This is Isabella's story.
I am a hyphenated individual. I am queer, non-binary, Chinese-Canadian, working and residing on the unceded, un-surrendered territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples in self-exile. I use these terms to self-identify whenever I am situating myself in relation to my work, locale, and the stories of my interactions within these locales. These terms in the English language act as my assistants in telling my story; yet, they are also the language of a colonial culture that has played a role in the propagation of my own displacement, as well as the countless historical and ongoing perpetrations of loss, violence, and displacement against the original, and current rightful owners of this land from time in millennia.
The story I am interested in telling here, therefore seeks refuge in a space woven less by the words themselves, but in my creative decisions regarding where I shall give emphasis to their punctuation. I am thus less interested in the words I use to identify myself, as much as I am in the hyphen that sits between the words. To me, the hyphen represents a site of interaction and synergy present throughout everyday life, but a humble dash where I contest that the interconnected relationality of things is often overlooked in text.
To approach the term, Indigenous-settler relations for me, implies considering the history of colonial injustices that have been transferred from peoples on one side of the hyphen to another. At the same time, given that the English language has only defined and named for itself the terms “settler” and “Indigenous”, and not so much the hyphen, I propose that this linkage also poses as an expansive space for the yet-defined and imminent work that settlers need to enact, a work that adheres to, consults, and respects Indigenous protocol in solidarity. This work must be conducted with the best interests of Indigenous peoples as the rightful leaders of this land in mind. This hyphen marks a place of interrelations, activism, scholarship, solidarity, sovereignty, and community already put into practice by Indigenous leaders and many allies, artist/scholars in solidarity.
As a Chinese immigrant settler, my own position within this space is one that has been affected by the histories of lands. That history begins at the site of another hyphen, adjoining my Chinese and Canadian identities. It begins with the earliest story of my family I have been told, when Mao’s regime persecuted and murdered my paternal grandmother, and it would go on to trail a legacy of colonialism from which, I have benefited. Although returning to my homeland is not possible for me, and I was merely brought to Canada at a young age, I have not asked for permission to live here by the rightful owners of these territories. Although China is no longer a place I can call home, how do I begin to speak to my own exile, making a home, future, and income for myself on land and with resources all stolen?
For as long as I have been writing, I have not known the love, support, and faces of my birth family; for as long as I have been writing, I have regarded the writing community as my found family. I am here because almost eight years ago--which is crazy to think! Where did the time go? -- when I embarked upon my writing journey, I began this process by learning how to braid, and allow myself to be braided with other writers as a community.
Someone really special to me introduced Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful essay collection, Braiding Sweetgrass. This idea of braiding was taught to me by her book. As Kimmerer generously shares with her readers on the collaborative effort, love, and kindred relationships that evolve over the process of braiding a strand of sweetgrass:
"Of course you can do it by yourself […] But the sweetest way is to have someone else hold the end so that you pull gently against each other, all the while leaning in, head to head, chatting and laughing […] Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider."
In concert with many writers I admire in the community, Kimmerer, in her chapter “Putting Down Roots," braids syncretic strands of storytelling, narrating her graduate student’s scientific thesis project and her own movement elongating the pulse of “bend and pull, bend and pull” in the river. As well, she discusses, Mohawk language, and the traditional knowledge of harvesting sweetgrass to convey the historical and ongoing social issues faced by Indigenous peoples in her community. Situated specific to Mohawk culture and land, the story in this essay bridges a shared sense of loss, displacement, colonial settlement and violence, and ultimately the love and endurance that reverberates along many Canadian poets’ works as well. Nevertheless, Kimmerer consistently and structurally centers acts of weaving, braiding, creation, and solidarity at the forefront of her essays: like a woven basket; like how she expresses that “pockets of the [Mohawk] language survived among those who stayed rooted to place,” Indigenous strength, resilience, and wisdom are the arms that collect and uphold the equally important issues and policies that she chooses to amplify.
Trust is earned; it is something that you learn to give to others over time, but many queer, BIPOC, and Indigenous writers have also given me the invaluable gift of being able to trust. I love Lee Maracle’s words on sharing. In Conversations with Canadians, she shares the anecdote of being asked to perform work for free, stereotyped: “aren’t Indians about sharing”? In response, she reframes the idea of sharing around reciprocal acts of giving and caring, as opposed to one side giving, and one side endlessly taking.
Time and time again, I have learned to recognize Maracle's, and Kimmerer’s idea of reciprocity not only through books, poetry, and words on the page, but been shown that when everything you are experiencing is too much, when you are about to let go of yourself and any hope, and believe that all you have to compose the fibers of your person are the grief and trauma you have carried with you, the community will show you something different. They have been my basket.
