I HAVE RETURNED to the mountains, squeezed between the breasts of Radium’s cliffs again. I have returned to the navel of thought from which I spewed forth the final breaths and commas of Jonny Appleseed, nesting in the Rocky Mountains. Staring out at the lone edge of a raised hillside, its convex aperture—it, too, pretending to be a mountain in the making, willing the wind to propel it into a taller vista, wanting to wave to the snowcaps reflecting pîsim into the needles of elder pine—I splice open a cigarette to lay down tobacco for guidance and reciprocity from my ancestors, here in a territory far from my own. I take off my moccasins and socks, dig my toes into the mud, curl into consonant, and arch my feet up into the sun rising above the mountaintops. I close my eyes. Here my sole too becomes a bowl, and I foreground the arch of my foot against the bevel of the Rockies. We craft a parallax of containers thirsting to be filled, one of earth, one of snow; one of ground, one of sky—creation in the making. Fill me, I say to no one visible, although everyone I have ever touched and loved stands here on the hill, in the dogged light of near morning, raising their naked feet into a sky rising too. We pull the hill up with us, granting its wish, becoming a mountain, becoming elder, becoming unmoored from the sewage pipes you hide, my hill, and enter anew into definitions with no score or merit in this bull’s eye we call “English.” And there begins a horizon from which I gallop into language, the swath of kin I house—now upside down, by which I mean right side up, feet planted into Sky World, their long braids and fingers saplings and witness-trees reaching for me, tickling me with foliage, brushing my hair that is knotted into a nest from the violent whippings of merely surviving.
I tell myself this richness of being, singular yet wholly connected, is a breadth of breath that expands beyond the monotony of being I’ve so carefully contained myself within. And yet the refrain that is housed within me now, in this particular moment we find ourselves in globally—“Please stop, you’re killing me”—rings continually, like a chime in a windstorm.
When I return into myself, I remember why I have come here. My aunties are selling raffle tickets on Facebook for two children’s bicycles to raise enough money for a headstone for my uncle, who passed away handfuls of years ago. Another aunt of mine I picture clutching my uncle’s ashes, contained in a soup pot, waiting for the moment we can all meet again and properly release him back into the breathing roots, the lungs of his trapline—Patsy Cline and Garth Brooks harmonizing in her home on vinyl loops as she mourns. I think of my grandmother, Rose, who yet sits unmarked in Saskatoon, her burial rites and recognition a poem in the landscape of Literature—the poem, like her autopsied body, taken apart and examined by doctor and scholar alike. This ritualistic asking, this giving of medicine, then serves as both gratitude and an overloaded act of grieving.
I walk back to the cabin I have come to write in, the Highwomen’s “Cocktail and a Song” playing in my AirPods. Amanda Shires warbles: “Don’t you look at me, girl, like I’m already gone / the day is close, it won’t be long.” All of this, I wonder, for whom? Or for what? I think of nohtawiy, of nikawiy, of wahkohtowin; I think of the conversations I’ve had with many of the “you’s” in this manuscript, having drafted contingency plans for the “what if,” should the moment we contract the sickness of pandemic take us too soon. I think of the half-joking, half-dead-serious inquiries about what would become of this manuscript if I were to wilt into a flattened petal, a dried bouquet of wildflowers, alone in a bed, tubed and plastic-lunged in a hospital cot, if I were lucky, or caked over alone in a bathroom, peeling oxygen out of the tiled floorboards.
How close is the day if I close the day prematurely in this gratuitous grieving? I want to ask Brandi Carlile if she ever became a crowned sparrow, and if so, could she teach me how, too? I want to ask if she ever unstrapped herself from that wheel in Laredo. I am trying to do the same, Creator knows, so let me roll this back for you.
It’s nearing Christmas in 2020 and I am driving home from Alberta to Manitoba at a frenzied speed of 130 kph. The prairies are easy, you can always spot a cop from miles away in the flatlands, their cruisers a white stain on this earthen mound—the Trans-Canada Highway a gauze to the spilling I am conducting. I wrap the Cypress Hills windings around me, a simple tourniquet: concrete, rose bush, sagebrush. I am racing home to save myself. Bits of me flake off like petrified bark in the gusts of Saskatchewan winds that pour into my car as I open the window. I watch the skin on my arm blow away into dust in this squall, dance upon my dash, squeeze itself out of the tiny crack of my window, and mushroom into living sky.
