Back to the Work

It’s a Friday evening as I sit down to write this post and I’ve officially been back to work for three weeks. I can’t believe how quickly that time has gone! Being on maternity leave during the pandemic has meant that for healthy and safety reasons, we’ve foregone time with family and friends we would have otherwise spent the last year with. And while I’ll probably be processing the sadness of that lost time for a little longer, I know there’s still much to be grateful for. This last year with my little family and our new baby has felt strangely insulated, but we were also able to spend a lot of time focussing on one another, and being able to focus on anything—much less something so positive—this last year feels like an absolute blessing. There’s been a lot of change and adjusting to do, and I’ve felt a need to maintain an almost continual state of acceptance about much of it. That hasn’t been easy, of course, and though I’ve done my best to manage the stress and anxiety of the times and go with the flow of things, it feels good to join the world again—to set intentions and make plans, however small.

The plans I’m making right now are primarily creative. I’ve spoken at length on this blog about how honouring creativity and telling stories fuels everything else that I do, and I’m super excited to resume my storytelling work in this next half of 2021. It was however, a definite challenge to write and edit this past year. As a result I’m more behind than I’d like to be on my book writing schedule (thank you everyone, for your patience with me). But! I am planning to release both The Fortunes of Ithaca and The Wall of Bones (the next Vampire Skeleton series title) this year, and I’m so excited about both of these books. I can’t wait to share them with the world :). I’m also really happy about the one thing that will make all this creative writing work a bit easier—this amazing little writing cabin that was a gift from my husband for our 5th wedding anniversary. I’ve been writing in it for the past few months and I’m amazed at how much it has already helped.

In the meantime, some of the smaller projects I’ve been working on over the last few years have come out into the world. I love writing speculative fiction but for sure have a special place in my heart for children’s books. This last year, I’ve been able to work on a few interesting pieces. This one is a short article for the children’s history magazine, Kayak. It appeared in their February 2021 issue and is about the Great Tree of Peace. It also features some of my art. Suffice it to say, I absolutely loved working on this project and am so grateful to the Kayak team for the opportunity. The second book that was released this last year was a Rubicon Inquiry title called The Birthday Gift. This was another really enjoyable project I worked on with my sister (who was the illustrator for the piece), and I’ll be sure to link the book once I have the chance :).

There are also some new projects in the works that I’ll be talking about in the near future, as well as a short story and poetry collection I’ve been working away at over the last few years. Some of the poems for this collection also appeared in a Hamilton Arts & Letters special edition last year, and I’m really looking forward to releasing the rest of them once the collection is ready. I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate comics and graphic novels, and have been practicing with some small form pieces that may be fun to include. We’ll see :).

Speaking of art, as many of you know, I started working on my art a lot more while I was finishing my doctorate. The art I was doing rather quickly overtook the small page I had built for it on this site, and so I’ve moved it over to a website of its own that you can now visit! Please feel free to check it out, if you’re so inclined. I’ll also be shifting some of my research articles away from this site, as those ideas also seem like they need their own place and space to grow. In some ways it feels funny to have so many different spaces, but my hope is that it will help those who are interested in a particular part of the work I do to stay connected to it in an easier way. All in all, I’m grateful and excited to move forward with my many projects and look forward to seeing the ways they’ll connect to each other.

And with that, I will end this blog. Happy May everyone! I hope you’re all finding your way in these strange times, and send my wishes for your good health and continued happiness as we move about the world. 

Happy creating,

S.

November and All the New Projects

Hi everyone and happy November! I’m just wrapping up a short vacation and have been enjoying the chance to catch up on some of my creative projects. October was a hectic but interesting month. I travelled to California for the first time to attend the 2019 International Conference of Indigenous Libraries, Archives, and Museums, which is organized by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums. It was such a great conference and it gave me a lot of ideas for things to do and ways to move forward at my work (I work at the the Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre in my community). 

