Nanaboozho and the geese.

Having rebuilt the flooded world with the handful of mud that Muskrat brought back to the surface, Nanaboozho sets off to travel the earth. It's a dark and rainy night, he's hungry, and then he sees a light in the distance with a party going on. As he gets closer to the castle, he sees the geese and one of the geese sees him. Almost immediately they both come up with a plan: Nanaboozho wants to get inside, and the older goose, who has clearly met Nanaboozho before, tries to prevent it. Unfortunately, Nanaboozho comes up with something about a flat tire and needing to use the phone, so they let him inside where a lovely fire is crackling in the fireplace.

Nanaboozho loves a party, but there are no snacks and he's hungry, so he tells the geese that he's going to teach them a new dance. It's a jump to the left, then a step to the right, put your hands on your hips, and close your eyes tight. Then, It's so dreamy, Oh, fantasy free me, So you can't see me .. No, not at all. When he returns to the chorus he changes the lyrics a little bit again, put your hands on your hips and bring your necks in tight. Just as they do that he grabs them and breaks their necks.

Loon had been dancing along with them and he heard that crack, opening his eyes just in time to see what Nanaboozho had done. Not buying Nanaboozho's line that it was a mercy killing, Loon cries out a warning, but before she can get away Nanaboozho gives her a kick and that's why Loon's back has that sway to it. In other stories it's the explanation for why Loon's eyes have that red ring around them. Dammit Janet.

This is where the story gets weird.

Nanaboozho puts the geese in the fireplace with their feet sticking out and decides to take a nap while they cook except that he's worried somebody is going to steal his geese and he asks his butt to keep an eye on things. So to speak.

What?

His fanny agrees to do this and when Nanaboozho falls asleep his backside does cry out two warnings about a government investigator and some other castle weirdos, but they duck away before Nanaboozho can see them so eventually Nanaboozho uses the Medusa Transducer to freeze his tush and tells it to stop playing tricks. Well fine then, and Nanaboozho's buns watch while everyone mutinees and makes off with the geese, leaving the feet behind.

Nanaboozho wakes up, finds out what happened, and because he is both angry AND impulsive (never a good combination) he tosses his bum into the fire which hurts because of course it does. There is some running through the woods behind the castle (leaving blood behind on willow branches creating what we know as red osier dogwood) and then sliding down a smooth rock (creating what we know as lichen) before landing in the water and cooling off and what have you done to Brad?

There is a LOT happening in this story, and I don't just mean the Rocky Horror Picture Show references that may or may not have worked for you. I rely on part of this story in Becoming Kin where I make the point about keeping our eyes open and being aware of what's going on around us. That's why this story came to mind while I was reading Babel by R. F. Kuang. It is important to question the stories being told, to be alert to what's going on around us, but what is going on?

Babel is a brilliant story set in early 19th century Britain, Oxford in particular, and a fictional tower called Babel where translation work takes place. It is about colonialism and rebellion told through the experiences of four scholars Ramy (Indian), Robin (Cantonese), Victoire (Haitian), and Letty (white, British) just before the opium wars in which Britain demanded that China open up trade allowing Britain to sell opium (produced in India and illegal in Britain) to the Chinese who they saw as not fully human. Ramy points out that's what connects he and Robin. The opium is produced in his country and then sold to Robin's with Britain profiting at either end.

"It all seemed so abstract - categories of use, exchange, and value - until it wasn't; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain."

What powers the machinery of empire in Babel, are bars of silver with words carved into either side. We all know that translating language isn't a simple 1:1 substitution. You take something in Anishinaabemowin and when you render it in English it will mean "something like" rather than "exactly this" and it is the tension contained in "something like" that the silver bars are able to turn into energy. The British have, by this time, exhausted the European languages for these word-pairs because over time the familiarity between languages diminishes the tension between them and so they turn to the colonies where they take promising children who are then raised to be good citizens of empire, becoming scholars whose language creates new new word-pairs to power the empire.

Empire lies. It sings fun songs and gets us all doing things together but to what end? And did you know that singing songs together has psychological impact? When you sing together, particularly if you are doing hand motions or dancing, it creates a kind of group cohesion and you're more likely to learn from whatever comes next. Why do you think so many group activities from school to church to WalMart's working day start with singing or chanting? This isn't evil. Singing together is great, but it can also make us vulnerable. And in this moment, Nanaboozho is not being a good leader, a fact which would indeed come back to bite him in the ass.

It's intriguing that Jones places this right after the flood narrative in his volume of stories because you'll recall that in some versions of the flood story (not Jones') Nanaboozho sings and the animals dance a new world into being. Very different from the singing and dancing of this story. To what end is always an important question to be asking of any leader and the things they want us to do because sometimes those things seem reasonable, or if they are unreasonable at least they seem to be in our interest. Asking to what end helps us figure out what's actually going on. The tension of translation that powers the silver bars could do much more than simply power empire, the problem isn't the silver bars. The problem is empire.

Jump to the left, step to the right, hands on your hips, eyes closed tight. Once they're used to following instructions Nanaboozho can slip in the critical one. Jump to the left, step to the right, hands on your hips, necks in tight.

Snap.

In Babel Victoire develops a great word pair using English and Kreyòl but it isn't accepted because in Britain not enough people speak or understand Kreyòl for the pair to be useful. The fact that it would be useful in Haiti is irrelevant. Over and over the scholars are asked to create word pairs to power empire, never to make the lives of their own country-men any better. This tension, the tension between what they were promised and what they are actually being asked to do becomes unbearable.