When I cross the Manitoba border, the night is thick, viscous. I meander through its gels, sticky from its humid sweat, ectoplasm, wet from panting, dry, cracking tongue in want for thirst. It’s here—after weeks of smudging for communion, not of the Christian style, but with union of community for the sake of surviving a pandemic that requires the obliteration of touch, of intimacy, of a kiss to shotgun breath back into the body—I witness magic. Carlile howls into the sky, glazed with stars that look like sugar and pinhole, “You should always let the sun go down on your anger / let it burn you to sleep.” I see a shooting star dart across the sky—something I have not witnessed in the light pollution of urbanity and fluorescent nettings in a dog’s age. I wish upon this star’s particles and granularity, upon the trail of life fleeing from its now-foreign head, upon this light pouring into my retina, a dying flare, mercenary. The body disintegrates, but that is not to say it dies; it transforms into mineral, potassium, into oxide and oxygen. We always return to our mother. “When you’re home, you’re already home,” Carlile sings. The luminosity of this majesty overcharges my senses, history now writ as a dying version of me smoking in my truck, lips pouted out of a cracked window, snaking out of aged skins.
In another history, which is to say that present moment in which I experienced this, and this future ledge from which I perch now, the sky blooms like a wound, a corsage, or a wormhole, or a needle’s eye, sâponikan, and I thread into its weavings, thrust—I am dancing sky, holding burning cherub, babies rushing into elderhood, weeping for motherhood; and I am birthgiver, star walker, the grandness of a body whose pouch I zippered out of to be here in this body named Joshua. The sky is ablaze—not with apocalypse, although surely this is an ending, but with a mouth slightly ajar, teeth askew, and tongue slicked into a curve to suckle milk and galactic dew. Here, Creator blesses me, a bobbin now unwound fully on the seat of his Chevrolet, and tells me, “Take what you need, take it all, this is a gifting for you—but make sure you gift something back, m’boy.” As the night sky becomes an inferno of babes scraping across the belly of some thing we might call God, I am presented with wishes aplenty, and I ask for health and happiness for those I love and care for. And as the presentation of floral fires ends, one lone meteor stops, momentarily, and winks at me. Its light fills my mouth like a blooming, a feast of magic, a feast of divinity. I wish then for happiness for myself—in the form of something material, something that can hold me, kiss me; someone upon whose palms I can draw hearts into their broken lines, and whose intersecting histories, wrought upon their calloused skin, I can smooth like wind caressing sandstone. I wish for partnership. I wish for caretaking and excitement. I wish for kinder tomorrows. I wish for joy buttoned into being. “And I am leaving / oh, I am tired / and I’m coming home / ’cause I am yours,” Carlile hums into a barrelled echo. I orate all of this to say: in you I smell the rich grains of asteroid and planetary parallaxes; I taste honeydew when I mouth your name into air; and my belly blossoms with seedling and story when I drift into dusk, your richness a buffalo hide, a papoose for cradling into soft sleep. I find the wish granted, in these limited but wide connections we share across latitude and nationhood.
You’re a skeleton key found in dust and pixel. I want to wish to thank Creator for putting mud to rattle with a lipsticked kiss to form you into being, so that we could find one another, here, at the end of the world—holding hands as the nation-state burns and we emerge into newer horizons rich with possibility and potential. I speak here of a wish for radical change and rhizomes of care—out of a sense of global care but also, for once, out of selfishness too. I think the world of this pronoun “you”—so here I’ll build a world from a pronoun, and balloon it into wishes. I place a kiss into the wind in the hope it finds you when you need love. I whisper to rain and snow a love coo, so that when you’re feeling lonely, sweet words will tickle your cochlea. In this limited materiality, across the chasm of kilometres, I want you to know that along the bent line of sundown there is a person waving endlessly, waiting, patiently, even lifetimes if needed, for the moment he can celebrate a ballet of bodies, the warmth of skin touching, the shiver of excitement, the brush of lip skin on lip skin, and the sifting of finger through hair. A wish, one I saved from that Manitoban evening, I send to you in eastward gusts. Take it; I hope it works for you too. My affection pours forth from my body tectonically, a gifting to the “you’s” of this manuscript—and I am emptied abalone, shell of ash and smudge.
Now back in my body, meteor shower having ended, that lone winking comet swallowed by the sky, we return to nothing but deadlight and sky-scarring—the severance of our connection to dimensionality now a light line on the skin of infinity. And I, like âtim, put my head out of the window and lap up the remnants of that comet’s Sky Peopled wish. Having scraped the sky and killed a bird, I thank the comet for its gifts, untie my shoe, and toss it out the window as a promise of cycles of return.
