One-Piece Suits Are Closer to Naked than Bikinis

            I worked on memorizing the first verse of “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian and memorized the first three verses of  "La noyée" by Serge Gainsbourg.

            Microsoft Word crashed on me again while I was continuing to transcribe the poem "Au lecteur" by Charles Baudelaire. I installed Apache Open Office and "Au lecteur" was my first document in that program. I put it on a flash drive to take to school with me.

            At the Ramsay Wright building a guy asked if I had the key to a lab. I told him that they don’t give the keys to labs to English students because we might create Frankenstein's monster.

            There was no class ahead of us in the lecture hall. I plugged in my laptop and tried to transcribe a little more of “Au lecteur". Some students behind me were saying that our textbook finally arrived on Thursday. It made me wonder why Professor White hadn’t emailed us about it so I could have swung over there to buy it during my bike ride on Friday. As it was I didn't get the required reading done and neither did most of the other students.

            I tried to go online with my laptop but I couldn’t connect, despite the fact that my laptop had been set up two years before to access the U of T network.

            The professor gave us our “Finding Place assignment". It had been due on October 21 but he’s extended it to November 18. The assignment has two parts. We have to find four Indigenous places at or near our original homes and another four in the Toronto area. Of those four our TA will pick two for us to visit and write about. Some suggestions were actual Native run places like the Pow Wow Café. I asked about places that have no supervisors or plaques, like the indigenous village that used to be at the mouth of the Humber River. Someone asked if they could interview people but he said there are ethical issues about human subject studies. We have to submit our proposals this Friday.

            The final assignment should be three to seven pages long and it’s worth 20% of our mark.

            The professor mentioned that our textbook was in but when a student announced that it had sold out he exclaimed, "They're killing me!"

            In the lecture he talked about finding the middle ground between the indigenous viewpoint and that of settlers.

            History was a collection of oral traditions. Is a standard version necessary? In the west we need a standard narrative.

            He drew the diagram of an intersection with two cars that have just had an accident in the middle and a closed circuit camera on the corner. How many points of view do we need to know what happened?

            Another example he used was 9-11. What happened?

            We take into account in a cyclic sense how things have changed.

            We have the point of view of someone from outside the natural world versus that of someone from within. Context means everything and both sides of Custer’s last stand are important.

            Stories are understood on an individual basis.

            He asked students to Google something related to Indigenous people and to report the number of results and how long it takes. A Native woman in the back Googles Orange Shirt Day and gets 429 million results in 4.5 seconds. September 30 is Orange Shirt Day to honour indigenous children that were taken away from their parents and placed in residential schools. The day after I tried and got almost 2 billion results in 0.45 seconds.

            He asked us how many pages deep we go when we search for something online. Most people raised their hands to “one". I tend to go three pages deep and the professor said he usually goes five.

            He says in the United States there were boarding schools for indigenous children too.

            Do songs make you think of points in your life? Do you still sing the ABC song to yourself?

            Some claimed that Christian hymnals helped Native people remember their stories.

            Which presidents were good speakers? Obama was good but Bush wasn’t. Trump is in a class by himself called "liar liar pants on fire".

            He mentioned a book called A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. He said that it’s told not through the eyes of the dominant culture.

            Where did Columbus land? He said on the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic but it was on Guanahani, which became San Salvador in the Bahamas. I found out that the Santa Maria was owned and captained by a Basque named Juan de la Cosa and several members of his crew were also Basque and so there was already an indigenous connection. Some speculate that Columbus was actually also Basque.

            Columbus's men almost mutinied. It was actually the Basques that almost mutinied.

            The professor didn't know that his Columbus Day is the same day as our Thanksgiving.

            What is widowed land?

            Some claim that the Indigenous population in North America at the point of contact was less than the current 2.7 million population of Toronto. The widely accepted estimate is that there were 15 to 19 million but by the year 1900 there were 250 to 350 thousand. That is a 95% loss.

            What caused this loss? The plague and what used to be called “The American Holocaust” before the term got pushed back because that would mean someone would have to take the blame.

            Lord Geoffrey Amherst took blankets from a smallpox ward and distributed them to Indigenous people.

            The decline in the indigenous population caused the buffalo population to rise to 60 million up until the 1850s.

            He said there's an overpopulation of deer right now in the United States. He's hunted five years but only gotten two deer.

            The Indigenous population of Hispaniola almost became extinct from 1492 to 1535.

            He said Mexico had 25 million Aztec in 1519 but my research says the Aztec empire had 5 million people. 

            The Spaniards came for glory, god and gold but not in that order.

            Assimilation and acculturation are not interchangeable.          

            Assimilation is a coercive technique. Some of the greatest stories have been written about resistance to assimilation. Star Treks Borg: “You will be assimilated”.

            Those fighting assimilation have been known by various names such as the resistance, insurgents and terrorists.