I also attended a great event that Deyohahá:ge: cohosted with the Archives of Ontario towards the end of October. Over the summer and early fall then, I’d been busy thinking about and reading about archival practice, Indigenous knowledge and language revitalization, along with other interesting areas that have stemmed out of my various work and research projects. Because this blog is mostly a space for me to write about my (creative) writing and art, I’ve decided to create another place to write and share about these other areas in case anyone finds them as interesting as I do. In order to do that, I’ll be starting a new blog that focusses more specifically on my research. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes because I’ve always found so many intersections between what I do—writing, art, learning, researching, and trying to live a good, peaceful life, but I also recognize that each of these areas (writing, research, and art) has a life of its own. I’ve started to create the site and upload some content but it will be a few months or so before I launch it. So that’s something I’m looking forward to but in the meantime, I’m continuing on with my creative work—the work I treasure the most!  

I’ve said before that being in school for as long as I was took a toll on my creative process. This past month, I’ve been in rebuilding mode. Getting reacquainted with how I outline stories, how I set daily targets, how I set aside time for editing. I have seven projects to write across three different series to work on and I want to finish all of them within the next two years (a few of them already have first drafts and outlines), but finishing them will take time and focus. At present, I’m currently doing NaNoWriMo to get a draft of the The Lightning Song done, which is the second Cora Solomon story after The Fortune Teller’s Daughter. The moment I’m done that, I’ll be doing final edits on The Wall of Bones (The Vampire Skeleton series) and The Fortunes of Ithaca (Fortune & Fall series). In short, there's lots of exciting new stories on the way but it will take me some time to finish them up.  

Happily, there are other projects that I have finished that I’m really excited to share about. The first one is the follow up to the children’s book Treaty Baby. The new book is called, We Give Our Thanks. It’s illustrated (as Treaty Baby was) by my sister, Alyssa. I wrote the book two years ago, and she worked at the illustrations last summer. We released the book a few months ago and it’s one of my favourites!

The second project is a few poems and some art that appear in an upcoming issue of the Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine. I wrote a ton of poems over the last four years that I’ve been slowly putting together into a collection but for now, being able to share a few of them was nice. I’ll update with a link to the magazine in a future blog but in the meantime, here's one of the art pieces that was included in the edition. 

A third project is Akwa:ji:ya', another book in our Cayuga language series, which I didn’t write but have been having a lot of fun illustrating. I love working on the Cayuga books. I’ve been really doubling down on my Cayuga language learning the past few weeks and making efforts to speak as much as I can. I’m determined to level up my speaking this year and so a lot of my spare time is going into that!

And a last bit of work that is forthcoming is a short story that's part of an anthology launching in December. The book is called Bawaajigan and features a lot of wonderful work by several Indigenous authors. I’m excited for it and really love the story that's appearing in it.  I wrote it a few years back and it was inspired by dreams and some of my travels through Upper New York State.

Anyways, I’m very happy to share about these projects while I continue working on others. Being on vacation this last week has given me an opportunity to clear my head and sharpen my focus on what I want most and what I’m most grateful for: family, health, language proficiency, and creativity. There’s been a lot happening in our lives, in our community and in the world this year, and everyday there seem to be more and more reasons to think on and question how we can grow, change, make better decisions, and challenge ourselves to leave even less of an ecological footprint while still making a lasting, helpful impact on the people we like and love. For me, art, creativity and reflection is a huge part of navigating these questions and manifesting change in a positive way. I look forward to making more art for the rest of the year, and to start thinking about the projects the new year will bring! I hope you’re all well and until next time, happy creating :).  

S. 

Canoes and Other Thoughts

I’m drawn to stories that share the lives, adventures and experiences of women. Fiction and non-fiction. Poetry and Memoir. Quiet stories about someone’s life, or sweeping tales of their adventures. And of course, I am especially fond of science fiction and fantasy, so I love female protagonists in speculative fiction as well (Circe, The Broken Earth Trilogy, and the Their Bright Ascendency Trilogy are some recent favourites). There is courage, heartbreak and heroism across all of these different forms of stories and I’ve been inspired in different ways by each of them.

Recently, this interest has extended to wanting to hear and learn more from the female characters in Haudenosaunee legends. I’ve always been interested in our legends but now that my dissertation is done and defended, I’ve been spending my time reading through various story collections with more care and attention—an endeavour that requires its own post. As such, this blog holds some very preliminary thoughts about the stories I’ve read so far (a work in progress if there ever was one).