I am racing home for rejuvenation at the height of isolation, suffering intimacy starvation, having worked vast numbers of hours with little to no reprieve from my own warring thoughts and anxieties, from which I have emerged slightly charged but nearing depletion after an encounter with suicidal ideation. This running home is more than a reunion; it is a raging against the death knell the world has been ringing, both in this particular momentous pandemic but also in the echo of those church bells that have been tolling their death hymns for Indigeneity since 1492.
“Please stop, you’re killing me” is my refrain, accompanying this ominous tinkling.
Lately, I’ve been alarmed by the question “How are you?” It is a bewildering jab, and I swallow pain whole and regurgitate little worlds for others even as I exist in the canyon of a junkyard spelling out nihilism on the jagged rims of tins. How do we care for one another when we’re so entirely exhausted on multiple planes of historical and intergenerational existence? How do we hold one another when even the pronoun “you” feels more like a stitch ripper than a darting needle? Even prior to this pandemic, conversations, primarily with BIPOC and queer folks, around mental health and wellness were choreographed dances indeed—but now I find the peppering of “how” alongside the pronoun “you” to be an adverse adverb that hinges on the profane. A simple asking can so easily become a violent undoing. I am teaching myself the ethics of asking and engaging, of when that moment and level of trust is correct, even with the most beloved people in life—teaching myself how to care for ourselves and one another on the brink of obliteration.
ON VALENTINE’S DAY, 2021, my apartment floods from a burst pipe in my living room. I am informed that the rupture was caused by the cold air from an open window—this, after the stifling heat in my apartment had only recently been fixed. I awake that day to two men knocking on my door, one a condo manager, the other a contractor who will temporarily fix the issue.
Both men come into my apartment, and the contractor begins fixing the pipes as the “building manager” surveys my home—looking at the Simone McLeod, Jerry Whitehead, Pat Bruderer, and Kent Monkman paintings on my walls before announcing, “I didn’t realize you were so cultural; I think it’s great the Natives are still so in touch with their culture.” The man continues to inspect my condo, noting the differences in my layout as compared with others in the building. He comes across a bullwhip my father bought me when I was a child. “You shouldn’t use the thermostat as a hook for your sex toys,” he says. I can only imagine the thoughts running through his head as he sees pictures of queer folk on my fridge, an embroidered “Queer” tapestry, my Eighth Generation Snagging Blanket draped across my couch, and smells the lingering scent of sweetgrass from the previous evening’s smudge. I entertain him to busy his wandering eyes, his dirtied, sullied fingers, and to abate the power he holds over me as a tenant in the building.
After finishing with the radiator, they both leave. Hours later—my radiator pulled apart into pieces and lying on the floor, my living room’s contents shifted into my tiny kitchen and hallways, the apartment floor’s carpet and floorboard ripped up, and the drywall pulled off to dry the insulation—the repair agency installs large, cumbersome, noisy fans in my condo. I ask for an update, knowing I cannot safely live in this place, much less work or house my dog. Chief, my German shepherd pup, is kennelled for three days and I am left to stay in my bedroom, barricaded in from the furniture and artwork scattered around the apartment for the drying process. I sit cross-legged on the floor, a life’s worth of collected furnishings and decor displaced around me like a cemetery: a fossilized bison tooth found in Eastend, a painted rock from my niece, my father’s engraved Zippo, my great-grandmother’s Wades, and the Inuk lance that carved kiyâm into my wrist. Amongst this inventory of rubble, I stare at my walls, this sanctuary I once called grace and refuge. Here, again, my home is scalped of its animations; I sit now in a haunted house I once revived only to let it wither in the cold snap of an Albertan winter. The spirit of the house is splayed and stretched, without an offering, at the hands of yet another settler uncovering the anthropologic without apology. When I wake from this grieving trance, I see the outlines of archived joy traced on the exposed granite flooring in chalk and dust. My home is a microcosm of the nation-state: a stalwart vision of ruination. In this I include, too, my body—the visage of my innerness kneeling on the floor behind a veil of hair, hands splayed into prayer, the buckskin of chest alit with holes: some bullet-shaped, others hitch-scarred.
