When I received an invitation from Tricia Ebarvia and Dr. Kim Parker to write for #31daysIBPOC, I was overcome with joy - and I haven’t found joy in writing in a long time.
Yet, writing about being an Indigenous educator feels like not knowing where to first put my foot down, though I walk just fine most of the time. Will I start the path in the right spot? I imagine my writing unfolding as a visible trail of thoughts, made for you.
In her post for #31daysIBPOC, Dr. Debbie Reese holds up a central truth that Indigenous peoples “were — and are — nations.” My family is part of the Six Nations - the Haudenosaunee - and where I grew up in Brantford, Ontario, Doxtdator is a relatively recognizable as a First Nations name. Things are a bit different where I live now. While Native activism - mostly lead by Native women - is arguably at one of its highest points on Turtle Island, in Europe Native peoples are almost never visible outside of caricature. I recently saw an advertisement for a roller coaster park in France that featured cartoon ‘indiens’ from the past riding along with real, live white passengers.
Rebecca Nagle writes that “Invisibility is the modern form of racism against Native people” - an invisibility that especially applies to the murdered and missing Indigenous women.
I have to tell myself, over and over again, that there’s no way to comprehensively address that invisibility in one post, just so that I can free up the mental space to begin writing, to begin this particular trail.
I haven’t written in quite some time, though for awhile I felt like I was in an unbreakable rhythm. I’ve grappled with depression, especially during the dark winter months here in Brussels, which makes gathering concentration more difficult. My history with depression reaches back to my first days in university, but the most recent wave has in large part come from my ambitions to dismantle the deficit theories about race and IQ that are currently back in fashion. I dove deeply into the literature and I can quote more from memory than can possibly be good for me.
I have roughly divided my writing interests into two halves: one contesting the future-looking neoliberal narrative created by education-adjacent technology enthusiasts that goes to great length to never talk about race and racism; and the other contesting the neoconservative narrative that argues we need to return to a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum instead of pandering to ‘identity politics’. More harmful than either side of this dichotomy is the exclusion of other alternatives: Where’s the Indigenous futurism that doesn’t rely on extractive technologies? Or: What could be more ‘traditional’ than Indigenous knowledge?
It’s often the same people who want to claim they are asking scientifically neutral questions about race and IQ who are the first to blow a gasket at Ian Campeau of a Tribe Called Red wearing an ironic ‘Caucasians’ t-shirt. It’s all fun and rational scientific inquiry until someone challenges the status quo. Don’t you know that someone could get hurt!?
I was pursuing a definitive dismantling of racist IQ science, or more broadly a dismantling of the ‘deficit theories’ that prescribe heavier and heavier doses of the ‘best that’s ever been thought and said’ by white men, test prep, and ‘no excuses’ discipline to make up for supposedly ‘inferior’ biology or ‘inferior’ cultures, depending on whether science is currently in a genetic or environmentalist mood. Now, I look at my research project differently.
Kehinde Andrews writes about the Psychosis of Whiteness, “a distorted view of reality” that can’t be reasoned with. I’m not entirely comfortable with using a mental health metaphor, but I take Andrews’ main point that Whiteness creates “a distinct inability to see reality in any other way than the distorted view it creates”. Even if I dissected every racist study about IQ and knocked over every shoddy claim about genetics and race, what difference would that make to people who have already started out with the distorted view that it makes sense to divide people by ‘races’ and measure their ‘intelligence’?
I know that the hours I spent reading about the history of racist science took away hours that could have been spent treating reading as sustenance. I’ve missed too many chances to be a student of Indigenous knowledge, language, and culture.
In my teaching life, I have not done enough to be visible as Indigenous. I have largely constructed myself as an ally along several dimensions. Earlier this year, I worked with students to investigate and confront Islamophobia in a book by an author that visited our school. I mostly received either direct support or polite silence from the other adults in the building, but one person pulled me aside to talk about how I sounded ’emotional’ when speaking to the author in front of students and how that was ‘uncomfortable’.
It’s taken awhile to pick myself back up from that.
Over the past month or two, things have been turning around. I’ve let go of a writing project that weighed me down and more importantly, I’ve stopped worrying about not being productive as writer. I’ve played lots of guitar and even made one in my small Belgian basement workshop.
Writing this post has helped me to gather and re-focus my energy. The last ten books I have open on my Ipad are all by Indigenous authors. Sustenance reading. I am in the pleasant place of feeling that there is such an abundance of Indigenous writing that I could never possibly catch up with all of it, but I’ll go one step at a time.
Expect more writing from me soon. Discomfort in the workplace will be right on its heels, and I’m ready for it.
This blog post is part of the #31DaysIBPOC Blog Challenge, a month-long movement to feature the voices of indigenous and teachers of color as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Cornelius Minor (and be sure to check out the link at the end of each post to catch up on the rest of the blog circle). Please CLICK HERE to read all the other blog posts!