On Saturday morning I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du
progress" by Boris Vain.
I
memorized the second verse of “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg. I
had to rethink some of my rhymes because I saw that all of the first lines
rhyme with each other, all his second lines as well, and so on.
I
didn’t go to the food bank and probably wouldn’t be going for the next few
weeks because it takes me at least a day to write about it and I have to focus
on school. Between now and the beginning of December I have five assignments to
hand in.
I
washed the seven board wide area under the shelf on the threshold between the
living room and the kitchen. The main dirty part is a strip of floorboards that
I glued down myself on top of a concrete ramp that I made there more than ten
years ago. There had originally been a toe-stubbing jump in elevation between
the two rooms because long before I moved in they used to be in separate
buildings with a brick wall in between. I’m quite proud of the ramp that I made
because I didn’t know how to do it but it worked out well anyway. I cut the
floorboards from a section of the kitchen floor in front of the cupboards that
I’d intended on replacing with plywood and covering with tiles, but never did.
The floorboards have a lot of glue on them that did not all come off when I
cleaned the first seven boards and so it still looked patchy even after being
washed, brushed and scraped. I think it would take an electric sander to fully
strip the glue off. I have thirteen boards to go to finish that ramp and so
maybe I’ll go over all twenty again in the next session.
I
had three corn crackers and some old cheddar for lunch.
I
finished reading the first chapter of Ways of Knowing. It paints a
picture of the North American First Nations people as having a lot of dogmatic
beliefs and that a Native person that is an atheist would have a hard time
fitting in to any of the communities. It made me think that atheism seems to be
mostly a white phenomenon and that maybe it arises from a sense of privilege.
One interesting
and alarming statistic was that of the 53 Indigenous languages in Canada, in
the next ten years only three will be left: Ojibway, Cree and Inuktitut. But
that quote came from 1992. According to the itk.ca website there are 60
languages (UNESCO says 70) and all endangered but none of those are dead yet.
However speaking of those languages has dropped by half since 1996.
In
the afternoon I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this
story Andy wants to avoid any more breach of promise suits but there is one
woman he proposed to a few days before and she was recently seen shopping for
her trousseau. He learns that soldiers can’t be sued for breach of promise and
so he borrows a uniform from someone who's just been discharged, puts it on and
goes to see the girlfriend. It turns out she is getting married but not to
Andy. While he is there dressed as a soldier he meets the woman’s father, who
is a major. Andy tries to lie his way through but when he tells the major where
he is stationed he says it just so happens he’s on his way there and he’ll give
him a lift. His battalion ships out in two days. The only funny line is near the
beginning when Andy is telling Kingfish about a woman that he once dated who
had so many chins he couldn’t tell where her mouth was to kiss her. His
solution was to hold a piece of candy in front of her face and to kiss the part
that opened up for it.
I
took a bike ride to Bloor and University but this time I took Queen first.
Queen is a lot less smooth eastbound than westbound. On University I felt my
left crank-arm was loose. I stopped and the nut was about to come off. Luckily
I carry the socket to tighten it in my backpack. I think I caught the nut just
in time before it would have fallen off.
I
rode along Bloor to Lansdowne and then went south to No Frills. I bought
grapes, peaches, a bag of red potatoes, a strawberry rhubarb pie, mouthwash,
kitchen bags, yogourt and kettle chips.
I
saw my next-door neighbour Benji in the hall on my way out and on my way in.
Both times he joked about me wearing blackface. Both times he also said people
are making a big deal out of nothing. While we were talking our upstairs
neighbour David came in. He wanted to buy me dinner but I told him I’d be
making dinner.
I
started reading Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian. I bought it while
looking for Ways of Knowing, which we were told in our first Indigenous
Studies lecture is the required reading for the course. I picked it up thinking
that it might be mentioned as secondary reading for our course and also because
I’ve read some stories by King that I enjoyed. I just found out that I
accidentally made a good decision because the King book is required reading for
this course. But the syllabus offers no reading list and I only figured out
when the lecture for next Monday was said to be on “King chapters 1 and 2” that
the professor was probably talking about Thomas King. This is the most shoddily
prepared course I’ve come across at U of T.
The
Inconvenient Indian is much better written and more interesting than Ways
of Knowing. He said that the second biggest massacre by Natives had a loss
of 295 settlers in the small town of Almo, Idaho in 1861. The thing is that it
didn’t even happen. The whole story was made up. The largest massacre of whites
happened in 1813 in Alabama with a loss of 400. After that the largest massacre
was 108, then 90 and then much smaller numbers. On the other hand there are
plenty of massacres of Natives by white people. In 1598 Spanish conquistador,
Juan de Onate killed 800 Acoma in what is now New Mexico and cut off the left
foot of every man over 25. In the 17th Century another 600-700 were
killed during one massacre in Connecticut. Throughout the 19th
Century massacres took place in which 200 were killed, some tribes putting up
no fight whatsoever.
I
had an egg and a spinach pastry for dinner with a beer while watching Wagon
Train. In this story the train is crossing the desert on their way to
California and it’s running out of water. Flint has gone ahead to the only
spring that isn’t dry but before he takes a drink he sees animal bones and
realizes the spring is poisoned. Unfortunately his horse drinks before he can
stop it and he has to put it out of its misery. He makes his way back to the
wagon train on foot but is sick and delirious from dehydration by the time he
gets there. There is only one other man that knows the way to Fort Paiute and
that’s Monty Britton, who is traveling with his wife Betty. The Major doesn’t
trust Britton because he thinks he is a deserter from the military. Britton
denies he is a soldier. Finally, when there are only two canteens of water
left, Britton takes them, steals a horse and sneaks off. A day or so the
cavalry arrives with a water wagon and Britton sick in the back from having
given all his water to his horse and ridden through a sandstorm to reach the
fort. The commanding officer is Betty’s father and it is revealed that Britton
never deserted but was dishonourably discharged because he commanded his men to
retreat in the face of battle and caused several deaths. But he was only
suddenly in command when his senior officer was killed and he may have been
following the last orders of that officer. He could have appealed the
court-martial but felt betrayed by the army and left. In the end it looks like
he's going to be back in the army.
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