In the morning I wake and survey the aftermath of this crime scene: the removal of artwork from my walls, inked with oil and greased fingerprints; my carved wooden eagle’s beak broken off; ceremonial feathers strewn on the ground; and a beaded earring crushed beneath steeled boot. My condo’s upending, its brokenness, mirrors me in this moment as I pack up the home that displaced me. My retreat to a new, more stable place is welcome, but it’s the undressing, the undoing, the unlevel of removal from wall and mantel that gives me pain in my chest. The unmitigated destruction of home in the middle of global destruction. The act of packing becomes one of mourning: here I find gifts, love letters, and goodbye notes from the multiples of “you’s” addressed in this book. But the real harm I feel is that of violation—the forced entry of and for white folks, the anonymity of touch, broken rostrum and enamel like the snapping of limb and cartilage, the destruction of this place I named sacred. That sacredness is trampled as the world is aflame with ecological shifts and pandemic breath. I feel again as I did when I crashed into this condominium’s carpeted floors like Sky Woman, reeling back the bobbies and cogs of my body and dressing the wounds of bruise and rape.
Just when I am settled and feeling safe from this flight into a new home, one of you will ask, “How are you?”—and I will unravel like yarn, drowning out all sound and sight. I will weep the sorrows of these events; I will weep the histories of epidemic and pandemics that I have survived already ancestrally; I will weep the almighty cry that throws everyone within earshot from their bones and blood. The thrush of unmitigated sorrow becomes a saving grace in this moment, for my eye is the only reprieve from gust and blow. I will not be able to answer this question—I will just ask you to hold me. May your arms with their brisk, rough prairie hairs, with their woodlands grit, hold steady a body exploding like an infant star into fractal configurations. pimâtisiwin, I will coo into my linings, kiss into my arms, let me leach from this embrace a bit of joy and futurity—let me live awhile yet.
“Please stop, you’re killing me,” I’ll say as I hold this wreckage like a garbage dump in the contraption I call a body—and I’ll will myself to smile, dry enzymes from cheek and collar, and continue into a Zoom meeting, wholly performative of and drunk for this foreign verb we name joy.
I CONTINUALLY FIND myself making plans with kin for when this is “over.” While hopeful, this repeated deferral reminds me of how embroiled we are within a system of continual warring. When is over? Will that day ever come? Will our collective hope bloom into revolutionary NDN joy when we emerge on the other side? Can our feet carry us across such hilltops and chasms? What is over, and where is over? In nêhiyâwewin, we say kisipi as a means of signalling an end, a finishing. If over were a place, I would name it homeland—signalling a finale, but also an entrance into possibility, for this world we inhabit is overwrought, overwritten. I would name over a space in which futurities lie, rich, dark tendrils that thirst in the space of overness—over being the potential for Indigenous excellence in this collective grief we call occupation. I would name over the Dover Hills, my river spot in Mohkinstsis; I would name over the feeling of sitting along the Bow River reading Alexander Chee, shirtless, in tiny swim trunks, alone save for pîsim above. Over would be the ease of stripping off one’s shirt without the burden of body dysmorphia—how easy, then, to remove and fully be. Over would be the splendour hidden in the mundane, this power so easily taken for granted. Over would be a bingo hall full of NDN kin bucking for their numbers, trolls and lucky charms atop numbers, scrounging change for chip-ins for a Friendship Centre hot dog. Over would be a naming ceremony, would be a revolutionary powwow, would be the rolling head of John A. Macdonald later becoming a terrarium in the aftermath of the nation-state, would be the concrete crown of Queen Victoria engrossing the head of an orange-shirted child. kisipi, I return to the end, which is never a finishing but a beginning. I return to the Bow, to the Red, to the Milk—I return to the river to ponder a finale. This river connects us all; we each have our spot, which we sometimes share, and which in turn I’d call a truer kind of nudity than the act of undressing. Here we each have a spot to mourn, play, make love, and self-create. kisipi, sipiy, kisipikamâw, môskinew—and I am slathered in holy silt from which I’ll spew into you the bile of creating clay.
I strip myself of the preservation of colonial wax, static and immobile, encasement and showcase, hulking statuette frozen in time, in amber. Look at how my Indigeneity shimmers in the daylight, in this form that is a body that never knew embodiment, a noun beyond body with no properness, a portmanteau, love child of body and of end. Here verbology will unmoor from its predatory classifications and retire itself into herbology; and there, too, its sheathings will peel florally, and from its predicate will emerge the seedlings of kin, infant in their babbling, saying of this subjecthood: over, over, over. And here this “you” disintegrates between the crushing of prefix and suffix, and all I will know then is the rooting of osihew. Should I say, then, that “over,” in its animate beings, kisipayiw, might be this verbnoun atop the Golden Eyries—my ears tilted into the wind to hear the doom cry of finality, because when the end rings its end, the mountains will move again, tired from their cumbersome slumber, tired from being bent into a V from ear to pelvis, and stretch into a thrust. The land, like the body, teaches us the fundamental rule of ending: that no such thing exists, no suffix of “-ed” shall ever touch the prefix of “pre-” and even a body in its most cellular state knows this.
