Indigenous Studies

            On Monday morning while working on my translation of "Complainte du progrès" by Boris Vian I tried to find the English equivalent to an appliance that translates directly as “a waffle pistol”. I thought it might be something that shoots the batter into the waffle iron but I couldn’t find anything like that.

            I worked out the chords for “Kawasaki” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I left home at noon for my first Indigenous Studies class. I only just remembered that morning where the Ramsey-Wright building is and how to get there. I had to turn left from College onto Huron and ride up to Harbord where the building is across from Robarts. It’s been at least three years since I had a class there and I think the last one was Children’s Literature. They’ve renovated the entryway and made it loungeier.

            There were two or three others in the lecture hall when I got there half an hour early. I did some reading of “Death of Judas” but then I got sleepy and dozed for a while.

            When the professor arrived he looked surprisingly like a professor in being a bald and slightly stout middle-aged man with a beard and glasses. He was wearing a pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up just below the elbow. He wore a brown and beige tie in patterns that might have been indigenous but I couldn’t say for sure. On top of the shirt was a buttoned up vest and he had on jeans and comfortable shoes that weren’t quite sneakers.

            He introduced himself to us as Kevin White. I hadn’t been certain just what “Indigenous Studies” would entail, since it could theoretically cover indigenous peoples all over the world like the Sami in Sweden or the Ainu of Japan. But Professor White clarified that this course would be on the indigenous people of North America.

            He said he just moved to Toronto a couple of weeks ago from upstate New York and that this will be the first time he’s taught a full year course.

            The course will focus on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee cultures but he admits that he is Haudenosauneecentric.

            He said the course would deal with some complicated engagements and difficult subject matter.

            Canada is ahead of the United States in the recognition of Indigenous people.

Our textbook is the third edition of Ways of Knowing: an Introduction to Native Studies in Canada by Yale Belanger. The book is not in yet but he said the preface and first chapter are available in PDF on Quercus. A student corrected him that the PDF is not up and neither is our course listed yet.

The full name for our course is “Introduction to Indigenous Studies: Foundations, History and Politics.

What professors normally call their “office hours” he will be calling “student hours”.

The first indigenous cosmological narratives were recorded in 1634.

The science of Anthropology has only been around for 100 – 120 years. Studies from before that time are referred to as being from the salvage ethnography period. Scholars were terrified that the indigenous people were going to be all dead within the next fifty years and so they went out to gather stories. These tales were all recorded as mythology.

We are now into the second or third generation of indigenous scholars.

Professor White surprised me when he told us that he’s Mohawk because he sure looks white.

When he crossed the border to live here Canada Customs wrote him down as a “settler”.  The Haudenosaunee call both sides of Lake Ontario home.

Indigenous culture has been either romanticized or lost.

There are PhDs in Indigenous studies that have never met a Haudenosaunee. There have been 125-150 dissertations on that culture alone.

He asked us if anyone knows what is happening in Hawaii right now. Someone answered that they are trying to put a big telescope in a sacred place and the Indigenous people are fighting against it. The main thing reported in the news is that Jason Momoa was at the protest.

He compared the course to building a house. The book is the foundation, the lectures are the framework.

He said it’s colder on this side of Lake Ontario but the southern side gets more snow.

He said that professor Ward Churchill got taken out of context in comments that he made about 9-11 in which he said that the attack on the World Trade Centre was a natural consequence of unjust US foreign policies. He lost his academic career but now he’s making a comeback.

Hitler studied the treatment of Indigenous people in order to learn how to deal with the Jews.

The professor told us that we each would be allowed one and only one “life happens” moment in regards to assignment deadlines.

He said he doesn’t care what citation style we use in our papers as long as we stick to one.

In the United States there are some federally recognized tribes, some state recognized tribes but some not recognized at all.

He said something about there being only three species with blood measured and it threw me off balance because I’d never heard blood talked about in terms of species. I asked him about it and I don’t think he meant that people are of different species. I think he was talking about the Indian blood laws. The Haudenosaunee recognize their members by matrilineal descent.

He said that the 2.5 cm margin criteria was once misunderstood by a student who made his essay text 2.5 cm wide.

For our essays we will have to submit a 200 word abstract proposal prior to the essay.

Our final exam will be in April.

We’re to read the preface and chapter one of Ways of Knowing.