To me, a land acknowledgement begins with self-positioning and locating; also, as I have been taught, about storytelling. For me, there is not a linear story I can tell because my sense of home, my location, is in constant flux depending on where I am working, living, and resting. But I can try.
This is how I introduce myself as a teaching assistant to my students in the Indigenous Studies course I have helped teach for the past three semesters: I tell them, I am learning alongside you. In my first year of university, I had the absolute gift and pleasure of being able to attend an Indigenous Studies course taught by Dr. Deanna Reder, someone I thoroughly admire and am inspired by all the time. I have also been taught by Indigenous profs in other departments, and learned from Indigenous guest speakers in the literature departments where I did my undergrad. At the same time, a lot of my background, and what I bring to my classes, comes from being a part of my community, being mentored by Indigenous authors and editors, collaborating with Indigenous poets at literary events, being offered food and stories over lunch by Indigenous elders, and offering the same to them in reciprocity. And recently, working at an Indigenous-owned bookstore. These experiences, academic, literary, and lived, have helped to shape my perspectives and understandings of the histories and ongoing injustices faced by Indigenous peoples on stolen land. As someone who is always learning, and also someone who is learning to teach, I will always do my best to honour the gift of my mentors’ time and wisdoms. I tell my students that there are times where I may make mistakes, and I will always acknowledge my mistakes.
This is the story that I tell my community when I begin readings: Until recently, I have not known what a safe and stable home is. For the time that I have been an author, student, poet, and community organizer, I have moved over 23 times across various parts of Turtle Island. I have resided in just about every city, seen the good parts and the devastating sides of the souls of each place. I have lost my home. I have been offered homes by friends and kin. For anyone who has moved a lot in their lives, you will probably understand the difficulties of what it’s like to not have a stable sense of home on your body and psyche. It’s hard not having a resting place to go to at the end of the day, with all of your most precious belongings, the ones with the memories and feelings of safety and comfort. During all of these moves, there was one constant thing that helped keep me upright, and that was the land. Wherever I was, on the streets, in Coquitlam, sleeping on a university couch, I was on unceded land, stolen land, land that made me feel steady. Creeks that refreshed me and collected my tears when I really wanted to cry. The land was always there–land that doesn’t belong to me, but that held my weight regardless. And during this whole time, there was too the people on the land. Stewards of this land, the community, friends, elders, kin. And for that, everyone, I want to say thank you.
- Isabella
The story I am interested in telling here, therefore seeks refuge in a space woven less by the words themselves, but in my creative decisions regarding where I shall give emphasis to their punctuation. I am thus less interested in the words I use to identify myself, as much as I am in the hyphen that sits between the words. To me, the hyphen represents a site of interaction and synergy present throughout everyday life, but a humble dash where I contest that the interconnected relationality of things is often overlooked in text.
To approach the term, Indigenous-settler relations for me, implies considering the history of colonial injustices that have been transferred from peoples on one side of the hyphen to another. At the same time, given that the English language has only defined and named for itself the terms “settler” and “Indigenous”, and not so much the hyphen, I propose that this linkage also poses as an expansive space for the yet-defined and imminent work that settlers need to enact, a work that adheres to, consults, and respects Indigenous protocol in solidarity. This work must be conducted with the best interests of Indigenous peoples as the rightful leaders of this land in mind. This hyphen marks a place of interrelations, activism, scholarship, solidarity, sovereignty, and community already put into practice by Indigenous leaders and many allies, artist/scholars in solidarity.
As a Chinese immigrant settler, my own position within this space is one that has been affected by the histories of lands. That history begins at the site of another hyphen, adjoining my Chinese and Canadian identities. It begins with the earliest story of my family I have been told, when Mao’s regime persecuted and murdered my paternal grandmother, and it would go on to trail a legacy of colonialism from which, I have benefited. Although returning to my homeland is not possible for me, and I was merely brought to Canada at a young age, I have not asked for permission to live here by the rightful owners of these territories. Although China is no longer a place I can call home, how do I begin to speak to my own exile, making a home, future, and income for myself on land and with resources all stolen?
For as long as I have been writing, I have not known the love, support, and faces of my birth family; for as long as I have been writing, I have regarded the writing community as my found family. I am here because almost eight years ago--which is crazy to think! Where did the time go? -- when I embarked upon my writing journey, I began this process by learning how to braid, and allow myself to be braided with other writers as a community.
