Bad Indians Writing Club

Hey all,

Haven't gotten any RVSP's for tonight, so I'm wondering if monthly meetings is a swing and a miss which is ok! Perhaps we just keep this as a monthly writing activity and see where it goes from there. Every month I'll send out a prompt and we'll fill a google docs folder with our work.

So last month the activity was to pair up with a friend and for each of you to tell a story about a photograph on your phone. Make something up, tell a true story, doesn't matter. Then be curious about each other's story, ask questions. The purpose was to get our heads out of feedback mode and into curiosity because that's the kind of feedback we're going to use. Curiosity rather than commentary.

This month's activity is a writing assignment. Think about something that changed you. I often see the question, what radicalized you? It's a good question, but chances are there was not a single thing. There rarely is. And people often put pithy comments in like "being Ojibwe" or "having a single mother." While those may be true statements, they don't say anything about how or why that thing radicalized you. There are a lot of politically conservative people with the same short story. And, while there are pivot points where our life takes a sharp turn more often I suspect that we're taking a long curve away from something. For example.

Idle No More radicalized me. Radical just means to get at the roots of a thing, to change the things that need changing rather than just give it fresh paint and new decorations. I had always known that I was Ojibwe because my father was Ojibwe, but it was an individual thing. Through the events of Idle No More I came to understand that being Ojibwe was also a social and political identity. It didn't have to be. There were, and are, many Ojibwe people who live apolitical lives, what I was realizing was that I could no longer be one of them. And my life started to shift.

At that time I was still going to church and I had a vision or something, I don't know, the further away from it I get the less certain I am that it was a vision but I remember being very certain of it at the time. Jesus sitting on the arm of the pew beside me. I was going to have to make a choice. This or that, I could no longer do both and there was no choice. I was Ojibwe, no changing that. My final answer.

For years I continued going to church, it would be a decade before anything resembling a clear break but looking backwards I can see that my trajectory shifted. My relationship with the church shifted, became increasingly adversarial as I heard sermons entrenching a kind of Christian exceptionalism that the church simply did not deserve. Even as recently as the publication of Becoming Kin I was still identifying as a Christian and member of a local church. Now I joke that I only go to church if I'm being paid. It's not really a joke if it's true tho.

So you can see, no real pivot point. I can say that Idle No More was the precipitating factor but there was no sharp turn. It was a long slow curve that took about 10 years. I have other stories with a sharp turn, moments where I realized I could no longer do or be something. It's important to recall these stories, to write about them because other people will see themselves in those stories and think about the changes that they are also making. It's also important to recall these stories, to write about them, because we forget that long slow curve. We forget all the pivots and moments of change that it took to get us here. We forget the progression of books or seminars, the conversations with people who did not yell at us about being selfish or stupid or any of the things we do to disparage people on the political right, not from hatred but from real frustration at their refusal to see what seems so plain to us.

It wasn't always that plain is what I'm saying. Few of us were raised in revolutionary households. Maybe you were, I don't know. Bless if you were. Most of us will spend a lifetime confronting things internally while we also confront them externally.

It's hard.

So tell your story. Tell it as memoir or fiction, remember to make the central person's position clear. Are they Black? White? Lakota? Religious or not. Do they live in a city, rural area. All these things matter. Idle No More hit me because I was living in an area where round dances took place, but I didn't tell you that in the story did I. Didn't tell you about being in the midst of round dances and two-row wampum marches. Didn't tell you about participating in Animal Rights activities, primarily around Marineland where dolphins, belugas, and killer whales are kept in captivity. Didn't tell you about other marches in Toronto for Indigenous rights long before Idle No More. Didn't tell you about the first time I stepped into a busy intersection along with many others armed with nothing but our handdrums, and didn't tell you about the exhiliration of rushing to a Standing Rock solidarity event with a friend while other protestors parted before us like the Red Sea: drummers coming through! Get them to the front with the others!

So much room for curiosity and expansion.

Write your story down, and don't worry about telling the whole thing. A thousand words more or less. Send it to that friend you practiced curiosity with. Then upload it into the folder where we can be curious about each other's writing. I've created a folder, Bad Indians Writing Club, where you can put your documents. Anybody with a link is an editor. Remember: curiosity, not commentary.

Next month I'll send you another prompt.

And remember, always carry a book.