Marxist Lennonist

            On Monday morning I started song practice singing my translation of “Le poinconneur des Lilas”. By the time I finished I noticed I was singing in French but didn’t remember where I’d switched languages. Maybe I’m becoming subconsciously bilingual.

I got more than half of  “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian memorized.

            I finished posting my translation of “Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais” by Serge Gainsbourg and started memorizing his “Vu de l’extérieur” (External view). He's telling someone they are beautiful on the outside but ugly inside so they should stay away.

            I spent 45 minutes reading the chapter on Winkelman from Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. I’d never heard of Winkelman but apparently he was a German scholar of Greek literature who hated Germany and German literature and was a big influence on Goethe. He worked out of Rome and became quite well known for his books on Greek lit and art. When he finally returned to visit Germany he received a hero’s welcome but shortly after that he was murdered by one of his many young lovers.

            Reading made me sleepy so I took a siesta from 9:30 to 11:00.

            I planned on voting on my way home from class and so I gathered up my voting card and put my non-wallet-sized birth certificate between the pages of a book in case they would ask for it. It went online to see who was running in Parkdale. Besides the Liberals, the Conservatives, the New Democrats (The party is 57 years old. How long can they call themselves “new”?), the Greens, the Purple’s Peepee of Canada, The Communists and the Radical Marijuana Party there were no other choices. Why is there never a Rhino or Pirate candidate in Parkdale? Also isn’t the Marijuana Party more than a little redundant now that pot is legal?

            When I got to school there was another class in our room and so I sat in the hall and read more about Winkelman.

            Professor White was a bit late. We began by talking for quite a while about our Finding Place essay and everybody seemed quite confused about the format. My impression is that it’s extremely wide open as long as we talk about the places we selected.

            The professor talked about the torture tree in Cuylerville, New York. In 1779 George Washington sent troops to destroy Native villages on the Genesee River. One troop ran into a group of Seneca and most of the soldiers were killed. The ones that weren’t were supposedly tortured. Washington had the nearby villages obliterated.

            The professor had a problem with Thomas King’s “dead Indians” reference in The Inconvenient Indian when he said that North Americans love dead Indians while live Indians are invisible.

            We talked about leadership and governance.

            Indigenous people don’t just choose leaders. It’s tied into cultural identifiers, place and community. The plains Indians have a different chief selecting criteria than the Haudenosaunee. Leaders are selected based on service and respect.

            Today was Election Day in Canada and in our system the majority wins. Someone said there could be a coalition.  He said that could never happen in the United States.

            He told us that in the US citizens can’t talk to their representatives unless thy go to $500 fundraisers.

            Chiefs are sometimes appointed for life in a hereditary position but not always guaranteed for life. Plains Indians traditionally choose their chiefs for their bravery in acts like snatching someone’s weapon in battle or counting coup, which involves touching the enemy rather than killing them. Unlike in a European monarchy the wealth of chiefs is sometimes determined by how much they can give away.

            With the Haudenosaunee it’s the clan mothers that select the chiefs. The clan mother is equally a leader but male leader plays a different role. I was confused by the difference between the two roles. Haudenosaunee chiefdom is not hereditary. The clan mothers bestow the title or take it away.

            Someone said that it was 100 years ago today that women won the right to vote in Canada. I think it was January 1, 2019 but we didn’t have a federal lection for women to vote in until three years later.

            Consensus is arriving where everybody’s voice feels valued.

            We probably all can agree that everyone should stop their cars at stop signs but not everyone does it.

            Who has the authority in this class? Can we have the professor removed? Yes. 

            If anyone has power long enough it will corrupt them.

            It is a myth that all indigenous people were hunter-gatherers. Three-quarters of today’s diet came from contact with western hemisphere. The tomato, corn, beans and potatoes are not indigenous to Europe.  I see that the tomato is native to western South America. Corn came from Mexico. Beans came from all over the world but I think the vine type came from the Americas and they were planted so they would climb on corn stalks. I knew potatoes came from South America.

            Having a relationship with plants is important. Existing as hunter-gatherers alone would have required several acres per person.