We always begin at the end.
I picture myself spread-eagled atop the Blanshard Needle asking for this ending to refresh into a coming. This cellular verbing will burst and spill across the latitude, erasing etchings of geography, nation, province, territory, and treaty so as to divine the directions between this world and the Fourth, knowing upwards and downwards to be as valid a mapped direction as north and south are. This mutating unlanguage will ride the crest of coming and of ending down into the confluence of the Rockies trench. Here I’ll lick into the Selkirk Mountain and wormhole home too. The rivers will all sing their Spring songs, weary from telling their Winter stories, from ktunaxa to kináksisahtai to miscousipiy to zaageeng to amiskwasîpi to kaniatarowanenneh—this choir will be a jingle dress dancing with the chinook of all-direction in the snuffing chime of all-medicine. manitowapow will beat its Two-Spirit drumming, from middle point, the belly button and first mouth of origins. The longitude of this noun we call a world, on the plane we call Earth—the flatness of this mapping—we will crack into Vs like waciy and live in all-way, upside down and right side up again, queered, aslant, widening. This blast of breath will be brought back by reverbing kickback, snapped back into our dimensionality—and just like that, the end will end its ending, and we will have survived again, surfing the tin lid of a junkyard can.
MUCH OF MY WORK in life—but this has been exacerbated during COVID—is that of an alleviator. Like a salve, I spread myself across my kin and their injurious scars. I find myself to be a pain eater; I swallow whole wounds and dissolve them in the pit. My gift, if not my role, is that of a listener, advice giver, holder. I will ask you how you are, that light touch of finger to bicep, the invitation to spill, overflow. I will look you directly in the eye, cock my head from time to time, and eat language, crunch syllables and syllabic, chew through comma and end-stop, crush synecdoche, and lap up metaphor. You will tell me what ails you and I will leach the sweat from your skin into mine, wholly pluck from you thorn and stone that has edged into your spirit-skin, and swallow.
You will leave lighter, and I will move inward, animate organ, place my eyes into my intestines, dissolve pain into mineral and enzyme, and defecate it in the morning.
This is an act of reciprocity I enact with kin. These many months have been a gluttony of pain eating—from witnessing Black and Indigenous death, the collapse of our social and intimacy networks, the skyrocketing of COVID cases and negligence, the isolation and loneliness of monotonous being, the glare of pixel and snowfall. My stomach swelled into a junkyard, the pain I ate a boulder in the gut. I dragged this weight of hurt across the floor to pour myself a glass of water, then shouldered myself along the wall to return to my bed. I pummelled my most intimate flora with the fatty gels of this eating and made a graveyard of a flower bed.
I think this digestive act is a technique that comes from proximity: my ability to witness those who showcase how their bodies morphed into malfunction, albeit temporarily. I hold and make space for their molasses confessions, as I am malleable and full of grit. Perhaps pimatisowin is a kin of pihtâkosiwin, which is the act of being heard, a voiced sound—here pihtâkiyaw, to move inside the body; inwardly I enact pihtâkosiwak, the chant. When you speak, I peek from behind my duodenum; this is where my head is. Like a constellation, the walls of this well are as alit as syrup skies, glucagon, amylase. I too am a wildness, like the tongue, and I have sprouted into a husk in this gestational entrapment. At first, the chant I heard was, “Baby, can you hear me now? The chains are locked and tied across the door,” ringing from the ampulla. I stretched nerves in those days to feel for the biliary tree, and peeked into the hollowness of my cavernous self, the ducts of these travails—and paid homage to the sibling lost there to a Western diet, heavy with stone. I pulled through his star mouth, “Baby, sing with me somehow.” Those were days when I could feel only the chasm of the missing within me, baby fingering the ducts, holding on to this sludge of harm, until I too became a monstrous swelling. Now pihtâkosiwak sounds like nimôsom’s singing alone in that ratty shack, the smell of stale Budweiser wafting in the air, the yellowing of cigarettes a wallpaper of its own, Ernest Monias and Don Williams the hymns of his sanctimony. When I chew lipid and protein—meaning loss and pain—I chant into song, sâh-sainiskênin kîhtwâm wâh-wîhtamawin wiya ohci ninpîkotêhêh: “so full of love and pretty dreams that two should share.” This eating and defecating, like maskwa and his grease, enriches the gap between vibrato tongue and bound mouths. Then omôsihtawin, pihtâkoyaweksawew, is churned into enrichment and betterment through omow; is that why these words share a prefix with omôsom? Or is my biliary tree like the Grandfather Tree, white spruce, in Cochrane? This caretaker of the infant trees, older than anthem and country, and his children hold the soil and prevent erosion—tree full of medicine, tree full of flight, bark and wood a tool transforming into canoe, resin a chewing rein, shoot tip a citrine vitamin. nimôsom posits himself in the pancreas, and as I chew, I churn worlds for you and me; as I hold against petrification, I gift the grasslands a cavalcade of birthing.