"trained to use [their] languages for [Britain's] benefit, to translate laws and texts to facilitate their rule, when there are people in India and China and Haiti and all over the Empire and the world who are hungry and starving because the British would rather put silver in their hats and harpsichords than anywhere it could do some good."

Eventually they scream, like Loon, and the story of Babel becomes about rebellion and resistance to Empire. You know, I picked this book up because last fall I spoke at a conference and chose to talk about the tower of Babel, framing its destruction as a rebellion against the control of empire. The notion that God was mad because they were building a tower all the way to heaven is ridiculous, so I wanted to think through what it was that made God so angry in this story. It takes place in Chapter 11 of Genesis, right after a lengthy description of all the different peoples and languages who descended from Noah so there's no way that the whole earth only had a single language. But you know who DOES have a single language to which we are all required to conform?

Empire.

And I could see that the abuses of empire would make God angry, particularly since it was written down during the time when the Hebrew people were captive to the Babylonian empire and surrounded by these ziggurats.

In Kuang's novel, solidarity develops between these scholars and the trade unions, they learn to focus on the connections between them as exploited people rather than dividing along racial lines. As David Treuer remarks in an op-ed on tribal belonging, "other nations take these things into account, and in doing so they reinforce something we, with our fixation on blood, have forgotten: bending to a common purpose is more important than arising from a common place."

This is solidarity. Yes our relations matter, the place where our ancestors emerged as peoples matter. These things matter because they shape who we are, but it is not the only thing and we cannot let that get in the way of building solidarity with those who are bending with us towards a common purpose. Loon did not just get the heck out of dodge, she warned the geese, her cries providing a distraction that allowed some to escape. In Babel strikers from various guilds and trade unions find common cause with the rebellious scholars, these silver bars are part of an industrial revolution that is leaving people behind to starve and be criminalized. But will it be enough?

"Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. And why should the translators succeed where other strikers - white strikers no less - had failed?"

Early in his book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad wonders "Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?" Who must remain invisible for empire to continue functioning, to ensure that the public can experience all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. Near the end he notes the consequences of that nonexistence. "Victims of empire aren't murdered. Their killers aren't butchers, their killers aren't anything at all. Victims of empire don't die, they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog."

Nanaboozho's rage is absurd, it's funny. He throws his bum into the fire and then runs through the forest, his blood turning willow branches red and then creating lichen by scraping his bottom on rock. In his rage he creates medicine, which is where my parallel with empire falls apart because while the rage of empire inevitably causes harm to itself, it does not create medicine. Like the chaos at the end of Rocky Horror Picture Show, there is no silver lining in the midst of imperial carnage. People will try to rescue empire, to demand that it keeps its promises, that it be the thing it pretends to be. But it can't, won't. That was Letty's burden throughout Babel, the constant challenge to her conception of Britain, what she believed it to be rather than what her friends knew that it was.

I have watched people like Letty come so close to seeing what is happening in Palestine. They see the Palestinians as human, they admit the violence of Israeli occupation. At other times I have listened to them lament the violence that made Canada and the US, wringing their hands and asking how people could be so cruel to children in residential schools. And then, like Letty, they stop short, refusing to see the connections between here and there. They make excuses, and begin the work of rescuing empire, insisting that it is the thing it pretends to be. Golda Meir famously said that Palestinians don't exist. Netanyahu called them Amalekites. We count the deaths of children, as El Akkad points out, because children are innocent, although even that is debatable. Palestinian men are inevitably seen as terrorists, and if the women aren't terrorists then they are giving birth to future terrorists. Children throw stones and become terrorists. Israel requires Palestinian non existence, and the rage at their ongoing presence is incandescent. While Palestinians emerge from nonexistence only as terrorists, as El Akkad notes, the killers of Palestinians aren't anything at all. In the press the passive voice shields Israeli soldiers from being the perpetrators of this violence. Other newspaper articles tell us how upsetting all this is for these soldiers, the trauma they experience. Even when Letty does begin to understand, it is her friends who experience racism who must comfort her.

Eyes closed.

Necks in tight.

Snap.

And the scream of a Loon.

Yes, colonial violence exists all over the world. The cobalt that powers our electronics comes from unfree labour in the most appallingly dangerous conditions in Congo. Sudan is torn apart by post-colonial violence exacerbated by the very countries that profit from it. El Salvador is still uncovering mass graves. But if people can't see the genocide being livestreamed into our homes, if they are so prepared to make excuses for the horrors unfolding in front of us, how can we begin to hope that they might see other, less well televised and documented violence no matter how much people scream? People want the conveniences without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were obtained.

But like all good revolutionary stories, this one contains hope and possibility. A real obstacle to a better world is our inability to imagine that one is possible, our despairing belief in the greatest of imperial lies: that this is simply how it is. But another world is possible, Anishinaabe stories are filled with worlds ending and beginning. Change is not only possible, it is inevitable and our job is to be ready.

The red osier dogwood and lichen created by Nanaboozho's injury have medicinal uses including pain relief and antibiotic properties, both of which are useful in treating burns. So in addition to teaching us about paying attention to what's going on around us, the very silly part of this story contains important medical information. Because although he does, at times, behave very badly, Nanaboozho is spirit, and spirit creates. Empire is empty, it is a constant state of consumption rather than creation. You can't get medicine from something that is empty.

So look around for the medicine that is showing up for you, the ways that it may heal or build. Because it's not enough to cry out against injustice, we must do something that is just. We must build a world worth living in.

And don't forget to join up with the Nii'kinaaganaa Foundation. Every month we collect funds from people living on Indigenous land and redistribute them to Indigenous people and organzers. You can find out more information on the website which is now powered by ghost, which means that you can become a subscriber there just like you are here!