While reading, I came across a particular set of tales concerning a young man who lived with a cruel uncle. In both cases the story is titled after the young man even though in them the man is essentially rescued by a young woman (and in the other, two women) who help him escape his uncle. In one version, the young woman helps him escape with the help of her seemingly magical companion and her canoe (waiting at the nearby shore). I found this—and her—so interesting. I have been curious in the past about the lack of emphasis on the female heroines in the stories or legends I’ve read and am doing a closer read of the stories now to see just how pronounced this gap is (perhaps it is not so much as I think). This effort aside, I still found myself imagining a different title for the story, like “Young Woman Rescues Future Husband From Crazed Uncle”, because I was so curious to hear more about her.

From my learning over the years, I know there may be reasons I am not hearing more about her or from her perspective; that there are implicit biases and politics at play in the ethnographic work in which many of these stories came to be recorded, and choices made about whose story and what topics are being centred in written narratives. Perhaps there was more to her story, perhaps it’s even somewhere in the records—it’s too soon to say for my own inquiry whether it is or isn’t. And—perhaps not. This lack of record was something that came up while I was learning more about Jikonsaseh, the first clanmother, and it’s not quite so surprising that it’s coming up again. Other Indigenous scholars have written about the anthropological and ethnographic records—what they include and what they do not, how they do or do not resonate with our lived experiences as Indigenous Peoples, here and now, that might be missed in the way that our culture was documented or collected.

Nonetheless, while reading this tale about the unfortunate young man and his unscrupulous uncle, I found myself captivated by the woman’s story. How did she cultivate her powers? What are her powers? Where did she meet this dog that can change its size with the switch of her whip? How did they become friends? How did she know there was going to be trouble? What is her story? Clearly, these questions brought a lot of new thoughts and ideas to the surface, and I’ll continue to reflect on them as I continue my reading. All in all though, the imagery of her, her canoe, and her story has been on my mind for several days, and it eventually resulted in this new painting. 

A Woman and Her Canoe by Sara General

At the same time I was reading these stories, the the Two Row on The Grand was just concluding. This is an event in which a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people paddle down the Grand River together in a symbolic enactment of the Two Row Wampum, each in their respective rows. I haven’t personally been able to go on the event because of school and family commitments, but I’m very interested in canoeing and fortunate that our community offers the activity for free for our members every Wednesday at the Aka:we Canoe Club at Chiefswood Park—so my family and I are looking forward to trying that out. 

Finally, a few days ago as the Two Row on the Grand event was winding down, my brother-in-law reshared an old Facebook post he’d written that said, “Paddling is a great fun. Hodenosoni: were once renowned for their abilities to paddle great distances and navigate dangerous waters. Mobilizing fleets of canoes for war and trade. Now the women of Ohswe:ken, New Credit and Kahnawake are keeping the tradition alive. Nia:wen” (Deer, 2018). It was a post that reminded me of our people’s connection to canoeing and the way that Indigenous women keep our knowledges and practices alive—at a time when I was reading stories with similar themes.

Anyways, I’ve always found that reading our stories and legends help me to draw connections and make meaning of events and happenings in my life, at least when I’m paying attention. Admittedly, I’m not always paying attention and so the meaning-making doesn’t always occur the way it has in this post—but I do appreciate it when it does. It is nice to be connected to particular ideas or people (like the woman in the story), at particular times and across spaces. It is nice that different aspects of our stories resonate to different listeners, or readers, potentially at different times in our lives. This connection is one of the many powers of stories, really—the magic of them.

At any rate, I look forward to reading and sharing more thoughts as I continue reading, and I hope that there will be some more canoeing in my future. Til next time, happy creating everyone.

S.

Links:

More information about the Two Row on The Grand can be found at their website: http://www.tworowonthegrand.com/

Cheer Yourself On

A new, as of yet untitled painting I finished recently.

I took a vacation this past week and it was incredible. I listened to music. I binge-watched Supergirl. I relaxed. I did some art. I did some writing. I went to see Paw Patrol Live. It was amazing. It was like I spent time just existing and it was so, so refreshing. I also went for lunch with my husband and we spoke mostly Cayuga to one another. We also spoke Cayuga at the dinner table with the girls several times through the week.

