Kingcome Fashion

Robin, my niece and the teacher in Kingcome, wants to be nominated to go on What Not To Wear. What Not To Wear is a reality TV show that selects very poorly dressed people, secretly films them in their slovenly attire, and then presents them with the evidence before giving them fashion advice and a debit card loaded with $5000.

What Not To Wear is a very urban show, with lots of downtown scenery and shopping for the new wardrobe in big department stores and upscale boutiques. It is very NOT Kingcome which is a remote village up the coast of BC at the end of a two-hour water taxi ride at the end of Kingcome Inlet followed by a half-an-hour or so in a small boat or canoe up the river.

I imagine the hosts, Stacy and Clinton and the What Not To Wear crew coming to Kingcome to do the secret film footage to convince Robin that how she dresses is less than her fashion potential. They film her wheeling Baby James in his heavy-duty Kingcome stroller down the narrow gravel and sand road, across the soccer field wearing her thin and baggy plaid pajama bottoms and her blue cotton T-shirt. Then I imagine Stacey and Clinton doing The Intervention, showing Robin the secretly filmed footage and telling her what she needs to do to improve her wardrobe.

Robin’s already convinced. She comes out of her bedroom late on a Saturday afternoon, long past pajama time, pulls out the elastic waist-band of her plaid pajamas and says, “What kind of a person wears PJs like this?”

Later, she emerges from the bedroom and says, “You better tell Stacy and Clinton about this!” She’s changed into a bright yellow T-shirt that commands, “Kwak-wala Gaxan,” [speak Kwak-wala] and dark grey Capri pants with an interesting curled fringe just below her knees. Robin tells us she’s achieved this look by cutting the legs of her sweat pants and then cutting the half-inch fringe which curled on their own when she put them in the dryer.

The next day at the river as we’re getting into the punt to leave the village, Robin in her white T-shirt and very fashionable knee-length floral skirt proves to be wearing the perfect ensemble for wading barefoot into the icy water to push the boat off the sand and into the current and wave us off. As our boat heads out, she lifts the floral skirt to pull down her underwear and moon us good-bye.

What would Stacy and Clinton think of that?

1500 Indigenous Kids

Yesterday I attended a career fair for Indigenous teens. Ho-Lee!!! oo-lee-ka-lee-eek-ya . . . Talk about high energy. There were 1500 Indigenous kids in attendance along with their chaperones and teachers and exhibitors. A very good day.

Let the Party Begin!

The day after the federal election. And it seems that the Conservative Boogey Man is at the door. YIKES! They're going to tear up agreements the Liberals made with FNs and take away programs and it's all terrible.

But then I found these insightful thoughts, written by Taiaikae Alfred, the day before the election. And since the Conservatives DID win, Dr. T.'s words actually provide some optimism. He says:

People have sent emails asking me for some comment on the election, or for the reason that I don't vote. I've written a ton on this in the past. But here we go again...

For my part, I can't see how anyone Indigenous can bring themselves to even think of voting for either the Liberal money pigs or the Conservative white supremacist jesus freaks. Hell, even the NDP are just the Colonizer's bleeding heart bad conscience. I'm Mohawk, not Canadian, so I don't vote in the white man's elections. Simple. But all the "aboriginals" who have turned their back on their ancestors and do consider themselves Canadian are panicking at the thought of an impending Conservative government. I think I even remember getting an email this week with the subject heading: "VOTE LIBERAL or Thomas Flanagan and Harper will kidnap and eat your children!!!!"

Actually, it's understandable that they fear the future under a Conservative agenda. If the narrow-of-mind and white-of-shoe crowd does get elected, it's obvious to everyone in politics that, how shall I say, "the Great White Father is now a strict and mean S.O.B.", "the teat is henceforth dry" or "it's last call at the trough!" Whatever...

It's pathetic to see how being out of an easy job means more to these aboriginals than their heritage, their rights and their dignity, all of which the Liberal Party has consistently denied or attacked over the last ten years. I want the Conservatives to win, myself. Remember the last time the Conservatives were in power? It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What's the main memory anyone alive and aware in a First Nation has of that era? Oka, blockades in BC, etc.... the last time we stood up for ourselves with honour.

The Liberals have been buying off our leaders for a decade now since then, and we've all been blinded by false promises and cash and sucked into thinking that we can survive without fighting, while our lands and our rights are stolen from under us. The Conservatives are greedy, hateful, racists, but at least they are open about it!

If the Conservatives are the next government of Canada, then all the better for our people because the massive cut and slash of our programs and attack on our lands and rights is just the thing we need to wake our people up to the reality of their situation. If the Conservatives win, it's gonna be political war, and I say, "Let's get the party started!". Taiaiake

And I think Taiaiake might be right . . .