            There were trade networks. Rivers were highways and combined with portage crossings one could traverse the continent. Pipestone is found all over North America but it is only indigenous to Minnesota. The Haudenosaunee borrowed the alligator dance from the Seminoles but the Seminole later lost some of the words and borrowed them back. Obsidian knives can be sharper than a razor. Stone knives break but they can be replaced more quickly than steel.

            Animals don’t fight at the waterhole.

            Most of the people under Greek democracy were not free. Indigenous democracy had individual freedom.

            Freedom is tempered by responsibility. What if we had to be responsible for every word we say? Professor White declared, “I own what I say.”

            What is a sovereign? Kings in the old days and nation states now. Indigenous nations are also sovereign.

            Canada is still making treaties.

            Changing the name in the United States from American Indian to Native American often muddies the legal waters.

            The Gutenberg press created literacy of the masses. Before that stories were told through stained glass. I would argue that songs were more important for spreading stories since not everybody went to church.

            Professor White thinks that Indigenous culture influenced the United States constitution.

            From Canada to South America only one country only one country recognizes that the Earth has rights. He said it was Ecuador and implied that it has something to do with it having an indigenous president. Someone corrected him that it’s Bolivia.

            The Law of the Rights of Mother Earth is a Bolivian law passed in 2010. Evo Morales is the Indigenous president of Bolivia. Ecuador had a less defined law two years earlier recognizing the rights of a natural entity.

            The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted in 2007. It began in 1923 and 1925 with the works of two Haudenosaunee chiefs.

            They objected to the word “population” and so they used “peoples”.

            If you tell Indian people they can’t be Indians for 500 years nobody says anything. If you tell white people they can’t be Indians on Halloween they blow up.

            Clan mothers wouldn’t give power to someone that wants power.

            He takes a moment to praise Obama and to complain about Trump’s lack of empathy.

            In North America we have rights but what are our responsibilities. What if university was free after four years service in either the military or the Peace Corps?

            Someone said that the Peace Corps is colonialist.

            Professor White talked a bit about his experience in the Korean War.

            College culture robbed the United States of its trade's people.

            Each Indigenous nation had ways of engaging with the world.

            They did have land ownership but not on an individual basis. Women owned the clearings and men owned the forests.

            There were forums for airing grievances. Public debates occurred but without shouting and name-calling. The understood the importance of diplomacy and it wasn’t about quid pro quo.

            The professor said students teach him. Back when the Haudenosaunee was just starting the first casino in New York State it had a fifty-fifty chance of succeeding. A student told him that if it does succeed then New York would legalize gambling and she was right.

            He showed us a slide of wampum belts. Creation is how humans and the spiritual world function. He asked us what stands out about some of the wampum belts. I said that one of them has people on it. There are thirteen people for each of the thirteen colonies.

            Another belt represents the dish with one spoon.

            The Hiawatha belt has a tree in the middle. Some say that belt inspired the US Constitution.

            Most wampum belts are not horizontal. They are mnemonic devices that hold history. They mark the beginning of an agreement.

            At tutorial only four students showed up. Concerning my Finding Place assignment I asked Safia if she could pick the two villages on each side of the Humber River for me to write on because they are easier for me to get to. She said I don’t actually have to go to the places, and besides, if I’ve posted my choices she’s already made her selections. Safia says that she knows our Finding Place assignment is confusing. She told me that I was probably right after all that the professor would not be able to get caught up with the syllabus in his lectures. He’s fallen two lectures behind schedule. I said that I don’t mind that rambling kind of lecture style as long as it doesn’t affect my mark. I added that I sort of like it and told her about taking Canadian Poetry with George Eliot Clark, who is a master of the rambling lecture. She said, “He’s a black guy who’s always smiling and he’s an activist? I've worked with him!"

            Safia has gotten a lot of emails from students who are confused about the assignment and she finds it confusing as well. She and the other TA sat down with the professor to talk with him about it. She said she doesn't want to say anything against Professor White but she obviously is frustrated with him. She taught this course last year and it's clear that she would rather be teaching it this year as well.

            She warned us that the majority of our assignments are happening next term. That works out better for me since this will be my only course next term.

