The Scissors Suggest A Failure Of Patience
Via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I bring you bondage news:
As I took the decorations off my artificial Christmas tree and put them away, I found myself mulling over new year’s resolutions… Carefully handling each branch, I snipped away at the wires and started feeling for this tree. With each snip and painstaking unwinding, I recognised that I was releasing the tree from the bondage of appearance and glitter.
The bondage of glitter, I mean.
As an Anishinaabekwe, I am most at home among my mitig (tree) relatives. So when one is brought into my home, I feel like I’m welcoming family. I live by the beliefs and values that I’ve been taught: that I have a relationship with everything around me — the flying beings, the growing beings, the swimming beings, the four-legged beings and the rooted beings.
And the mass-produced plastic trees.
The experience of freeing my pretend tree from the wire bondage that held it made me reflect on this custom and has led to my new year’s resolution: Instead of buying another artificial tree pre-bound in the wires that have come to represent to me the bonds of colonisation, I will welcome my mitig relatives into my home and dress them honourably and brightly.
Ah, deep and spiritual. Immensely ethnic.
My pre-colonisation family name is Mkishinaatik, meaning “Rotten Wood.”
Oh well done. Have a toffee. Mine means Son of Thom, or, at a push, Twin.
A kind and knowledgeable Kokum explained the importance of my name. My family became known as nurturers and healers because, without the rotting wood, nothing would ever grow again. The medicines given up by the wood as it returns to the earth allows the next generation to flourish. I was filled with pride when I received this teaching and I say “Chi miigwetch, Kokum” for this truth.
This truth. Big pride. It’s heady stuff. And a lot to take in.
And so, I will put away my now unbound tree, branches relieved from their burden and give it another season to honour its natural peers. But the time will come when I will once again welcome my mitig relative home and dress her in the memories of my family. Then I will celebrate her return to the earth after the season of celebration and allow her the opportunity to give medicine to the generations to come.
I repeat, plastic tree.
Marina Commanda Westbrook is Anishinaabekwe from Nipissing First Nation. She is a blessed mother, professor of Indigenous studies, lifelong learner and lover of her relatives — all the earthly beings.
Yes, an educator. As was no doubt obvious.
Via Jonathan Kay.
there is a dearth of knowledge about interactions between early Ukrainian immigrants
Alberta Ukrainians were so unwanted they were run out of Honky Mecca (Winnipeg, Manitoba) by respectable Ukrainians. The good people of Saskatchewan escorted them through their province to Alberta, where, in a gesture of goodwill and survival, they started handing out babushkas to the natives.
This heritage moment brought to you by Cabbage Rolls and Coffee mm mm Good. Polka On!
Cabbage Rolls and Coffee mm mm Good.
Mrs. Yachtki’s really can’t be beat.
No, no, no, no, no. You’re all confused. I think you’re thinking of the Canadian Natural Law Party, aka Yogic Flyers.
…Yogic Flyers.
Yogic Flyers – more buncombe, they are just being propelled by the metabolic product of too many of Mrs. Yatchki’s cabbage rolls, if you catch my meaning, if you get my drift.
buncombe
Heh. I live not very far from there. Somewhat proud to say. Somewhat.
Edited…just checked and they’re a bit further away than I thought. Sure seem to see their school busses a lot for some reason though.
Sure seem to see their school busses a lot for some reason though.
The Buncombe County High School sports teams, “The Red Racketeers”, are arch rivals of the Flimflam County, Georgia High School “Purple Ponzis”.
Yogic Flyers.
The Yogic Flyers played in the Alberta Junior C Hockey League powered by Mrs. Yatchki’s cabbage rolls.
No, no, no, no, no. You’re all confused. I think you’re thinking of the Canadian Natural Law Party, aka Yogic Flyers.
No need to spend travel money on those evil polluting jet planes.
Yogic Flyers – more buncombe, they are just being propelled by the metabolic product of too many of Mrs. Yatchki’s cabbage rolls
Oh. Never mind.
But does a flatulent giggling kook really have Buddha-nature?
Because it must be posted:
We are kings:
We are kings
Hey – that’s on the Mighty Mississippi just north of Graceland (home of The King) – can’t miss it if you ever drove I40 west. It has a bird and alligator sanctuary inside, as well as climbing walls, nature trails – and shopping, restaurants, and hotel rooms. It’s like Biodome and a mall, but in pyramid shape. I am also guessing there’s a lot of modern engineering, tech and good ol fossil fuels keeping that place going, too. The we waz kangs crowd shoots up the surrounding city and generally act like Chicago-lite.
The we waz kangs crowd shoots up the surrounding city and generally act like Chicago-lite.
And upstream from Memphis is St Louis, which has the same problem.
Dentistry is always the weakness for woo.
Here in NZ we hear a lot about Maori wisdom and knowledge, but never about Maori dentistry. I have never known of any Maori activist who eschewed Western dentistry, no matter how much they go on about how much more in touch with nature they were/are.
It’s not just the magical brown people though.
There’s a large number of women who insist that taking painkillers in labour is unnatural. Suggest a root canal without them, however, and it’s a different story. (In fact almost none of them would even get a filling without pain killers, the babies.) It turns out “natural” is only for some things, which don’t affect them.
kokum
A corruption of hokum?
If she were really invested in freeing herself from “the bondage of colonization “ she should stop celebrating Xmas at all as natives have culturally appropriated it from the very colonizers they want to be free of!