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A retrospective on the proposed Granite Sculpture Training Program one year later
March 31, 2008, by Stewart Steinhauer
I’ll speak to you, the reader, in my own voice: first person singular. This is a fitting perspective from which to tell my little story, and a revealing insight into how the grammar of the English language is shaped by western civilization’s ideology.
Approximately one year ago, I found myself sitting, stunned, in the Blue Quills boardroom among people I had thought were my closest allies, my inner circle of friends and relatives. From the silent perspective of my private and personal interior world I felt deeply wounded, fatally wounded, with a numbness spreading out from the center of my chest up through my throat into my brain, and down from my heart into the pit of my stomach. The life force in the granite sculpture training program was gone, the intentions reduced to fragments of ideas, lying like rubble around me.
Exactly what happened in that circle I don’t even know now; I do know that I left the room making plans to leave Alberta, plans now coming to fruition. On a spiritual level, a door closed, and, as is always the case, new doors began to open. Perhaps what really happened in that room that day was a spiritual intervention staged by my Rock Grandfather, using the relentless pounding technique I use on him when I carve…that day he carved me.
One year on, I realize that the sculpture training program as visualized would have failed, for four reasons. Number one, I was basing the success of that program on the potential success of the oilfield training program’s hidden agenda, which I read as awakening Rez Zone folks anaesthetized by the ‘genocide, what genocide?’. The collapse of that effort is instructive about the severity of the problem.
Number two, I had unreasonable expectations of an educational institution, trying in my own peculiar way to blend classroom instruction-based curriculi with an active ‘for profit’ business sense 33 years in development, seasoned with a dash of revolutionary fervour. Not a good recipe; like the Chinese fellow who invented gunpowder, I, too would leave a note beside the recipe advising folks to never mix these ingredients.
Number three, my own inner voice, which might not be my voice at all, but the voice of my Rock Grandfather, was very consistent in saying that what I know and do can’t be institutionalized. The lure of an altogether too perfect setting, great instructional spaces, institutional support for expansion and development, great future business exposure, infrastructure mostly in place already, a deep pool of raw human talent, like stored kinetic energy, just waiting to be released, and the release agents, the freedom fighters on BQ’s staff, honing a survival craft under development since the abrogation of Treaty Six by Canadian state forces 131 years ago, caused a momentary bright light of hope to blind me to the reality of institutionalization.
Which leads to number four. To explain it better, let me repeat an anecdote told to me by my late uncle, Mike Steinhauer, about an experience he had in the company of his friend and partner in crime (the crime of cultural survival), Metis Elder Joe Couture. Joe, a PhD psychologist, amongst many other skills, thought it would be beneficial to the august body of a national gathering of Canadian psychologists to hear Mike Steinhauer’s perspective on ‘Indian psychology’. Joe invited Mike to travel with him to Ottawa, where the national gathering was being held. Mike dutifully sat and listened to the proceedings of the conference for a couple of days, and then was introduced and asked to speak to the gathered assembly.
He took the floor, and, very briefly, told them that what they knew was of no use to him, and further, that what he knew they could never learn. He ended by saying that, in his opinion, there was nothing to talk about. Later, Joe was furious with him; it was just one more crack in their crumbling relationship.
One year on from that fatal moment in the Blue Quills board room, I now recognize that what I know is of no use to the BQ group, and that what they know I’ll never be able to learn. A tectonic shift occurred that day, and I find myself on a different earth crust plate, drifting away from Blue Quills, Saddle Lake Cree Nation, and prairie-based Indigenous Peoples. My feet are still rooted to my Great Mother through my Rock Grandfather, though Rocky and I are afloat, headed for the Rocky Mountains, like some bizarre flying rock shower caught on super-slow-mo camera.
As you can see in my choice of words, a ‘me-and-them’ dichotomy has emerged, or perhaps less naively, just made more visible (to me). Blue Quills First Nations College has given me a master class in the intricacies of surviving the unique brand of genocide practiced in Canada, and for that I am truly grateful. After this I don’t know what else to say, knowing that for many hearers I had already said too much at the opening of my first sentence.
In gratitude, and with love, Stewart the irritating Magpie
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Kahentinetha called the other night, and we talked about Mohawk activism, and the mirrored lack of such amongst Crees, but she was really interested in talking about the actual current cash value of land and resources in the indigenous territories where a nation state named Canada stands. She and Katienes, legitimate women title holders following a very long legal tradition, one considerably older than the legal system upholding Europe’s liberal democratic nation state system, want to issue an invoice for moneys owed.
We talked about what Canada’s current net worth might be listed at and what Canada’s GDP is ($1.6 trillion in 2007?)….I asked if she meant invoicing for an amount that would represent a percentage point-based fee, or a royalty payment, but, no, she just wanted to claim the entire amount.