            We talked about our textbook and how not all Indigenous Canadians agree with it.

            I had thought that Yale Belanger is Indigenous but she said he's a white guy.

            We talked about treaties and I mentioned that Nunavut seemed to have been a pretty good deal. She seemed to suggest that not all Inuit are happy with it. Nunavut is almost the size of Mexico.

            She mentioned the Indian Act, Terra Nullias and doctrines of discovery.

            She said Africa has reserves too and that there are Somalians on reserves in Kenya.

            She said that in western Canada there had been a law for sixty years whereby Natives on reserves needed a pass in order to be allowed to leave. I told her I'd never heard of that. She said she didn't want to debate it with me. I wasn't debating the facts but rather trying to understand them. I asked when this had taken place and she said from 1855 to 1915. That made more sense, as it's certainly not anything I'd heard of in my lifetime.

            I looked it up later and it was implemented in 1885 in Saskatchewan after the Northwest Rebellion. It was meant to be a temporary emergency measure but it hung on for sixty years. In 1893 the Northwest Mounted Police protested the pass system because it wasn’t even technically legal and wanted it ended but one Indian Affairs commissioner overruled the police. Another Indian Affairs Commissioner said it was illegal. The problem was that Indian agents had a lot of power in the communities because they served as judges and supervised commerce.

            Clint Eastwood did a film about residential schools. I see that Eastwood executive produced the Canadian movie Indian Horse. He was very surprised that this happened in Canada.

            She asked us to think about how we are all treaty people and to find out what treaty people are. I looked this up and it means that every use of land that we have in Canada exists because of a treaty. Buying and selling property can happen here because of a treaty. Benefiting from resources here happens because of treaties.

            Despite the complaints about Professor White's rambling lectures, our tutorial was a bit disorganized as well.

            I told Safia that she could be the sister of my upstairs neighbour David as they have the same features, even though he's Ethiopian and she's Somali. I said he's a Falasha, but she first heard, “He's a philosopher.”

            Before going home I went north of my place to Parkdale Public School to vote. I noticed that among the names of candidates with their parties on the end was one name with ML after it. I asked the person that had checked my identification what ML stood for. He didn't know and so he asked someone else. She didn’t know but then they both called to another guy who explained that ML stands for Marxist Leninist. The Communist party was already separately on the ballot. I exclaimed, “Marxist Leninist AND Communist!” One of the workers affirmed, “We run the gamut in Parkdale!” The guy that answered my question said, “I can’t tell you the difference between the two. I just know what they are called.” I was surprised that all through that day no one else had asked my question. Was it because everybody knew what it meant or because everybody just knew whom they were going to vote for and didn’t care? I’m guessing it was the latter.

            I went home and had a lat lunch of my last pork chop with cranberry sauce and some yogourt with honey.

            I worked on typing out my lecture notes.

            For dinner I had my last chicken leg with a potato and gravy while watching Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen.

            In this story Josh arrives in Benson, Arizona and the sheriff is relived he’s not there for bounty hunting but to take a little break. Two bounty hunters named Jarrett and Meadows show up with a dead bounty that turns out to have been the town’s mayor. A few years before he had been an outlaw under a different name and the bounty hunters had found out about it. They have a whole book full of unclaimed bounties and they invite Josh in on their business. Josh wants nothing to do with them and so they conclude that Josh must be in town waiting for something big if he’d turn down their lucrative offer. They begin to follow him around town to find out what he’s up to, but what he is up to is a vacation. He tries to make time with the beautiful saloon owner Helen Martin and she is interested until she finds out that Josh is also a bounty hunter. She explains that it might be all right for them to be seen together if Jarrett and Meadows weren’t following him around all the time. Josh comes up with a plan to get rid of them making use of Helen’s artistic talent. He has her make up two fake wanted posters, one each for Jarrett and Meadows. Josh goes to each man separately and shows him the other’s poster. He tells each man that he’s got something big going worth $5000 but he can’t work with a wanted man. This sets Jarrett and Meadows against each other. When they get into a gunfight the sheriff arrests them for disturbing the peace but while they are in jail he will find something else they are wanted for and have them charged.