radiant fracture

(Imperfect Offering is a series for Indigenous History Month about Indigenous authors and storytellers who have meant a lot to me and to the students I teach.)

George Clutesi
(Tse-shaht)
(1905-1988)
Artist, writer, scholar, actor

Okay, I’m cheating a bit by including George Clutesi, because I haven’t taught his work yet. I’m researching him now because I want to give more focus to authors and storytellers from this and surrounding regions, and because I want the class to follow a thread that starts with Basil Johnston (IO 1) and gets to George Clutesi by way of Kahentinetha Horn (IO 5) and Expo 67.

It’s going to be fun. (The Expo 67 connection came to me via this excellent two-part story from The Secret Life of Canada.)

Born in Port Alberni, Clutesi was a member of the Tseshaht First Nation, which is a part of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council.

From his youth, he was recognized as a gifted artist, and his art sustained him through residential school. He also wrote essays for The Native Voice, one of the earliest Indigenous newspapers in Canada, was on the CBC, and acted in TV and film (you may have seen him in Dreamspeaker (1976) or Spirit Bay (1982-7) or in an episode of The Beachcombers). He was an eloquent advocate for Indigenous cultures.

Because I am extra interested in the story of Indigenous theatre, I was thrilled to read that Clutesi wrote a play in 1949 -- I wonder if I can find out its production history (tseshaht.com).

Clutesi was key to the preservation and revival of Tse-shaht teachings through songs and dances. And he wrote down versions of traditional Tse-shaht teaching stories in Son of Raven, Son of Deer (1967), and ceremonial practices in Potlatch (1969) -- only eighteen years after the lifting of the Potlatch ban (The People and the Text).

I recently obtained a copy of Son of Raven, Son of Deer (1967).




In the first story, "How the Human People Got the First Fire," Clutesi tells how Son of Deer stole fire from the Wolf people to give to humanity. The story acts on my brain this way: it tells the reader about the power of art and artists to outwit greed and tyranny, and about how being young and seemingly unimportant can be a great cover story. A very good story for students.

As I read the introduction to the collection, I could not help but observe that the messages from Indigenous knowledge keepers and Elders -- about orature and its centrality, about Indigenous education practices and their strength for the whole person -- these have been clear and consistent all along, from contact to 1967 to now.

Clutesi, a residential school survivor himself, writes that in traditional education, "the young were taught through the medium of the tales that there was a place in the sun for all living things" and that because of the imposition of oppressive "education" systems on Indigenous students, "there is, in fact, a broken link in [their] life-growing period” (11-13).

I wish this message had been treated with the respect it deserves. It feels both a little desolate and oddly hopeful to see the same message delivered in 1967 that I see restated in new textbooks and hear in contemporary workshops, classrooms, law courts.

Clutesi actually died in Victoria. According to the Internet, he is buried in the Alberni Valley Memorial Gardens.

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(A series for Indigenous History Month about Indigenous authors who have meant a lot to me as an instructor and to the students I teach.)
(Photo Credit: Nadya Kwandibens)

Where do I even start with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson -- scholar, philosopher, essayist, musician, short-story writer, filmmaker?

From her website: Simpson's "work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity."

Sovereign creativity. Maybe I start with her passionately attentive ethical exploration of how to carry forward the philosophical principles of Nishnaabeg thought? That might be my favourite thing about her work.

Something that’s great about teaching Simpson’s writing is that she situates herself in relation to the intellectual lineage of Basil Johnston (I.O. #1).

She takes care to explain that their traditions are not identical, but this connection means the students and I can follow a thread of Anishinaabeg philosophy from Johnston to Simpson, especially through the word debwewin (whose meaning, as I understand it, is very roughly triangulated by ideas like truth, the limitations of personal knowledge, and the sound of the heart). I often teach her essay "Gdi-nweninaa: Our Sound, Our Voice," which takes up four ethical principles through exploring the definitions of four Anishinaabe words.

So if you checked out some Johnston and liked it, try Simpson; or if you were intrigued by Jo-Ann Archibald's ideas about storywork, read that essay for parallels in what research looks like when it's embedded in -- inseparable from -- cultural practice.

Or read something else entirely. There's a lot to choose from. Simpson’s short stories are beautiful; some are also songs and spoken-word pieces. I often teach the first story in her collection Islands of Decolonial Love (2013), “All of My Relatives” — it is this incredibly concentrated meditation on perception, self-perception, fear, internalized colonialism, and decolonial love. Also it's funny.

But there are any number of other amazing stories, beautiful in craft and in thinking. Simpson has also created short films and videos — so as an instructor, I can bring in all kinds of media for the class to engage with. Her essays are dazzling.

We’re almost exactly the same age and she has written seven amazing books and edited or contributed to many more and I, well now I have written this note.

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For Indigenous History Month, an imperfect offering: some posts about Indigenous authors who have inspired my work and the students I teach.

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(Photo credit Alex Nguyen)

Joanne Archibald, Q’um Q’um Xiiem (Sto:lo)

Last week and this week some colleaguefriends and I are reading Jo-Ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit (2008), a book that has been foundational to my approach to teaching Indigenous literature and oratures — and that I would like to underlie my approach to teaching everything.

Archibald is of course part of a larger discussion among Indigenous thinkers about what oral knowledge is and how you do philosophy with it and in it -- Basil Johnston among them.

Archibald's Indigenous Storywork is a book directed specifically at educators and researchers. There are quite a few books now about Indigenizing and decolonizing methodologies -- my sense is that this is among the first, but I am not an expert. She is the one who coined the word "storywork" (3).

In the book, Archibald explores, but more importantly models, good practices in reading, researching, teaching about, and teaching with traditional stories.

What I mean is that she doesn't just list principles: she describes her whole process of thinking, interacting, asking, being, listening, reflecting, returning.

Inescapably, although we start from the idea of talking about traditional stories, if we are thinking about that in a serious way, it leads us towards a different paradigm of education, one that is embedded in relation -- not just ways of knowing, but ways of being ways of acting in the world.

Foundational to Archibald’s approach is the truth that knowledge can’t be separated from the relationship and situation in which it is transmitted.

To talk about traditional stories is always also to talk about the foundational philosophies of Indigenous cultures, which are -- if I am understanding Archibald correctly -- active philosophies, applied philosophies. That is, to study it is also to do it, or you’re not really studying it.

We talked Friday about many of her ideas, and especially a lot about teaching literature in relationship and as relationship, rather than as an object of study.

When I think about how to respond in my own practice to the truth of the violence “education” has perpetrated in this country — one small thing that comes to me is to try to be the opposite kind of teacher to those who collaborated in that violence — to be instead the kind of teacher who sustains life.

Archibald has a lot to teach about that.

I recommend this book to those, like me, travelling the long road of trying to decolonize our teaching and research practice.

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Note: You get a few more notes than Instagram because I perceive this format as more spacious. This mixes in some of my introduction from the book group with the Insta post.

I was lucky enough to see Archibald honoured at the STENISTOLW conference in, I believe, 2017.

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