I have to say, it was pretty amazing to know that even though it’s taken a long time—it’s happening. I’m learning language. I’m using language. We’re all using it—together, as a family. We’re filling our house with Cayuga and we can do even more if we continue to work at it. I needed to recognize this simple, good progress this week. I needed to give our family an enormous burst of love and affection for being awesome and encourage us to keep being awesome—to keep trying. We don’t do that enough. Cheer ourselves on. Encourage ourselves.

I am a busy person. Busy with work, busy with school. Busy with writing and art projects. Sometimes these different types of busyness blend together, as it did a few weeks ago when I presented at an Indigenous education conference I helped to organize. For a brief moment while I was standing there next to my PowerPoint (lol), it felt like all these different parts of myself got to exist in one space for twenty minutes or so: writer, researcher, language learner, mother, wife, artist. It felt good to feel them come together—even for a second—because it can be truly exhausting to pursue all of these different things all at once throughout the year. Hard to feel like there is enough space to be all of those things. And even though it’s hard, the truth is—I don’t want to give up any of it. It’s all connected. It all feeds each other.

This week was important then, because I got to think about how grateful I am that any of those things are in my life at all (rather than lament that I have so many interests, which I’m prone to do from time to time). I’ve worked a long, long time to have things like writing and language be in my life and moving forward from here—these are the things I am going to continue to prioritize. But the truth is, I’m going to prioritize all of it. Doing this means I need to continue to be careful with my time. Fortunately, I’ve learned some valuable lessons the last little while about what kind of space and energy I need to create for that work to flourish, and about how important it is to value my time and create boundaries around it so that I can be helpful, healthy and peaceful.

Part of this reflection and recommitment to being careful with my time comes from my ongoing reading about the concept of “deep work”. But it also comes from just living and experiencing the highs and lows of life—and the last few months have been filled with high points and low points. The high points were finding out that two proposals I worked on in May of this year were both approved. I’m excited about both of them for completely different reasons. The first project was for funding for a language immersion program for the Cayuga language. I’ve spent the better part of the last six years thinking about language and the Ogwehoweh Language Degree program, reading literature, talking with speakers and learners, hearing various kinds of feedback and then reflecting on how to improve and grow the language programming at my place of work. One of the most pressing issues I (and others) have observed is the need for an influx of highly proficient Cayuga language speakers and teachers for the degree (or any language program) to be sustainable in the years to come. Case in point—my husband was teaching three nights a week this term. My husband is an awesome speaker, but this isn’t a sustainable model for the program or my family. There is no question that adult immersion with effective teaching strategies and a well-laid out curriculum is the best and most expedient way to create new adult language speakers. And so, the proposal was written with these ideas in mind. There is a lot to say about this project, and I hope to share more about it as it moves forward, but for now, it is wonderful to have this opportunity to do this work.

The second proposal was for funding to host an Ogwehoweh Storytelling Festival. I’m excited for this one because ever since I started sharing my writing and books, a lot of people from my community have approached me with questions about writing and storytelling—many of them have writing and storytelling aspirations of their own. While I’m happy to share what I’ve learned with anyone, I thought it would be even more amazing to organize a festival where people could learn from other Indigenous writers and storytellers from Six Nations because Six Nations is a community where there are so many talented writers and storytellers working across multiple media. The planning is in the preliminary stages but the festival will happen in the fall of 2019, but in the lead up to it, there will be seven seminars focussing on a different topic (short story, poetry, script-writing, etc) that people can sign up for. I’m super excited for it and will be sharing more about it through my work.

Of course, where there are highs, there are lows. I don’t have as much to say about these, because I am fortunate that they pass with time, sleep, art, and music. I always find that for me, the lows are much more internal than external. Self-doubt. Self-criticism. Feeling like you aren’t doing enough or doing things the way other people think you need to do them. It’s times like these that I’m most happy to be a writer and an artist. Because I can watch something like Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” speech and remember that I’m not here solely to please anyone or live up to anyone’s expectations of who I am. And when those kinds of thoughts creep in—I can let them go, let those people go, and focus on making the art that only I can make. Being the best version of myself that I can be. And celebrate that in myself and others. It’s a good place to land, I think. And land I did.

