Authors
Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Jennifer Markides, Beth Cross
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Abstract
Liisa-Rávná: I am Rámavuol Liisa-Rávdná, who is also Dr. Liisa-Rávná Finbog. I am the daughter of a long line of powerful women and men; stewards of the land, and keepers of the hearth that has and continues to nourish a good way of living. I came to the present work with multiple reflections, all about the importance of being grounded.
Although I was born in diaspora, and partially raised away from my ancestral homelands, I have always been adjacent to water. My tjidtjie’s (mother) homeland is on an island in the North of what is today named Norway. Her family was (and to some degree are) hunters and sea farers, living on and with the sea. My áhčči’s (father) homeland lies deep in the mountains, powerful workers of the land (and even the occasional bear hunter), but the coast is close and an imortant element of every day life.
I was primarily raised by the fjords that lie to the South – away from Sápmi, and our Indigenous territories, and yet connected to home because water is life; water is the red from Vaja’s veins, she who laid down her body and blood so that the Creater could shape the world into being.
Water, as blood and as the seas, smell of salt and seaweed, and kelp. It is a subtle scent, calling attention to the broad spectrum of life that the water (will always) shelter. It is this scent that grounds me, connecting me to family, to land, to territory, and to clan. It is present, in all the ways that matter; a deep sense of belonging. Through water, I know myself, and by water, I also know my place in the world.
Jennifer: I come to this work with two dear friends whom I have come to know more deeply over the course of writing the call, stewarding the issue, making artful pieces, and imagining otherwise in our scholarship. My name is Jennifer Markides and I am a Métis woman living and working in the traditional territory of the Blackfoot, including: Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations; the Tsuut’ina First Nation; the Stoney Nakoda, including: Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney First Nations, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Districts 5 and 6. My Métis family names on my Dad’s side are McKay, Favel, Ballenden/Ballendine, Linklater, and McDermott/MacDermott, including Scrip records and connections to Red River. He is also of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Coast Salish ancestry. My mom's Wood family is primarily Swedish and English. As a Métis scholar, I appreciate the work of women in many Indigenous communities as leaders, caregivers, creatives, and matriarchs. Our hands have made things out of raw materials for generations, and we lift our voices around issues that impact families, communities, and the Earth. It has been an honour to collaborate on this special issue and to witness the multitude of research conversations and stories that speak differently in this space.
Beth: How did I get here? How many stories do you have time for? Maybe there is time for a question instead to introduce myself. A recurrent question I ask myself comes from a request that Indigenous communities make of those who would work in common cause with them. The request is to not borrow their Indigenous teachings and customs but to re-engage with one’s own. This makes a profound sense to me, and yet, it opens up a nest of uneasy questions for me: What would this entail? How would I do this? Through what practices? Engaging with what sources? For myself, like many Europeans, the vagaries of wars, empires, industrialisation, and modernisation makes Indigeneity difficult to trace. Finding a way through this tangle involves working through the diffracting shock waves of grief, denial, and forced adaptations jumbled up with deceptive myths designed to distract. It feels like I am crawling out of a train wreck into a toxic waste dump. It is not where I would choose to start from or what I would want to claim as my motherland. But even here regrowth is possible. There are already allies working life into the cracks.
I come to work on this issue having been steadied by my welcome into a makers’ community, Galgael in Govan, Scotland. Their explanation of their name best expresses for me a place recognition I can live with:
The Galgael (Gaelic spelling, Gal Gaidheal) were an ethnic mix of peoples living in Scotland. By the nineth century this mix of people had become so settled, they became known as the GalGael—the ‘Gal’ being the foreigner and the ‘Gael’ being the heartland people. The name Galgael is our way of re-rooting identity and belonging in ways that are inclusive, not exclusive. We recognise the stranger and the native within us all.
So as stranger and native with a twisting wandering restless lineage I am somehow an academic looking for opportunities to use the entitlement that confers as pretext for community organising and resistance, seeking also to make revolution, with a nod to anarchist Emma Goldman, something I can dance to.
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