Talk I gave on Fish and Indigenous Law at the Walrus Talks National Tour: We Desire a Better Country, held on March 7, 2017 in Yellowknife.
endurance (the long durée)
Sometimes survival (or is it survivance, as Vizenor teaches us? I’m sometimes not sure if I’m just surviving or if I’m entangled in the urgencies beyond survival and manifesting my way firmly towards thriving) — sometimes survival looks like gently closing the door to your office on a Thursday morning in late September and sitting… Read More
Tending tenderness and disrupting the myth of academic rock stars
In euro-american academia, the arts, media, politics, and literature we are enthralled, obsessed with two things: ‘innovation’ and individuality. The triumph of individual will to manifest something new new new trumps everything else. Granting agencies often focus on a single Principle Investigator to the exclusion of whole teams of human and more-than-human beings who make… Read More
heart full to bursting
Just when I thought I could not be cracked open any further, when I’d felt I’d swam the depths of the rivers in my veins, it hits me. I love. I love my family. I love my kin. I love the stories that animate us and weave us together. I love the adventures I’ve had.… Read More
I tried to write something this evening, and as I laboured over the 613 words that I eked out about building academic community, I decided to abandon ship and start over. I want to sit with the sound of paddles dipping into cool lake water forever. I want to glide at the water’s surface and… Read More
From that unfeeling place (an ethnography of ongoing British colonialism)
I wrote this piece at the invitation of Katarina Stenbeck to accompany an exhibit she curated in Copenhagen at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Slow Violence). I want to thank Katarina for reaching out to me to include my work in the show. —– In Métis legal-governance traditions, we draw on the nehiyaw (Cree) legal principle of… Read More
Grief
My sweet and gentle grandmother died two months ago. I got the call from my mom on the morning of April 7, just before I was about to meet some friends for lunch. I had a dream early on in the morning of the 7th, a dream that had strongly informed me she had passed.… Read More
Encyclopedia of exhaustion: the D-DIC
Welcome to this encyclopedia of exhaustion! It is a new series wherein we will cover clusters of behaviour and ideology in anti-colonial/decolonial spaces which exhaust communities striving to dismantle structural violence. Our inaugural post is on that especially fun complex: the D-DIC! What is the D-DIC? It’s a shorthand for the Decolonial Dudebro Industrial Complex.… Read More
allow yourself
What I wish (for you) is to disentangle their hooks from my flesh. Finally let go, let it fall, let it soar. You are not their past. You were and are a jumble of bones and stories moving through time and space, and as you walk down the cobblestone streets, I want you to pause,… Read More
A list of all the places I’ve had a panic attack (CW: sexual assault)
On the train two hours before my master’s defence when I accidentally locked myself out of my friend’s apartment. In bed. At breakfast. During the Nutrition 100 midterm that I slept in for and had to write on the floor in my pajamas at the front of the classroom (or I may have had a… Read More