Anyways—these are some of the projects that I’m about to dive into as I return from the break, along with more books, writing, teaching, revising of dissertations, and language learning. It is a full life. A happy life. And even though it feels crazy and overwhelming at times—I’m grateful for all of it.

Anyways, I am jumping back in now. There are so many writing projects and books coming. It’s going to be fabulous. So happy creating everyone! And don’t forget to cheer yourself on every once in awhile :).

S.

Language & Art & Red Rising Magazine

Over the last year and a half, I’ve done a lot of writing that has yet to find its way into the world. There are a ton of short stories and poems, blog posts and partial novel drafts sitting on my computer patiently waiting their turn to make their way into the world. And when all is said and done with my dissertation work, I intend to release most of that writing—to pair it up with the art I’ve done over the last two years and set it free into the world to find the people that it’s meant to.  

I’ve written before about what it’s like to try and stay focussed on a research project while so many terrible things keep happening in the world. In short—it’s been difficult. But in other ways, having to focus so intensely on something and to produce a dissertation in a relatively tight timeframe has been good for me. It’s made me question what I’m really doing with my time and why. It’s made me think about what it is that I really want. And as more time goes on, it’s made me think about the audience I’m writing and creating for. The who. The why. 

Ultimately, I realize that the majority of my efforts are for my children. So that they know the truth about who we are as Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island, that they understand what our responsibilities are, and that they have some insight into how their mother tried to fulfill those responsibilities in environments that were not always supportive or welcoming. I want them to see how when things were difficult for me—our stories, knowledges, songs and ceremonies anchored me and helped me withstand and weather all manner of storms. And I want them to know and see that I valued language enough to make time to learn it well enough to speak every day, even when the pathways I was on (earning a doctorate, for example) were pointing me in a very different direction (i.e., writing articles, presenting at conferences, teaching grad courses). 

You cannot split yourself very many ways before it begins to impact the quality of your effort, your health and your ability to produce good work. For me—I’ve come to the realization that the biggest contribution I can make is not to the field in which I research (education)—but in my ability to be able to speak our languages with my family, and most especially—with my children. I’m grateful to have gained some clarity at the end of this huge educational journey, about what my priorities really need to be.

That said, there are many things in this world that I value deeply, some of which have emerged out of western mainstream knowledge systems. I’ve visited elders in hospitals or nursing homes and been grateful there are facilities and western medicines that support their care. And I’ve been a part of ceremonies that you don’t really study for in school—that you learn by taking part in community, by having a community that is willing to help you learn, and a community that even after experiencing a lot of adversity, is still very committed to helping each other. All of this appreciation factors into how I see the world, how I make my choices, and how I think about or evaluate those choices after I’ve had some distance from them. Sometimes, I have to make adjustments. Sometimes, I have to make a new choice. 

My point is—that amidst all of this academic activity, thought and action, there are things that have helped me that I will always be grateful for. Experiences that helped me understand what I value at my core, and helped me find other people who share those values. Encounters that have helped me think about how I could be helpful. 

Language is one of those things. Definitely, absolutely. So is writing. And so is art. 

All of which brings me to a bit of exciting news!

A few months ago, I submitted a small piece of art to Red Rising Magazine that I made for an article my sister wrote, along with a small explanation of the piece and where it came from. I’m super happy to share that all of these pieces appear in the most recent edition of Red Rising Magazine which launched recently! It’s the language edition, and it’s available for order here. I hope you have a chance to check it out. It’s the first time that my art is appearing in a magazine and I’m super excited for it. It’s wonderful to flip through the pages and see a lot of beautiful art and stories about people who love Indigenous languages. And it comes at a time where I’m able to make even more space in my life for language—which is timely all on its own.

I love this piece. It's especially cool because this was the 100th piece I completed. I made this painting for Red Rising Magazine but displayed a working progress version of it at Woodlands Cultural Centre for Indigenous Art 2018. It's special for a lot of reasons!

Anyways, this is just a small, fun writing/art update in the midst of all the crazy work/life/research excitement that I am super grateful to be able to share. I hope you're having a great summer and I look forward to sharing more exciting news very soon! 

Nya:weh and happy creating!

S.