            Acculturation is a blending of the best of both societies into melting pots, mosaics and stews. The professor said he was getting hungry.

            The idea of freedom during the French Enlightenment was based on the Indigenous American concept of freedom.

            In a consensus all don't have to agree but they agree that they can agree.

            US politics is about one number: 51 because there are 100 senators.

            We gravitate towards like-minded people.

            How long has the general population been literate? It exploded about 500 years ago.

            Stained glass windows were telling stories since long before literacy.

            Who can tell Indigenous stories?

            A myth was perpetuated that Indigenous people did not own land. Haudenosaunee women owned the clearings and the forests belonged to the men. There were always territorial boundaries.

            The rules of the dish with one spoon:

Take what you need and use it all.

Leave some for future generations.

Leave the dish clean.

            Agriculture was practiced by most tribes.

            Indigenous people were explorers. How else would the Haudenosaunee have an alligator dance?

            The professor asked where up here outside of a zoo have you seen an alligator. I said, “In a restaurant.” He asked if it had been alive or dead. I told him it had been on a plate. He declared that alligator actually tastes pretty good.

            In tutorial we talked about the colonial idea that North American land had been empty when Europeans arrived.

            Pre-contact was oral while post contact was written.

            Safia asked what was taken away. Someone said that boys were made to cut their hair in residential schools. The language, sundance and the potlatch among many other traditions were also suppressed.

            Language carries history.

            In the Caribbean the Terinas and the Arowak were eliminated. I asked what about the Carib Indians but she said that was the Arowak. But I don’t know what she means because Caribs are still on the islands and the mainland. The Terena are the indigenous people of Brazil. The Arawak came to the islands before the Carib. The Carib/Taino people are an Arawak subgroup.

            Indigenous suicides in the Attawapiskat First Nation James Bay happen in a diamond rich area where the Native people are extremely poor.

            We separated into two groups and our group discussed the question, “What does the cover image of Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian say about the marketing of the dead Indian in the era of the 1950s when it was painted?”

            Most of the discussion was between a very intelligent Indigenous woman and myself.

            The painting depicts one big ship and one Indian with churning waters in between. The ship is bright in the light while he is in the shadows and foliage but his back is lit by a red light, perhaps from a fire. The man is wearing a feathered headdress indicating that he is a leader and his spear is pointed away while he is raising his hand in what looks like a gesture of greeting. It’s not a very realistic image because of how close the waves are with no beach in between.

This was an advertisement for a shipping company and the marketing seems to be to tell customers that they have access to remote, exotic places where the resources are still pristine and where will be no problem from the natives.

Safia asked if we could think of any modern marketing campaigns that use Indigenous people. I said “Lakota" and the Native woman next to me smiled and said, “So exotic!"

I asked Safia about the Finding Places assignment because I wanted to do some research into a story that is well known in my family about two violent encounters he had with a “French Indian”. I would like to find out where home would have been for this “French Indian”. She said I should go for it.

Safia and I walked out together as I told her that my mother seemed to be terrified of Indians. I recounted how an Indian had emerged from our cedar forest at the east end of our farm and walked across the field to our house. She let him come in for a drink of water when he asked but she was clearly frightened. I assume he was headed west to cross the border.

I went straight to the help desk at Robarts to deal with the issue of not being able to connect to the U of T wifi with my laptop. The

            Gordon tried several certificates as well.
            Gordon comes from the Pacific Mall area of Markham. I told him my daughter was born not far from there.

            We'd checked my password and it worked to log onto Quercus but after I'd been there for almost two hours I wondered if the password was actually the problem. I'd been told when I set up my tablet there for wifi two weeks before that my password might be a future problem because there are new security criteria. Finally we changed my password to eleven figures from eight, I added a capital letter and three more letters and it still didn't work but after about fifteen minutes it kicked in.

            I checked to see if our Indigenous Studies textbook was there in the library but it was out and I think it might be the wrong edition anyway.

            I stopped at the U of T Bookstore to double check and I was told that the textbook has been ordered from Nelson and it might be in later this week.

            By the time I got home it was too late to take a siesta or even to do my afternoon exercises. It was almost time to start dinner.

            I emailed my cousin Glen

            I grilled the three steaks I'd bought on Saturday and had one with a potato and some gravy while watching the rest of the Annette Funicello documentary. When she signed up to do the Beach Party movies with Frankie Avalon, Walt Disney reminded her that she had an image to uphold and asked her never to wear less than a one-piece bathing suit. Maybe that was for the first movie, since there are lots of photos of her in a bikini for those films. I’ve always thought one-piece swimsuits are sexier than bikinis. But then no piece bathing suits are sexier than one-piece bathing suits. The one piece is closer to nakedness in that it’s form fitting whereas the bikini seems like a lot of clothing.