Little and Hip: Canada, ey!

I presented a paper at a conference in Toronto, Canada, and man it was cold that far north. Now that we have winter here, it reminds me just how cold it was.... Anyhow, my paper was about post-colonial feminism and I had such a great trip over there.

Kommagan mine holdt fotan mine varm...brrrrr.

Poetry night

I made a snowman for the girls back home: Olaf

The Anishinabek Peoples are water people and every morning starts with great lakes pow-wows, a sunrise ceremony. Ceremonies are important and as Dibaajimowinan explains:

"Our resistance to colonialism is fortified by knowing who we are as Anishinabek. Continuously deepening this self-knowledge allows us to root our lives and our resistances in the teachings that sustain our identities as Anishinabek peoples in Anishinabewaki (e.g. Deloria 1994, 277). Relationships and ceremonies are key to this resurgence of knowing who we are because it is through relationship that knowledge is revealed, while ceremony helps to orient and ground that knowledge and is itself a way through which knowledge is given to us (Frank D. qtd. in Garroutte 2003, 128). Within a colonial context, relationship and ceremony provide the unstoppable gift of knowledge that ties us to the ecologies from which we come: they are channels through which that knowledge flows. This resurgence of knowing thus supports our resistance by helping us reclaim and maintain Anishinabek identities because, simply, this knowledge helps us to know who we are."