say, attempting to learn how to tan hides via Zoom must be one of the most challenging forms of online education. So much of hide tanning is about feel, so attempting to speak it into words is mystifying. A lot of metaphors that do not quite make sense until you stick your hand into a bucket of hot water, vinegar, and deer hide and feel it plump and strengthen while its pink-tinged skin turns a milky white. As Lacy and I deciphered the process, we put many hours of love and laughter into our hides. As we got the hang of all the soaking and scraping, we found moments to tell each other stories – about our grandmas, our hopeful research, our place in the world. As we scraped away layers of membrane, we uncovered a meditative practice that connected us to each other, and knowledge long stored in our bodies. As Nakota/Cree/Saulteaux artist and storyteller Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway expresses in their teachings of buffalo hide tanning, it is a meditative process that connects us to ancestors through physical and spiritual memories.353 She states, “this work activates something inside of me, you know, to re-remember who I am … and reawakening muscles but also reawakening what is inside of my heart and my head. Re-remembering that our grandmas, grandpas, and ancestors could do this work no problem.”354 Somewhere in the process, my hide got a little weird. As my mentors were all on Zoom, it was difficult to explain what was happening. It didn’t quite look like Lacy’s, it was quite thin and had some gnarly knife marks. Despite the strangeness, I successfully made rawhide with only a few holes. The real trouble began when I began turning it into a smoke-tanned hide. I had 353 Part 4 - Scraping a Buffalo Hide, YouTube, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZzY3E4xx8&t=1503s. 354 Part 4 - Scraping a Buffalo Hide, 24:30-25:01. 100 originally offered to smoke-tan this hide as my portion of a creative project I completed in Shawn Wilson’s graduate Indigenous Research Methodologies class with my beloved friends-peers-mentors Lindsay DuPré and Denica Bleau. We were creating a physical manifestation of our ideas about Métis methodologies, and I so desperately wanted to offer this hide to them as the base of our ideas. As I was attempting to remove the grain off the hide, though, the centre began to shred. I was distraught. I was worried that this holey hide would become a metaphor for my attempts at relationship building with these new friends. I was worried that my inability to make an un-holey hide was also a metaphor for the ever-growing insecurities I had about my place in academia. I felt all the insecurities my younger self held about my artistic abilities welling up and threatening to spill over. Perhaps the hide felt all that I was projecting at it and needed a way to shake off some of this weight. Perhaps it felt the rushed way I approached the hide as I attempted to complete it for the project and needed a way to remind me to slow down. Perhaps I am just bad at hide-tanning. I took a deep breath, put the hide in the emulsified fat mixture and spent the evening watching curling with my aunt, using the commercial breaks as a prompt to go massage the hide. Perhaps that is the metaphor here. In the intention to slow down, I reoriented the practice towards contemplation and care – spending more thoughtful time with both the hide and my aunt. I am both sheepish and proud of the wonky little hide I made for that project. I cut out the best piece of hide for us to continue building-sharing-layering our knowledge – one that had no holes or crispy edges, one that was the thickest part of this strangely thin hide. I brought the other little pieces of hide that were pretty alright home to my family. We sat around the table and took in the intense smell of fresh hide. We shared stories, little memories, of other times we have been comforted by this smell. We laughed at the stories of my trials and tribulations of hide tanning. I 101 used to get really embarrassed when I would smell like campfire smoke. No matter what I did, it would stick in my hair for so long. A few days after I finished smoke-tanning this hide, I flew home to Grande Prairie. I felt so insecure about how strong the smell of smoke would be for all the strangers around me on the plane. But when I landed and my dad was there waiting for me, he took a big whiff of my hair while hugging me and all I could feel was love. The Final Stitches… Writing this chapter has been particularly challenging. I was scribbling notes in between time spent engaging in activism in solidarity with Palestine. The trivial nature of thesis writing never felt clearer than now as the world is quite literally watching the desecration of Palestinian people. It feels self-centred and of little importance to continue to worry about the length of a chapter when the Israeli state is committing genocide against Palestinian people. In this genocide, I hear and see the