An Activist Nap

A tiny glimpse into my personal life: I am a napper. Last night, after work, I napped from 5-7 p.m. (Could have something to do with the fact that I'm an on-and-off anemic, but that's besides the point.) After a nap like this, I wake up feeling one of two ways: 1) refreshed and ready to be productive for the final few evening hours, or 2) "WHAT?!? It's 7! How am I going to cook, clean, watch my favourite show, work out, and get to bed at a decent hour? Why do I do this to myself!!!" (Luckily, last night was the former.)

Since late March/early April, I've been napping.

I stopped listing to CBC Radio in the mornings and tuned into Hot 89.9.

I finished reading "X-Marks" by Scott Richard Lyons, then picked up "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" by Mindy Kaling.

I took a time-out from twitter in favour of constantly trolling my never-ending Facebook Newsfeed.

I fell behind reading some of my favourite blogs, like Native Appropriations and mediaINDIGENA, but read back posts on blogs like Suri's Burn Book and Young House Love.

Notice a trend here? I took, what I'll call, an "Activist Nap."

I'm not going to apologize for any of it. I'll still listen to Hot 89.9 when I'm in my car, and Young House Love is on my daily reading list. But this girl's nap is over.

I had an absolutely wild fall season. It was the busiest and most amazing time of my life, as I took on my biggest challenge yet of teaching a college class of 30 awesome Native students.

And after my class wrapped up on Tuesday afternoons? I hit the road to recruit more students to come to post-secondary education!

I expected the winter to be more quiet and a time to regroup, but instead I published my MA research paper, did a juice cleanse, and travelled more for work.

During one of said travels, I was having a conversation with a couple of Native colleagues. We were talking about the work we do in our 9-5's and our activism and community engagements on evenings and weekends.

"It's exhausting being Indigenous sometimes," one bemused.

We got onto the topic of books. After flexing our academic muscles and talking about what books we were reading by Native authors, the conversation quickly turned to "fun" books as we got talking about everything from sci-fi to Jodi Picoult.

"Sometimes you just have to take a time out and read a fun book."

I took her advice. I didn't completely tune out the news, but I allowed myself the luxury of reading for fun, skipping out on a rally or two, and I let myself off the hook for not being the first to know of each major development in First Nations rights and crises.

I napped. But, rather than it being an hour-long after work nap, it was a 2-month long post-activist nap. I was a Naptivist, if you will. I woke up from this one, not kicking myself for falling so far behind, but feeling refreshed, clear and ready to get back on track.

One-Minute Book Review: The Moon of Letting Go

The Moon of Letting Go and other stories (Richard Van Camp)

This book was given to me as a gift by a professor who requested that I speak to her Native Lit class about my master's research. A pretty awesome gift, especially considering that I read and loved Van Camp's coming-of-age novel, The Lesser Blessed.

These short stories are divided into four sections: Healing, Medicine, Teachings and Love. While the stories don't shy away from the grit and grind of rez and urban Indian life, many of the stories have happy endings (or maybe just endings I've interpreted as happy) and show that there can be a good outcome for someone who might typically be called "the bad guy."

Being the hopeless romantic that I am, I loved the three stories in the last section, 'Love.' But, I was particularly struck by the title story, "The Moon of Letting Go" (from 'Medicine'). It's the story of a mother and son, estranged from the other members of their family--an ex-husband and two sons--who get "accosted" by the last medicine man in their community, known and feared for practicing black magic. The line between black and white, good and evil is blurred as the mother and son spend time with the mysterious medicine man, moving forward with a weary trust and belief.

It reminded me of this one time I personally came into contact with some black magic, but I'll save that story for another time.... (Ellipses are so Van Camp.)

Struggle to Publish

So, I have come to an interesting point in my journey as a scholar: the end.

Well, that might be a little dramatic. As I said in my previous post, "Life lived like a story", I love learning and, more specifically, being a student and would love to someday go back to grad school for a PhD.