ONE OF THE DEATHS I will mourn most from this pandemic is the slow, necrotic wilting of touch. I witness how we have consciously and unconsciously entirely shifted our social dynamics as a species who, formerly, largely engaged with each other through this sense. But this death, I hope, contains potential for revival.
I am with one of my most beloved and trusted kin, both a best friend and a former long-term partner; we know each other in a holistic and whole way. We are in my temporary home after I have won a literary prize. We are celebrating with champagne and reminiscing about our contributions to my novel Jonny Appleseed—me as writer, and he as someone who read the earliest drafts of chapters at his kitchen table. We are laughing, crying, and cheering in unison. And yet we are on opposite sides of the room, the space between us like an expansive berth. Another dear kin of mine joins later, we three having bubbled together, and partakes in the celebration. While we converse, I take note of where we stand in the room. Where once we would have been sitting together, gleefully buckling kneecaps on the couch, we are now in carefully tiered proximity to one another. One sits in the couch looking into the kitchen, another sits in the kitchen on a stool, and I am behind the kitchen sink. We are enjoying one another’s company, but it saddens me to see that our usual intimacy through proximity and touch has completely disintegrated. None of us made the announcement that we would keep our distance within the home, and yet we have entered the code of our pandemic guidelines into our social codex even in this space where we have consented to the bubble of our shared risk.
I mourn most intensely the death of the hug.
This phenomenon of mourning is akin to the psychosensual—the loss of a pleasure that has been ingrained in us as normal, for surely it is; the intimacy of touch in all its connotations: hug, handshake, bumps, knees touching, hand holding, arm brushes. Its loss is a major hindrance to our well-being in that a single touch is now expanded into extreme pleasure, endorphin crescendo, highs of reassurance meeting the deep valley of remembrance. In contrast, when I successfully complete this book, the excellence of this accomplishment meets the solitude of closing my laptop. I turn to find myself sitting in an empty room, the dim light of fluorescence casting a shadowed audience and the sound of cricket and frog croak outside my window. My psychosomatic response acts as a deterrent: when I notice how severely alone I am, my joy is archived as historical even in the moment when it is meant to gurgle and ripple through the remainder of my time within it. What does it mean when joy is pocketed as historical in the very moment it is presented into your cupped hands? What does it mean when pimatisowin, the act of living, is immediately shelved into a past tense rather than becoming an ongoing series of unfolding events? This sensation is akin to how it feels to be and embody Two-Spiritedness, in that the moments in which I achieve something are already displaced and ghosted into a past tense that will forever place its possessive apostrophe before my name and being—it will claim me but distance itself from the wingspan of my grasp; and I will always be unable to claim or regale myself within its decor, its pinnings. Now living has become a series of hauntings, poltergeists, revenants that flock to the entrances to my ceremonial spaces and enter without regard or invitation. And when I say joy, I really mean joyed; and when I say living, I mean having lived.
There is no present within a pandemic, there is only ever a coming that is beyond the grasp of flight or feel, and is a conjunction with ending, with the past that is too amiable, too pliable, and dead-mounds into brittle medicine, thirsting starvation. My psycho-well-being is somatic as I process this continual undoing and unbuttoning of being. I am never fully embodied; rather, I exist like static, dazzling but frizzling into airwaves and light speeds that blink into disappearance. This very serious undoing is a mode of pimatisowin that now has been normalized for me, a queer Indigenous person living in this nation-state we now refer to as Canada. How insidiously genocidal, I ought to think, to be living within an unfolding of bio-organic death inside a history of continual pandemics. What means lonely, what means isolation, when one has continually been deterred in this modality of being? What means alone when the vowel within this word, a, which too denotes embodiment and being, is spliced but tethered to its suffix, lone?