He asked us how many indigenous people were in North America when Europeans arrived. There were various answers in millions but none as high as what he finally answered. He said that if one counts all of North America, including Central America and the Caribbean there were 300 to 400 million. I can’t find any estimate online that agrees with that figure. The most generous estimate I could find is 100 million.

North of the Rio Grande by 1900 there were only 40,000 to 50,000 left.

There was genocide.

There were licenses to hunt indigenous people. I don’t know if there were actual paper licences issued but in the late 1800s the government of California encouraged and even financed settlers and militias to kill indigenous men, women and children.

He said that Pocahontas was a victim of the slave trade and the sex trade. I understand how he would say that she had been a victim of the slave trade, but saying that she was a victim of the sex trade would be like saying that the slaves that built the pyramids were victims of the construction trade or a slave that works in the kitchen is a victim of the food trade.

James Cameron’s “Avatar” is a cross between Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves tarring three meter tall Smurfs with the hero the broken white guy.

We won’t be talking about residential schools until the end of the term.

Indigenous studies are catching up with the modern world.

He cut the class short and as usual for the first day there was no tutorial and so I was finished before 15:00. I rode slowly in easy gears up to Topcuts at Yonge and St Clair and it didn’t bother my hip or my knee. 

I only had to wait ten minutes for Amy to finish with another customer and to cut my hair. She told me that she had to keep it longer on top because it’s getting thinner there.

On my way home I stopped off at ABC Magazines on Yonge Street to look for Ways of Knowing. I didn’t find it but they had Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, which I suspect might be a secondary source for my Indigenous Studies course, so I bought it.

On the way down Yonge I noticed that Eliot’s Books has finally closed. I went west on College and stopped at She Said Boom and at Balfour but neither of them had the book either.

I had a late lunch of my last two pork ribs and took a late siesta. It was already evening by the time I got up. I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy poses as a wealthy businessman to win the hand of the beautiful daughter of a wealthy heiress. But there is a mix-up and the unattractive heiress thinks that Andy has proposed to her. She announces their engagement in the society pages and so Andy needs to get out of it. He goes to see the heiress but arranges for Kingfish to barge in, point a gun at Andy, say he’s cop and is arresting him for being a notorious criminal. The heiress asks Kingfish for a warrant and he starts searching his pockets for it. He tells Andy to hold his gun. Andy asks if he should keep pointing it at himself. Just then a real cop shows up to arrest the heiress and her daughter because they are notorious grifters posing as society people to take advantage of rich men.

The day before that the story was about Andy and Kingfish starting an employment agency. Their first client is Rochester who wants a better paying job with less work than he can get from Jack Benny. Their second client is Jack Benny who is looking for a more efficient and harder working valet. They hook Rochester up with Jack Benny but realize they are guilty of industrial bigamy.

I worked on my journal.

I grilled the two beef ribs that I had in the freezer and had one for dinner with three small potatoes and some gravy while watching Wagon Train.

Coincidentally but somewhat appropriately the story was “A Man Called Horse”, based on the Dorothy Johnson short story and later a hit film starring Richard Harris. It begins with a white man dressed as a Crow warrior taking an old and very ill Indigenous woman from a Crow graveyard. He finds the wagon train and while Ole Mother is being treated the man tells his story to the Major and Flint. He had been a legal clerk in Boston and had fallen in love with the boss’s daughter. When he asks for Lucinda’s hand in marriage his boss says it’s out of the question because he’s adopted and a nobody. Lucinda rejects him after finding out about his past. He decides to travel out west where he is captured by Yellow Robe and his warriors. He is made a slave and given to Yellow Robe’s mother. He takes on the name of Horse. He falls in love with Yellow Rob’s sister Bright Star and she with him but because he is a slave their union is impossible. Horse’s one male friend in the tribe is a boy named Little Hunter. When they are hunting together they are attacked by a Sioux warrior. Horse kills the attacker and when he returns with the prize of two horses he is no longer a slave. He marries Bright Star and tries to take her back to his people but the way she is treated at the first trading post causes him to return to the Crow village. When they go in battle against the Sioux, Yellow Robe is killed. Bright Star gives birth but both she and the baby die. He prepares to leave but goes to the burial ground to say goodbye to Bright Star where he finds the old Mother. She recovers at the wagon train and they move on together.

The Richard Harris movie made the hero from England but the original story had him be from Boston. Buffy St Marie said it was the whitest movie of all.

Dorothy Johnson also wrote the story, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “The Hanging Tree”.