I've finished my M.A. and, for the first time in my life, I am not a student. Gasp! Needless to say as a lifelong nerd, I feel a slight void (but luckily that feeling has been tempered by the new job at a university I began almost immediately upon graduation). But I still find myself stealing moments away from my day to browse PhD programs, google scholars and scan journals. I think it is clearly where my heart is.

In order to satiate the nerd within me, I have settled on applying for 2011's Graduate Horizons so that I can explore whether it's possible for me to go to school in the U.S. Well, anything is possible, I guess exploring whether it is do-able is more accurate. (Or is that the same thing?)

Between now and then I am going to concentrate on making myself more PhD-ready. I've already had the amazing opportunity to co-author a chapter for a book with a professor and a Harvard-educated PhD candidate, both of whom I admire.

Now I come to my current dilemma: my struggle to publish. I was very proud of my MA research essay. And, I was happy that my three graders seemed to feel the same way. I knew that I wanted to share my essay with others, having only shared it with my family at this point, and my graders encouraged doing so in their marking scheme...

But I can't start!


Up until now I've blamed my new job. It's been an adjustment and existing within a learning curve can be tiring. So, I'm not going to apologize for that. But every night this week I've wanted to start looking at my essay again, start sending it to friends who've been asking to read it, start e-mailing it to some of the professors who've helped me along the way to ask for advice.

I couldn't understand what was going on. It wasn't my normal procrastination, which usually only happens when I really don't want to do something. I want badly to get rolling, revise and submit my essay. (Whether to submit it to my "dream" journal, SAIL, or a lesser known journal - so much lesser that I don't even have one to name - is yet another untied end.) But I just couldn't.

Then I met with one of my graders who, until that moment, had been 'blind.' Our conversation inevitably turned to my essay and the possibility of publishing. After coming clean about my recent struggles, I was delighted to learn that I wasn't alone. As a newly 'crowned' (haha) PhD she had several publishers knocking on her door, but she's been sitting on her dissertation for two years.

Suddenly three months doesn't seem so bad. I just hope it doesn't turn into three years.

"Life lived like a story."

"Well, I've tried to live my life right, just like a story."

-Angela Sidney

I've always loved this quote. It is from one of the three Elders whose life stories are told in this book, through "author" Julie Cruikshank (my thoughts - although not necessarily fully formed - on non-Native people doing research "about" Native peoples is an entirely separate post, which I have no immediate plans to compose).



Angela Sidney's quote speaks to the power stories have for our people. Our stories and our storytellers are our greatest teachers in life; this is not something that is new to our people. (Yet, it seems that writing academically about our stories is a burgeoning field - how did that happen?)

I want to dedicate my life to stories. Listening to them, learning from them, picking them apart, putting them back together. And, maybe even someday, telling them to grandchildren of my own. My research for my master's was about stories. My essay looked at the theoretical/ethical/methodological considerations put forth by Native writers, and was punctuated by my grandfather's oral history and my self-reflexivity. Off the record, I called my essay "a story about stories."

It was well received by my readers. They called it "innovative" and "an excellent contribution." (All of these things, I am not going to lie, went straight to my head.) What's ironic about this is that my essay was the complete opposite of innovative; I was writing about some of our oldest traditions in their modern manifestations. We've always known that stories have power to decolonize, that stories and their tellers have responsibilities, that stories tell us where our home is, and allow our nations and cultures to survive. This is old news!

Now that I've graduated and am working at a job I love, I should feel fulfilled. But I feel like something is missing. It is no longer my main task, as it was when I was a student, to listen to my grandfather's story, to think about my own, and to read the stories, and stories about stories, that other Native writers tell. How can I get back to that place and still make a decent living for myself? One route surfaces as an option: PhD.

And, in strolls irony/trickster, once again, to laugh at me.

In the western world, the modern age, 2010 Canada, in order to "return" to a life lived like a story, I must complete what is commonly accepted as one of the most gruelling career paths out there (not to mention be a broke student for yet another five years of my life). To live and breathe stories, something that was embedded into community life in our "less colonized" days, and still pay my rent, I have to rise to the top of this academic game.

Oh irony/trickster, you've got me again!