Where do I exist within this canyon and canon of conjecture and connectivity? I feel as if I don’t and never have. And yet, within this momentous history, I am struggling to hold together the embodied and the disembodied. The price paid is the root of this equation: body. I need to, and must, exist beyond the limited scope of such a noun. I need to, and must, exist beyond the constriction of Western linguistics.
NIMICISOWIN, NIMICIMEW, NIMICIMOHIW—I am eating, I am holding, I am stuck. Perhaps this is my physical chant as a whole being, instead of a pancreas. Perhaps I return to the midpoint. We are in Golden, British Columbia, at the Trapper’s Haven cabin atop the hills. You are in the kitchen chopping onion. Your hair is a golden halo in this Ktunaxa light, the sun just setting beneath the Kootenay. Your chest is backlit from the light on the stove. You are braising chicken. You are preparing for us the food from your childhood home, Senegal. Wearing nothing but a yellow Speedo, you cook like the aunties in my family do, against flaring heat on bare skin—albeit pectoral here, not voluptuous breast. Grease splatters on your thigh, and I watch it dew from coarse leg hair.
I am writing this chapter, and as you look back at me, I smile up at you. I have found a reprieve here, in the mountains, atop this hill in Golden, in this temporary home we’ll share for the next six days. I have found safety after the risk we took to fly you here from Toronto, under the surveillance of social media, amongst the rising third wave; we have carefully calculated the risk, cutting off contact to all our kin for the sake of this trial. I have asked myself: In this risky endeavour, where we are told it is a wild act to think of being together across province and sovereign nations, what if we were not to do so? What type of risk are we furthering for ourselves then? As queer folks, risk is something we’re already attuned to. But in the height of COVID-19, when we are starved entirely of intimacy, care, touch, and love—will we flee, in turn, into extreme anonymity and perhaps enact riskier behaviours within this pandemic? We’re overloaded with social interactions in the virtual, but what of the body and its needs? What does risk mean, when we risk ourselves too, in this isolation?
You turn around, a plate in each hand. Yassa chicken and broken rice are placed in front of me, and we eat. And as we enjoy this meal, we stare out onto a hill that wants to be a mountain, the sun now resting in the bosom of the rock face, and I see that it is not only we who are sharing this feast. Grass sprouts back up, flowers curl into themselves, rocks sigh in the cooling of eve. In your perseverance amongst grease splatter and elemental burn, you remain animate for the sake of our continuation—nutritional and intimate and alive. That’s when I know that I am not the only one eating, that I am not singular in this widespread shared intimacy, that as I eat, so too does the land—that as I chew death, askîy spews life, askîy asahkêskiw.
I am never alone in this momentous feasting.
The land is eating pain too.
IT’S JULY 2021, and I am at Prince’s Island Park in Calgary, Alberta. The Every Child Matters vigil is going on, to mark the bodies of the children being found on the sites of residential schools. This ceremony is being held instead of cancelling the annual national holiday that is Canada Day. I am weary, for I have witnessed far too many deaths already. I am with a Dene friend, and we have decided that today we will not allow any whiteness in our proximities. We are wearing our orange shirts—the symbol of the missing children—to the park.
We walk from Kensington along the river. There is a heat wave in the province, and the sun bears down on us with teeth clamped around our limbs like a rez dog in heat. There is no reprieve but for the Bow River. We stop along an inlet—but here we find the water polluted by Canadian nationalists in their grotesque red-and-white attire. We dip our toes into the cool water, eyes darting from side to side, alert for danger or approach. If our beads and skin are not a dead giveaway, the orange is a homing device upon our bodies. Yet we want this release. We push into the river, we splash our faces with the cool mountain water, we wade deeper until our pelvic bones release from their rigidity and our bodies are cooled, relaxed. My hair is in a tight braid, one my friend has done for me. “It ain’t no powwow braid, but it’ll do,” she noted earlier, bursting into laughter in her tiny apartment. We push our heads and hair into the water, throw it back like a horse’s mane, and spark joy in the current of the riverbody; our glasses have fallen into the water, and we are blind and blinded by sun and whiteness alike.
