Presentation for Feminisms Conference

In Education there are two things which are required for Indigenous student success: a sense of identity rooted in community and culture, and a sense of identification within the school community.  In honour of that, I offer my most recent statement of self-identification:

Do I gain your trust in writing about myself? In situating myself? Probably not. I have never aspired to gaining trust. I have aspired to gaining respect for the ways in which I assemble things to be more than the sum of their parts – I am a synthesist, whether with images, as in graphic design, something I do as a graphic artist, as a member of a print production department for many years, as an academic with ideas, and as a storyteller with words.

My mother referred to me when I was very young as “a philosopher” because I was, quite literally crying into my soup at the age of 7 over my understanding of the concept of eternity, and the ways in which fundamentalist Christianity was not offering sufficiently functional ontological reasoning to cope with my understandings of time, space, science and the cosmos.

I have always understood that there are two (or more) distinct streams of thought in my head – one which understands that there are some things which can be organized, sorted and forced to happen a certain way, and some which just coalesce into being, and must be accepted with as much grace as one can muster. 

Being queer in this culture does not inspire trust.  I am not a “nice gay” – waiting to have a family and a white picket fence.  I am definitely the wrong kind of gay – the leather and chains, in your face with the radical feminists, cutting people’s balls off feminist, kind of gay.  At least, that’s where I come from. I still haven’t stopped carrying a knife and wearing steel toed boots, even if I do walk with crutches.  Being mixed-race in queer culture makes you an object (of desire).  I’m too white to fit into much of the black queer community, and my light skin isn’t quite white enough to pass as white. 

Last year I passed as nothing, trying to get through my undergraduate degree in Education, not talking about myself or my life, and barely communicating with anyone.   This year I started looking at why I couldn’t stay away from Indigenous studies.  I can’t stop talking to people about it, dreaming it, feeling it. 

I wake up in the morning, and I hear music in the sound of the tap dripping, in the snow falling, in the way the wind outside my window moves, and I finally understand.   I am hearing willow notes: “If you know how to be very quiet, and open your heart, then a tune will start singing within you.” (Sarv 2003)

Toomas Köömel explained in 1913 to folksong researchers visiting Rannu village, Viru-Nigula parish: "… each singer has their own tunes and sings to them..." You can learn the willow notes when you go to a tree, stone, river or spring, on your own and without talking to anyone, and ask them to teach you a tune. If you know how to be very quiet, and open your heart, then a tune will start singing within you. Sing along to it and give your thanks to the place where you found the tune.”

Being Estonian and Jamaican, both peoples historically subject to cultural and physical genocides, I am living my Indigeneity in diaspora, and using Eurocentric academia as a strange route to reclamation.  Not ideal perhaps, but it is what I have.