Someone really special to me introduced Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful essay collection, Braiding Sweetgrass. This idea of braiding was taught to me by her book. As Kimmerer generously shares with her readers on the collaborative effort, love, and kindred relationships that evolve over the process of braiding a strand of sweetgrass:
"Of course you can do it by yourself […] But the sweetest way is to have someone else hold the end so that you pull gently against each other, all the while leaning in, head to head, chatting and laughing […] Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider."
In concert with many writers I admire in the community, Kimmerer, in her chapter “Putting Down Roots," braids syncretic strands of storytelling, narrating her graduate student’s scientific thesis project and her own movement elongating the pulse of “bend and pull, bend and pull” in the river. As well, she discusses, Mohawk language, and the traditional knowledge of harvesting sweetgrass to convey the historical and ongoing social issues faced by Indigenous peoples in her community. Situated specific to Mohawk culture and land, the story in this essay bridges a shared sense of loss, displacement, colonial settlement and violence, and ultimately the love and endurance that reverberates along many Canadian poets’ works as well. Nevertheless, Kimmerer consistently and structurally centers acts of weaving, braiding, creation, and solidarity at the forefront of her essays: like a woven basket; like how she expresses that “pockets of the [Mohawk] language survived among those who stayed rooted to place,” Indigenous strength, resilience, and wisdom are the arms that collect and uphold the equally important issues and policies that she chooses to amplify.
Trust is earned; it is something that you learn to give to others over time, but many queer, BIPOC, and Indigenous writers have also given me the invaluable gift of being able to trust. I love Lee Maracle’s words on sharing. In Conversations with Canadians, she shares the anecdote of being asked to perform work for free, stereotyped: “aren’t Indians about sharing”? In response, she reframes the idea of sharing around reciprocal acts of giving and caring, as opposed to one side giving, and one side endlessly taking.
Time and time again, I have learned to recognize Maracle's, and Kimmerer’s idea of reciprocity not only through books, poetry, and words on the page, but been shown that when everything you are experiencing is too much, when you are about to let go of yourself and any hope, and believe that all you have to compose the fibers of your person are the grief and trauma you have carried with you, the community will show you something different. They have been my basket.
To me, a land acknowledgement begins with self-positioning and locating; also, as I have been taught, about storytelling. For me, there is not a linear story I can tell because my sense of home, my location, is in constant flux depending on where I am working, living, and resting. But I can try.
This is how I introduce myself as a teaching assistant to my students in the Indigenous Studies course I have helped teach for the past three semesters: I tell them, I am learning alongside you. In my first year of university, I had the absolute gift and pleasure of being able to attend an Indigenous Studies course taught by Dr. Deanna Reder, someone I thoroughly admire and am inspired by all the time. I have also been taught by Indigenous profs in other departments, and learned from Indigenous guest speakers in the literature departments where I did my undergrad. At the same time, a lot of my background, and what I bring to my classes, comes from being a part of my community, being mentored by Indigenous authors and editors, collaborating with Indigenous poets at literary events, being offered food and stories over lunch by Indigenous elders, and offering the same to them in reciprocity. And recently, working at an Indigenous-owned bookstore. These experiences, academic, literary, and lived, have helped to shape my perspectives and understandings of the histories and ongoing injustices faced by Indigenous peoples on stolen land. As someone who is always learning, and also someone who is learning to teach, I will always do my best to honour the gift of my mentors’ time and wisdoms. I tell my students that there are times where I may make mistakes, and I will always acknowledge my mistakes.
This is the story that I tell my community when I begin readings: Until recently, I have not known what a safe and stable home is. For the time that I have been an author, student, poet, and community organizer, I have moved over 23 times across various parts of Turtle Island. I have resided in just about every city, seen the good parts and the devastating sides of the souls of each place. I have lost my home. I have been offered homes by friends and kin. For anyone who has moved a lot in their lives, you will probably understand the difficulties of what it’s like to not have a stable sense of home on your body and psyche. It’s hard not having a resting place to go to at the end of the day, with all of your most precious belongings, the ones with the memories and feelings of safety and comfort. During all of these moves, there was one constant thing that helped keep me upright, and that was the land. Wherever I was, on the streets, in Coquitlam, sleeping on a university couch, I was on unceded land, stolen land, land that made me feel steady. Creeks that refreshed me and collected my tears when I really wanted to cry. The land was always there–land that doesn’t belong to me, but that held my weight regardless. And during this whole time, there was too the people on the land. Stewards of this land, the community, friends, elders, kin. And for that, everyone, I want to say thank you.
- Isabella