In Haudenosaunee law, and in UN-style global law of the future, if we humans are to have a future, she’s right. It is the full amount. However, in my opinion, invoicing (who?) for the full amount, while having the benefit of pointing out to the few who follow these shenanigans the reality of Turtle Islanders’ current global situation, is not worth the effort involved in doing the research and writing up the invoice.
Such an invoice may be able to appear in the margins, a public free speech space most clearly defined by its lack of corporate advertising, including dusty nooks on the internet, and lowest-cost production newsletters, magazines and videos, usually with what liberal-minded whitish folk (the fair folk?) call a left perspective. What would its appearance there do?
Just to follow that invoice idea forward to its logical conclusion, let’s imagine that Canada’s Supreme Court made a ruling like the one issued a day or so ago by the Supreme Court of Belize, which recognized Mayan title to land and resources, following the concepts recently adopted by most voting members of the UN in its Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous People. Imagine the collective body of Indigenous Peoples inside (underneath?) of Canada suddenly becoming the wealth managers for a $? trillion dollar enterprise turning over $1.6 trillion a year.
We’re strapped down in the colonial torture chamber, and our full attention is devoted to matters arising from that predicament. We don’t have the mental space required to attend to matters of managing a $1.6 trillion GDP. I don’t mean that we couldn’t, theoretically, but I do mean that we currently can’t.
And let’s see; net worth? What about the trillion or so barrels of oil in the tar sands…if it costs $50 a barrel to get it onto the market, and it sells for $100 a barrel, then that’s $50 trillion right there. The handful of human beings who control the global economy aren’t just going to hand it over if we present an invoice. For them, the only law is doing whatever it takes to stay in control. Sure, they’re maniacal mass-murdering war criminals, but, hey, what’s new? From an indigenous Turtle Islander perspective, that’s the way it has been since 1493.
I don’t want to invest any more energy into their system, fighting it, reforming it, or backsliding along with it. My heart/mind is intuitively drawn towards investing my own internal creative energy into envisioning a practical, workable, sustainable global system that encompasses human social, economic and cultural needs, accurately framed within Mother Earth’s larger ecological system.
No current system meets those requirements, left, right or center. My intuition tells me that humanity is waiting for the true voice of Africa, the true voice of Asia, the true voice of Turtle Island, and all other non-Euro centers (in NewSpeak doublethink that would be non-US centers), to speak up, to dialogue, to listen to one another, and to produce from such a true meeting of minds our new collective vision. The Euro-US-centric mind will, of course, be welcomed to listen, and to discuss, but no longer to dominate the discussion.
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On January 26th an Arundhati Roy article titled “Listening to the grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial and Celebration” was posted at countercurrents.org, then re-posted at ZNet. My Weypimus blog entry on genocide followed on January 29th, but I didn’t discover Arundhati’s article until this morning. As always, a brush with Arundhati’s words is both creatively stimulating and reassuring, like an independent assessment on the content and direction of my current thinking.
Sigh….but you may well know how it is….a little bit feels like more, a hunger stirred, and soon I was watching her on Znet’s cache of Arundhati Roy videos, the one on her Town Hall meeting in Seattle, in conversation with David Barsimian. When it finished playing, the You Tube format shifted, offering a visual menu of 17 more Arundhati offerings. Jackpot! In keeping with this morning’s theme of more is better, I rolled my cursor along the menu band, searching for my next Arundhati feast, until I came upon the last item in the popup visual menu at the bottom. A documentary called We: The Documentary Of The Human Race Today. The documentary begins with a screen shot of planet earth as seen from space, drifting across from lower right to upper left, while printed words offset from the image of earth, on a background of the blackness of space, tells you that this documentary is not about Arundhati Roy; it’s about her words.
Watch it. Listen to it. If you want to.
There was a sequence of archival film footage of Winston Churchill with Arundhati's voiceover, narrating, a direct quote from the guy I’ve previously called the greatest Metis warrior ever, because of his Cree nokum….he was talking about the British Empire’s actions in creating the Palestine Mandate, awarding a homelands to the Zionists, defending the attack on Palestinians simultaneously to defending the attack on Turtle Island’s indigenous Peoples, and various attacks staged by the British Empire. My first reaction to hearing her read Winston Churchill's words was to question whether he really did have Cree, or at least Turtle Island indigenous ancestry, as if that would, by default, make him an honorable person.
By looking around me right here at Saddle Lake, I should know better than to hang on to such romantic notions, even though Limerence Day does approach. Just say no to limerence.
Paper or plastic? Either way, you have a great day, now!
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