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.

The Long September

September is usually my favourite month of the year, given that it heralds the start of fall, the start of school and the start of a new year for me—as my birthday falls in September. But, as it has all year, 2020 continues to reshape the familiar and expected. Case in point—I originally wrote this post on September 1st, and then just became completely consumed in getting my six-year-old ready for her Cayuga language immersion class (choosing to follow the paper option because the internet where I live is so terrible), and then felt like it was hard to know what to write about when there were so many things on my mind and in the news cycle that were affecting my community and Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island. I’ve also had a tremendously hard time letting go of the summer—a definite first for me. 

And while I am someone who thrives on creating things: books, art, and stories, my great unwavering hope for this entire year has been for the continued good health of my family, my loved ones, my community members—the entire world, really. Still, it is only now, as we head into the last few months of 2020, that I’m able to fully process that this “new normal” will likely be the way of things for another year, if not more. We have been told all along that we’re in this for the long haul; that we’re grappling with change of enormous proportions, and witnessing firsthand how long it takes for humankind to learn about and develop a resilience to new ailments and illnesses. 

All of this makes it feel impossible to take anything for granted, and yet, there seems to be an open invitation to do just that, especially in these these days when goods and services are delivered almost instantly (depending on your location) and where anything can be streamed or consumed on a whim (also depending on your location). There is this sense, something approaching an expectation perhaps, that there should be immediate and unfettered access to the things we want. And this too, is not so, because, of course this is only one way the world can feel. For many, the world is experienced in a vastly different way, one where gaining access to goods and services is difficult, if not impossible and where seeking help might not always feel or be safe. Where seeking justice is even less so. Indeed, as I write this, members of my community are being targeted by police and the Ontario judicial system for drawing attention to the still unresolved land matters our community has been actively been seeking to address for hundreds of years using a variety of available mechanisms, and all while the land is further developed. These are hard things to watch for many reasons, not the least of which is that there appears to be no sign that the history of this matter will be well understood and approaching resolve by the time my own children, and the children of many of the people who I attended school with in Caledonia, are grown.

And now we are here, on September 30, a day known across Turtle Island as #OrangeShirtDay, in which we collectively remember and honour the experiences of our children and family members who were taken from their families and placed in residential schools for the purpose of cultural genocide. Some of those children never returned home, and the impacts of attending these schools for those who did, have been felt through the generations. It is important to remember these happenings, even as we work to recover, repair, restore, rebuild what was lost—such as we can. And yet—as recently as a week ago, I saw mean-spirited, hateful and inhumane social media posts calling for the reopening of these schools in response to the exercise of treaty rights by our Indigenous brothers and sisters on Turtle Island’s east coast. To me, this kind of hateful response to the exercise of inherent and treaty rights is not only deeply disappointing, it’s another example of how the desire and effort to eradicate and assimilate Indigenous Peoples is very much tied to the intent to subsume land and resources. To own and control them.

#LandBack. #OrangeShirtDay. These movements are connected and they always will be, until efforts to confront systemic racism include a genuine and fulsome examination of the purpose, intent, and structure. For until that intent is examined with a truthful, honest lens, and shifts are willingly made along every policy corridor, it is difficult to see a future where reconciliation between the Canadian State and Indigenous Nations will ever be possible. But I am a hopeful person, something that is hard to be when people have and are losing their lives to this inaction and the biases, attitudes and prejudices it fosters. And so I know that change of this magnitude will be slow, even as I know that the state appears to actively fight its own efforts to restore peace and justice at times. The response to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal confirming Canada’s discrimination toward First Nations children through the child and family services program are just one example of many that signals the road will remain long and arduous, and the discussions equally so.

Slow or not, we need this machine to reckon with itself. Just as we need to focus on fulfilling our own responsibilities and honouring our own intent in the meantime, however we can, however we are called. It is a lot of work. And it looks different for everyone. Some are called to language. Some are called to ceremony. Some are called to organize. Some are called to care for others. Some to art, to law, to writing, to teaching, to learning, to gardening, to entrepreneurship, to health care, to leadership, to archaeology, to museum work, to academia, to dance, to film, to music. And some are called to defend, with their bodies and their presence, on land and on water.

All of this work comes with its own challenges, and many of those challenges have shared origins: the cumulative, cascading impacts of colonialism. It has shaped us. It has shaped our treaty partners. It has shaped our responses for tense moments of resistance, when suddenly everyone wants a conflict resolved right away, instantly even though Indigenous Peoples are urged to be patient while the slow-moving wheels of process play out: tribunals, legal decisions, policy frameworks, legislation, program delivery, mandates to make any kind of change at all. And as we have seen in the case of the tribunal, even when we are winning—there is a desire to reverse and reject actions to rectify and resolve. A desire for things to stay as they are—whether people are being hurt by the status quo or not. 

And at times, I think I understand, in some small way, this desire for things to remain the same. If this pandemic has taught me anything, it is that I am not immune to mourning how things “used to be”. There are days when I want life to resume exactly as it was, or when the desire for normal, precedented times is so great I could cry. But even though I long for that—it hasn’t changed the fact that tomorrow, I will wake up to a world where we will still need to take simple steps to safeguard ours and others, and more importantly—where we are still not unified in the fight against climate change, still have not undone these oppressive systems of power. The pandemic hasn’t changed those things after all, it has simply laid them bare in another way. This is no future to leave to anyone’s children. And not choosing a side here or engaging some way, some how, would feel like betrayal. And so, the work remains.

