Meanwhile, I'm in Toronto and there's nothing RWC going on but another kind of fever has hit this town: TIFF (the Toronto Intl Film Festival), with its glamour and big lights and busy streets... tonite Jason and I met at the corner of Spadina and Bloor to go and find coffee, then got swept up in the feel of the streets and ended up walking to Younge St and finding a great Korean place for BBQ (memories of Sydney!) and soju (memories of Seoul!)... we then followed the buzz down Yonge St, along Queen, and eventually to King St, the centre of TIFF where the crowds were pumping...
This is also the beginning of my fourth week here... three weeks ago I had just arrived and was sitting in my new whare looking around wondering what I'd signed up for... and now I'm part of a community. Well, part of a few communities I suppose. Part of the RWC-crazed (or RWC-fatigued, depending on who you're talking to) will-always-be-home the-place-where-I-belong NZ community... and part of the T.O. bigtown brightlights a-chance-to-experience-so-much community... and quite a few others as well.
Yesterday I got my small rectangular piece of plastic that confirms I am part of the U of T community: my ID card which means I can now take out books from the library, go to the gym (once I finalise my membership), and generally be a part of things here. I now even have a U of T email address (am still using the Vic one too though). I thought I'd take a few photos of my ID card yesterday when I was at Kensington market with Daniel, enjoying some coffee:
 |
| My ID - at Kensington Market (10 mins walk from my place) |
 |
| My U of T ID with that Canadian treat, pumpkin pie, in time for Canadian Thanksgiving (end of Oct) |
Early this afternoon, I sat in Hamilton (about an hour away from here) drinking coffee with Nadine, Daniel, and Rick Monture (awesome Mohawk guy who teaches Native Lit and Native Studies at McMaster) and we planned an 'Indigenous Literary Studies Reading Group' - I'm going to get to hang out with these guys (and a few others as well) once a month, sharing food and talking about recent scholarship in our field. Yes, sure, I'm a geek - but for me the possibility of being part of this kind of community is exciting.
Tonite, now I'm home from a nice night out enjoying the Toronto nightscene with new friend Jason, I'm making pikelets to take to the Aboriginal Studies meeting tomorrow morning. This will be my first chance to meet up with many of the other staff there, and I figured pikelets were fairly uncontroversial and unstuffupable :) This will be my community for the next year... other people dedicated to Indigenous Studies here at the University of Toronto... part of the much larger community of people working in universities around the world with the collective aspiration of improving and celebrating and extending the experiences of our people.
This morning, I was at McMaster which is the university in Hamilton where Nadine teaches. While Daniel was at an appointment, Nadine and I decided to go the on campus gallery and check out an exhibition of paintings by artists who were on board Cook's voyages around the Pacific. One of the portraits, which is usually at the Canadian National Archives in Ottawa, was a Maori woman... it was apparently drawn on the spot (as opposed to later on the ship or back in Europe 'from memory' which was more usually 'from fantasy') which meant the picture presumably bore more than a passing resemblance to the woman who was its model in the early 1770s. Amazing. All this time, she's been stashed away in an archive here in Canada, and suddenly I have a chance to meet with her.
I felt moved to find some greenery to place nearby the picture, as a customary way to acknowledge her, and muttered to Nadine that I might 'smuggle in some leaves' to which Nadine reasonably replied that I could always just go and ask if it would be be okay - which of course was a good point, and so I went downstairs to the reception area of the gallery and asked. They weren't entirely sure what to make of the request, but thought it sounded okay as long as there wasn't any water near the paintings, and when I returned a few minutes later with a spring of greenery in my hand they were quite excited and had even called Igor, the main curator of the gallery, who was keen to come and observe along with another staff member. Up the stairs we went: me, Nadine, Igor, and the other gallery person, and as they explained that they were very excited to just see what I was going to do, I realised they actually expected me to do something! Something, well, cultural. I had intended to just lay down the leaves by her (as I have done in other galleries in London and Hawaii) and then leave, but I didn't want to be the cause of a gigantic anticlimax, so as I walked towards her I thought I would quietly karanga to her as a way of acknowledging her presence and significance. So yes, it turned out that I 'practiced my culture' in that particular visible way because it felt like that was expected by the people in the gallery in that moment, even though it felt a little bit disingenuous because I hadn't originally planned to. But the thing with tikanga is that either you do something because it's the right thing or, sometimes, because you do something it becomes the right thing... as I completed the short karanga, I found myself starting to tear up and felt my throat thicken... if I am honest I know that I initiated the performance for the sake of performance, but by the end of it I had had a chance to connect. To become part of the community of Maori who are over here in Canada.
I have been a bit homesick over the past couple of days, and my connection with this woman in the portrait extends and comforts me. I'm not from here and no matter how long I stay in Toronto in lots of ways I never really will be. And yet, reflecting on the wahine from the Archives in Ottawa, along with my relationships with the tangata whenua of this place (Rick, Kateri, and so on), yep, I am ready to respectfully say that I belong here for the moment too.
No comments:
Post a Comment