linkages to the historical and ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples here on Turtle Island. I hear and see the necessity and calls for Indigenous solidarity with Palestine. I also hear Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (Anishinaabe) reminder that “the Palestinian struggle for liberation is different from the Indigenous struggle for liberation. The two struggles are intimately related and connected to each other and to Black struggles for freedom and liberation. Different and related.”355 I hear Willie Littlechild’s (Cree) assertion that “when there’s dispossession of life, dispossession of language, dispossession of territory contrary to our international treaties, then we must say something.”356 I hear Megan Scribe’s (Cree) demand that “for our struggle in the Canadian context to have any integrity at all, we must call out the 355 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “A Blow To the Snake Here,” The Red Nation (blog), December 1, 2023, n.p., https://therednation.org/a-blow-to-the-snake-here/. 356 Jeremy Appel, “Assembly of First Nations Backs Permanent Gaza Ceasefire,” The Orchard (blog), January 12, 2023, n.p., https://www.readtheorchard.org/p/assembly-of-first-nations-delegates-cbf. 102 dynamics of settler colonialism in contexts elsewhere.”357 I hear these words, and others, as prompts to think and rethink about how I use my voice, my writing, my theorizations of restful resistance. As Métis provincial organizations in Canada are attempting to recolonize Indigenous Lands to gain access to self-government agreements (and the economic benefits tied to pipeline agreements) through Bill C-53 while ignoring our Indigenous relatives’ and neighbours’ calls to stand down,358 I think about how my resistance to Bill C-53 is intimately connected to my proud and vocal support for a liberated Palestine. Every day, as I read and reread the horrors of the world – of what the Israeli state is doing to Palestinians, of what the Canadian state is doing to Indigenous peoples, of what Métis people are doing to our Indigenous kin, I felt distraught. I did not, do not, want to live in a world where brutal and devastating violence is normalized. Every day, I had to remind myself that retreating from the reality of this world does not make it end. Every day, I chose to loudly voice my dissent. When I got tired, felt fragile, felt disappointed by the continued obfuscation of Canadian complicity in genocide here and in Palestine, I struggled with the choice of how I wanted to show up. Writing and creating feel like the least important things when in the middle of crisis. It felt, feels, selfish to care about rest, or art, when there are petitions to be signed and shared, letters to write, emails to send, books to read, conversations to have. But I also had to remind myself of the power that emerges through artistic displays of solidarity. I had to hear Christi Belcourt’s assertion that Métis artist’s work is done partly as a means of reclaiming of one’s own personal history and an expression of the individual identity of each artist. But looking at it collectively, it 357 Megan Scribe, “Settler Moves to Indigeneity: From Canada to Israel,” Yellowhead Institute, November 14, 2023, n.p., https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2023/11/14/settler-moves-to-indigeneity-canada-israel/. 358 Celeste Pedri-Spade et al., “A Call to Reconsider the Métis Self-Government Agreement in Ontario,” Yellowhead Institute, June 16, 2023, https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2023/06/16/call-to-reconsider-mno-self-government/. 103 would seem to me that it all adds up to a reclaiming of our collective history. Métis artists are calling for past wrongs to be made right. Métis artists are calling for the settling of outstanding claims. Métis artists are calling for justice. We are saying, “Don’t ask us to forget the past when we have so much unfinished business.” And Métis artists are also defining and proclaiming what it means to be Métis in the twentieth- first century.359 I reminded myself that restful resistance, in my conceptualization of it, is not a retreat from the world. Restful resistance is a tool meant to give the space for powerful contemplation that allows us to see ourselves as already entangled with the world around us. It connects us to knowledge and community that colonial capitalism obscures in its nonstop quest for optimal productivity and extraction. I think of my dear friend Erin Delf’s (settler) reminder that “when I try to place myself in the context of these “big issues,” they seem so big, but when I realized I’m already there and part of them, I understand that I’m part of these issues no matter what.”360 So, I went to beading circles and hosted a hide tanning weekend to connect with community and continue conversations about Palestinian solidarity. I ruminated on Mills’s and Woods’s statement that “beadwork is as much action as it is aesthetic. It re-centers Indigenous futures and knowledge and creates decolonial space through practice.”361 I encouraged my friends to sign petitions, send letters, show up to protests. As we stitched together beads and scraped away layers of membrane, we uncovered the ways we are implicated in these crises and found strategies to voice our dissent. I felt Métis artist Christi Belcourt’s assertion that she “paints to speak out again injustice and to inspire positive change.”362 In these gathering spaces, it became clear to me that artistic practices and processes not only allow us to reclaim parts of 359 Belcourt, “Purpose in Art, Métis Identity, and Moving Beyond the Self,” 146. 