My work right now while on maternity leave from Deyohahá:ge: is mostly with my children, and my oldest daughter in particular, doing what I can to support her learning with one of the local immersion programs she attends Grade 1 through. Even before my husband and I enrolled her, we knew there would be challenges with this. Schools are not perfect, infallible places after all; they weren’t for either of us and as much as we wish they were, we doubt they will be for her either. And Cayuga is a critically endangered language with few speakers and few learning resources. Learning it in a school environment creates this need to balance teaching language with teaching in the language, and we can appreciate that this balance isn’t always easy to strike. Still, curriculum development has been ongoing throughout the community and several schools at Six Nations are responding to and growing their programs to better reach language proficiency goals in ways that align with their school’s particular educational approach. Learning to speak language amidst all this development and growth will not be easy. Learning other parts of the curriculum, are also challenging in this current environment. Fortunately for my daughter, my husband Kehte is actually quite a good language speaker and there are a ton of great grade 1 resources that can help us become regular users of Gayogoho:nǫ’. This is, essentially, what I’ve spent much of this month doing, looking over the content, the various curriculums and thinking about activities we can do to really immerse our whole family in language—and asking myself where and how I can help with the language skills that I have? And while there are still so many resources that would be useful to this effort—indeed, it’s part of why we started writing our own little Cayuga books a few years back—I’m heartened to think that those are also something we can create together.

It is now then, when I reflect on all these happenings and news items on today of all days, and about the opportunity for learning and creating that our little family has over the next six or so months until I return to work, I can’t help but feel a profound sense of gratitude. I am probably not alone in sometimes wishing that I could be everywhere, helping everything all of the time. That I could retrain a dozen times and be at once: a lawyer, an educator, a language teacher, a linguist, a land defender, a water walker, a seed keeper, an everything, all-the-timer. Instead, I am at home doing a little bit of gardening, a lot of art, reading and my own particular kind of writing, working on my Cayuga language, signing petitions, donating, watching webinars and lectures, and doing an obscene amount of planning and house rearranging. And definitely, absolutely sending my appreciation and support to those people who are doing all of this aforementioned, specialized work. Much of the time, this is as lovely and fulfilling as it can be during a global pandemic. Some of the time it is stressful because I’m pushing myself too hard to be “productive”. But in truth, all of it would feel incredibly, unbearably lonely if I couldn’t spend my days with the girls and our awesome new baby, Hugo. Which I suppose, brings me to my point: our school aged daughter is home and she is safe. She can learn her language with us and her siblings, with the support of our local schools and educators who want and value a parent’s role in their child’s education, and who know and use her Ogwehoweh name. I am a part of her educational journey. These are good, simple things—the very least of what we might expect of an education system—and they were not possible for Indigenous children in the not so distant past. It will never stop being important to remember that, to remember them, and to know in the very core of our beings that we should never let something like it happen again. 

Until next time, happy creating. Hug your little people close. Sign up to support the Spirit Bear campaign. Listen to podcasts. Donate to the Woodland Cultural Centre and the #1492 Land Back Legal Defence Fund. And Happy Orange Shirt Day. 

Nya:weh,

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/

New Year ~ Old Paths

I love to write and have been writing on and off for a number of years.  The ‘off’ years have a lot of similar characteristics:  heavy workload, creatively unfulfilling, endless searching for direction and purpose, tiredness and sadness, little exposure to books, high exposure to television.

Last year, I finished writing a story of about 52,000 words or so. I had been working on the story for a number of years but by the time I got to the end of 2013, I realized that I just wasn’t happy with it.  I had originally wanted it to be a graphic novel that I worked on with my sister, then it turned into an illustrated novel and then just a novel - all of which made for a rocky narrative at best and by the time 2014 began, I knew I had to rewrite it. 

So this is the creative writing project that I am working on now and I’m really glad I made the decision to rewrite – letting last year’s work transform into something far more coherent and satisfying makes all previous efforts so much more meaningful.  It helps that it’s been a relatively painless process.  Certainly, a large chunk of the story was already in place but outlining and generating reasonable word count targets for each of the chapters has been my best ally thus far.  I’ve worked through five chapters relatively quickly and outlining has helped me make smoother revisions and adjustments as I go.

In the meantime, I realized I wanted to organize the blog a bit differently.  I started this blog because I wanted a place to record the positive, inspiring and exciting things that were happening in my community.  I wanted to record them because there is a lot of negative press about Indigenous Peoples and an enormous knowledge gap continues to persist in the mainstream education systems.  But I also got caught up in wanting to talk about my own creative efforts and struggles.  

I’ve read a lot of great blogs over the last year by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and they’ve inspired me to take a look at how I share what I’m learning in a way that really reflects who I am, what I care about and the things I like to do.  And who am I?  A writer? An educator? A participant?  A researcher?  A photographer? An activist? A schoolhacker?  

I realized that I’d like to find a way to include it all: a little fact, a little fiction, a little fantasizing about the totally sustainable future I hope we all have.   And this year, I’m going to try.  

Nu:yah Everyone!  (A Haudenosaunee way of saying Happy New Year)

S.