I think back to the summer before Oka and Papa telling me, "It's going to be really bad over there [indicating East]. At the time Papa would have been well into his eighties, but even then, he was a good source of information from Indian country. Maybe this was from relationships he'd established in his days with the Native Indian Brotherhood, the "Brotherhood," as he called it.

I remember that time being an awakening for me and no doubt being a motivating factor for getting me thinking about law school. It was the time of 7th Fire and "Buffalo Jump," Brian Mulroney and the SQ, road blocks and Mohawks.

And maybe the Conservative Boogey Man IS at the door but he's here to wake us up and make us take off the blinders, make us motivated enough to get up off our butts and let the wild rumpus begin!

The Truth Will Set you Free

but it might piss you off at first.

Three things we can't talk about . . .

When I worked as a treaty negotiator for the Kwakiutl Nation we frequently met with government negotiators. At one meeting we were in the beginning stages of drafting a chapter for "Language, Heritage, and Culture" and were doing a brainstorm to list topics that we (governments and First Nations) wanted covered in this chapter. One of the other Indigenous negotiators said the word "genocide." The two negotiators for Canada looked in disbelief at the FN negotiator who had said it and then they got up and left the room.

A few minutes later they returned and said that Canada could not participate in any tripartite documents that contained that word "genocide." Furthermore, Canada could also not endorse any tripartite documents that had the words "compensation" or "residential school."

This was a very interesting thing for them to have said because these treaty negotiations are supposed to be about "full and final settlement."

It's also interesting because these issues (compensation, genocide, and residential schools) are foremost in the minds of First Nation members involved in treaty negotiations.

One time, when I was at Papa's house in Fort Rupert getting ready to go and meet with government negotiators, Papa tried to teach me to say in Kwak'wala, "When do we get paid?" In other words, "When might we expect compensation?" He wanted me to say that to the governments reps. Around that same time, he also told me about his cousin Nu-nu who lost three babies to smallpox--in other words, "genocide." So these concepts--which must not be uttered at a treaty table and which must not appear on any tripartite documents-- are so important to our people that they are part of our everyday conversations. Yet these words cannot be part of a "full and final settlement."

These three things then, are a good example of why we're foolish to think that reconcilliation is sufficient and why instead, we need to be pushing for restitution.

Funny, you don't look like an Indian

One of my Women's Studies students asked me about the Thrifty's incident and if the cashier knew that I was Indigenous. I said probably not and speculated that the whole scene would like have played out differently had I been more visibly Indigenous.

This morning I was thinking about having this ambiguous appearance and how this has allowed me to go places that others can’t.

For the most part I can fit in. I can have lunch at the University Club and not stand out as the lone Indian in the room. Or I can go into a big-house and not look like a gawking White lady.

This, I suppose, has been my gift. Like other gifts that people are born with, this gift is a tool that ought to be used in a good way. Mothering, teaching, befriending, supporting.

Sometimes the gift has been a curse. There have been times when people have been openly racist in my presence, thinking that I was white and was going along with what they were saying. I’ve also observed people being racist through their inactions or their passivity. My gift combined with my position (lawyer, teacher) behooves me to speak, teach, change, lead.

And so, wanting to be a more effective bystander, I attended a workshop on Anti-Racism Response Training. In this workshop, which was developed by Ishu Ishiyama, Ph.D., (Faculty of Education, UBC), we learned about the four levels of witnessing (Avoid, Passive, Active, and lastly Ethical). The goal is social action, education, and institutional change. We learned that there are at least 11 different kinds of responses such as assertive interjections, victim support, and appraoching co-witnessess. You can find out more about Dr. Ishiyama at http://www.meaning.ca/conference/ishu_ishiyana.htm.

The workshop short and snappy and I'd like to see if I can bring it to my students.

What 'chu mean "we", White Girl?

Last night I completed the Race Implicit Association Test. Here’s the deal: People don't always 'speak their minds', and it's suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology. This concept is the main idea in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking which is where I first heard about this test.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. You can find the Implicit Association Test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/canada/index.jsp

This site contains various related information and other tests for implicit associations with regards to age, gender, weight, etc.

I've known about this test for a while but was reluctant to try it because I was afraid of what it might say. Maybe it would say that I was biased towards white people.

But I tried the test and my results?

“Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Black People compared to White People.”

This test is apparently a predictor of how we will act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations. These predictors won’t affect what we’ll CHOOSE to say or feel or do because most of time we aren’t aware of our most subtle behaviours. Hmmmmm . . . . interesting. It makes me think about the Thrifty’s cashier and her behaviour towards the Indigenous woman. But, "moderate automatic preference for Black People"? What does it all mean?