360 Erin Delfs, “‘These Things Are Done Together,’” The FEELed Lab (blog), October 2, 2023, https://thefeeledlab.ca/2023/10/02/these-things-are-done-together/. 361 Mills and Woods, “Beading Is Medicine,” 131. 362 Belcourt, “Purpose in Art, Métis Identity, and Moving Beyond the Self,” 148. 104 our knowledge and culture that the settler state attempted to destroy, but it also offers a place to work through how we show up for our communities, locally and globally. 105 Conclusion: Dreaming Forward There is something deeply ironic about researching rest for a master’s thesis. The University as a colonial, capitalist institution places unattainable and draining productivity expectations on students, staff, and faculty within it. The pressures to perform productivity coax people to take on responsibilities outside of their capacities. As Métis scholar Laura Forsythe writes, “Métis scholars can be pulled in numerous directions, making every matter appear urgent.”363 Alongside these unrealistic productivity standards are the exhausting impacts of discrimination and microaggressions so entrenched in the experience of being more than/other than a cis white man in the university, which compound the weariness of this work. Being submerged in this sort of toxic productivity culture where an inability to reach the university’s expectations is deemed as a personal failure did something strange to my psyche. As Black womanist Tricia Hersey points out, when we are in academia, “we internalize the toxic messages received from the culture and begin to hate ourselves unless we are accomplishing a task. We seek external validation from a violent system void of love.”364 My coursework left me shattered and I was fearful of the way it felt like thesis writing would consist of me slowly sweeping up my broken pieces to cobble together a jagged and uneven final product. I struggled to find a shred of my soul able to breathe life and love into this project. A few days after I finished my coursework, I had an extremely vivid dream of visiting with a few Ancestor-Aunties at an unfamiliar kitchen table. As my consciousness floated in and out, I could feel the ways these Aunties were measuring me up. One Auntie looked deep into my eyes and sternly instructed, “you need to start working for your community.” Sheepishly, I 363 Laura Forsythe, “Walking with the Grandmothers and Aunties Wisdom,” Pawaatamihk: Journal of Métis Thinkers 1, no. 1 (September 29, 2023): 122, https://doi.org/10.36939/pawaatamihk/vol1no1/art15. 364 Hersey, Rest Is Resistance, 117. 106 replied, “I am trying.” She gave me a look only an Auntie meaning business could execute. She saw through the thin veil covering up the insecurities I had, still have, about what I spent many years working towards. She knew, I knew, that academia had sucked up a lot of my spirit and left me with little to offer to others. She knew, I knew, that I carry a heavy guilt with me for all the times I chose school over the people I love most. She knew, I knew, that I needed to pivot and find something in this work that was for community – not for the university, not for myself. As the Aunties and I sat in this knowledge, I watched as a tornado came rushing towards us. In the moment I prepared for the tornado to whip me up into its violent path, I woke up. It is not lost on me that this message came to me through rest. In sleep, in dreaming, the insecurities weighing heaviest on me during the day found a place to be inspected, to be held, to be used as a catalyst for action. Dreaming is understood in many Indigenous cultures, including Métis, as an important source of guidance and knowledge.365 Like Muskego Inninuwuk scholar Gladys Rowe, I know that I must work “to understand and make meaning from the knowledges gifted to me in my dreams.”366 I have held this dream close to me as I worked on my thesis. This Auntie-admonishment asked that I reflect on my work over and over to think deeply about its purpose and my practice. Was my rest selfish? What was I neglecting to engage in this work? Was I offering space for others to rest? Was I showing up for community in ways that aligned with my beliefs? I have an ongoing and cynical hypothesis that the university intentionally fosters burnout in its students, staff, and faculty through inane and meaningless bureaucratic 365 Jennifer Adese, “Spirit Gifting: Ecological Knowing in Métis Life Narratives,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (November 25, 2014): 55; Chantal Fiola, “Naawenangweyaabeg Coming In: Intersections of Indigenous Sexuality and Spirituality,” in In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms, ed. Sarah A. Nickel and Amanda Fehr (Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 2020), 141; G. Rowe, “Implementing Indigenous Ways of Knowing into Research: Insights into the Critical Role of Dreams as Catalysts for Knowledge Development,” December 2014, 2, http://hdl.handle.net/10125/34475. 