We find our glasses and continue to the park. We hear the drums, the sound of music, the laughter of aunties as their throats strain from the intensity. When we reach the vigil, we come upon the final song of the day. It is a round dance and the two of us have not danced, hardly touched, for some eighteen months. The drummers thank everyone and ask us to round-dance this final song if we are comfortable doing so. We succumb—now double vaccinated but still shying away from the intimacy of touch. We join hands, my Dene friend and I, her hand in mine moist to the touch, warm and pulsing the rhythm of blood, and we look at one another, eyes flaring like sun dogs, yet as gentle as dancing sky. The feel of skin is a foreign invitation—and yet, familiar. Our eyes divine into wells.
As we look up together, we see that hundreds of people have joined us, forming four circles entwining into one another. This is the largest round dance I have ever seen. And now we move to a five-minute song, the rounds of the drum intensifying our steps, as if a stethoscope is placed upon our chests, matching beats. We look at one another here at the end of the end, or perhaps a new beginning, and cry. We sob for the children, we sob for touch, we sob for this reunion—not only of those of us here now, but of community. We are outpouring a reservoir of pain that we lapped up, from puddle to alleyway to great lake—by which I mean, we ate pain from those we loved, and have known, and have seen. And here it pours out like a great storm, upon the sunniest day. We pound into ground, barefoot and thrumming, until we ourselves become woodwind, until we ourselves become drum. And again, I see that it is not we who are eating; rather, it is we who are feeding. This land upon which we are guest echoes our Morsing, and says to us: pimatisowin, pimatisowin, pimatisowin!
And when I wake, I wane renewed.
Yet here I am, awake still.
TO END, LET ME start at the beginning. To find joy, I must find its birthing:
nitôsimiskwêm entered the world through a tear—nisîmis bore her through a gash in her gut. She burrowed into the earth-flesh of her body and dug out a child—and named her Akira. They had to pry her out of the bathwaters of my sister because Akira understood the safety net of womb water: what it held, taught, promised, and how it loved. And now she knows her body, she owns it; she knows the truth of human engineering and the constellations of her own coding. She knows how to rip herself away from it, too.
And she was born into a world on the cusp of revolution.
Akira enjoys the outdoors, the feel of grass, mud, rocks, leaves, and bugs on her skin. She tries to climb trees too often, obsesses over the wonders in the branches above, which must feel to her like another world, the Fourth world, the home she left to visit us. Once, while she was up there, a small crow fell from the tree in our front yard, a crow still in its youth, its wings not yet fully grown. It fell from its nest and landed between two pines, squawking while its parents hovered above on the tips of trees. We found Crow in the yard, picked them up, and with a ladder we placed them back into their nest. This was how nitôsimiskwêm discovered Crow.
Crow fell again, and despite all our attempts to keep Crow alive, feed them bread, defend the pines from cats and other prey—despite all our efforts, Crow eventually died between those pines. We dug up the earth in our backyard and buried Crow there. nôhtâwiy cracked open a cigarette and we blanketed Crow in tobacco, said a prayer, closed the casket of mud atop them, and sat down, quiet, sullen, contemplative on our back patio. Crow’s parents and kin flocked to the burial site, where they cawed a cacophonous cry, their squawks like the throbbing of a circle of drummers—all singing songs of pain. nitôsimiskwêm sat with us, laughing, looking up into the sky, surveying the limbs of boughs that vibrated from the weight of birds, calling the crows “beads.” While she laughed, we thought about the root of those crows’ cries—their baby was dead. I couldn’t do anything else in that moment but clutch nitôsimiskwêm and apologize, say kisâkihitin, you too are my relation, and we remember too damn much.
Now we play together, chasing each other around the yard, nipping at one another like coyotes, wrestling cubs in the grass. We regress into a feral state, a natural stance, a loving share; like Crow, we caw together, saying kisâkihitin, we’re making it in the world. Our kisses and bear hugs are promises to continue. Eventually, tired, nitôsimiskwêm and I lie in the grass, calling those crows beads instead of birds.
What does it mean to call a bird a bead? What language does she speak, and what authority do I have to correct her? She owns her stories as much as she owns her body. Her tongue is ceremonial; she honours Crow too, in her own way, gifts them a story through tradition, gives them the name of the bead that sits on her moccasin. Both of us lie here, the weight of her body pressing into mine, the low thrum of her breath pooling into the hollow in my chest, staring up at the Manitoban sky, the sun its own type of tear. This, I think, must be what sovereignty feels like.
This, I think, must be what futurity looks like.
This, right here, is a beginning.