366 Rowe, “Implementing Indigenous Ways of Knowing into Research,” 5. 107 drivel to stifle the meaningful and life-affirming activism that an environment full of passionate and perceptive people dedicated to working through complex questions is capable of. This hypothesis of mine echoes Black feminist Audre Lorde’s assertions that universities are “actually geared to either destroying these young people, or altering their substance into effigies that will be pliant, acceptable, and non-problematic to the system.”367 When I felt like I was becoming pliant or acceptable to the system, I thought of Ancestor-Auntie’s words and sought out ways to show up for community. As I near the end of my thesis writing, I think about how this guidance from Ancestor-Auntie helped shape my thesis. My central goal for this research was to offer my words as a gift to my Métis and Indigenous relatives, peers, friends, and mentors who work endlessly for our collective liberation and, therefore, need rest. I hoped that somewhere in my stories and theoretical writing I could illuminate a path to centring rest together, so that we all may experience the radical care of rest, together. Beginning my thesis writing with this message from Ancestor-Auntie helped keep this goal in focus. So even when I was writing my literature review with the goal to synthesize current understandings of the political potentialities of rest, I was thinking about how these theories crack open368 spaces for solidarity between Indigenous peoples and other folks who are systemically marginalized. Particularly striking to me were the ways that Indigenous women and Black women echoed each other’s criticisms of the ways their communities rely on them to be everything for everyone. What would it mean to create solidarity across difference to take up projects of collective care? 367 Lorde, A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer, 62. 368 Deanne Bell, “Occupy the Classroom Radically,” Third World Quarterly 43, no. 8 (August 3, 2022): 2069, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2022.2074828. 108 I came back to Ancestor-Auntie’s words when I was visiting with Land where I encountered all the ways that being with Land connects me to community – human and more than. Ancestor-Auntie’s words swirled around my mind as I began to understand the ways tending to my relationship with Land intervened into colonial capitalisms attempts to destroy community through destroying Land. I thought about Ancestor-Auntie’s words when I was feeling the conflict between writing about art as a method of restful resistance and actually engaging in activism to support Palestinian life and liberation. This dream guidance from Ancestor-Auntie helped me put into action the ways art can open up space for contemplation and conversation about ongoing injustice. Ancestor-Auntie’s admonishment asked that I confront the ways that, yes, this work is slow and takes time, but demands that we do not obfuscate our responsibilities – to ourselves, to each other, to Land. This requires that we rethink and reject colonial capitalism’s prescriptions for productivity. Under colonial capitalism, being productive asks that you engage in processes of extraction and exploitation where life and Land are expendable to secure profit. Engaging in a Métis restful resistance, then, requires that we do not ask “how can I do less?” but “how can I reach into community to support and be supported?” A Métis restful resistance prompts us to have ongoing conversations about capacity and ability so that when we need rest – need a break – we do not feel like we must turn away from the world, from our communities, to rest. A Métis theory of Rest as Resistance centres the ways that we care for each other and ourselves as an integral part of community building and activism as they directly oppose colonial capitalism’s attempts to annihilate and assimilate Indigenous peoples. When we rest, we are saying “we matter, we are important, and we deserve to flourish” directly in the face of a culture that says we do not. 109 Bibliography Acosta, Navild, and Fannie Sosa. Black Power Naps. May 19, 2023. Performance. New York. Museum of Modern Art. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Parkins, Ilya
Rest as resistance : a Métis-feminist analysis of the relevance of rest in activism
Text