NAISA dispatch #1 - book

University of Minnesota Press booth at the conference - see the giant poster of my book! :)

With the lovely Jason, the editor I've worked with on this book... with book and sign :)

dispatch from NAISA #1

Yesterday afternoon we drove from Canada to the USA, and today we drove from the USA into Mohegan, the sovereign territory of the Mohegans. As a reservation, it is both a construction of the US state and an enactment of Mohegan self-determination and self-governance.

We're staying at Mohegan Sun, the gigantic hotel/ casino here on the reservation, and it's totally overwhelming. As in glitzy, flash, enormous... This afternoon we were at a much simpler, altho no less beautiful (actually, to my aesthetic, far more beautiful) tribal government offices where they hosted a 'strawberry social' with dancing and some craft vendors and delicious food. An event with local people, including elders and kids and everything in between, the social was great!

I'm sleepy tonite, after catching up with so many dear friends and I'm looking forward to meeting up with so many more over the next few days.

Uh oh. The welcome here at the conference centre part of the casino (yes really!) starts at 8am so I better get some sleep... zzzzzzz....
 

on the road again

We're staying in a hotel room off the I-90 interstate in New York state, just outside Albany: Nadine, Malissa, Jennifer and me. Four of us from Canada are driving down from Toronto/ Hamilton and are on our way to NAISA, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference.

The day started off by picking up a rental car, then picking up the other three girls, then we headed south... through the border into the US... and down to Syracuse where we had dinner at Dinosaur BBQ, a place Nadine and I used to frequent back when we lived in Ithaca, just an hour south.

But more importantly, the conversation: in the car, in the hotel room now while I type this, while we had dinner, when we jumped out for coffee refills, we' ve talked a lot about things... Indigenous Studies, Whitney Houston, allergies to cats, colonialism, diaspora, food, research, and so on...

(And, some reassurance for Mum: Nadine and I are using our reusable coffee cups.)

Tomorrow we'll be off to Mohegan Sun, a casino/ hotel on the territory of the Mohegan iwi, where the conference will be held... this is the last conference of my sabbatical, the last time I'll have 'University of Toronto' written on my powerpoint, and the first time I'm giving a paper which focusses on three writers in my own family: Hamuera, Grandad, Uncle Paul. I'm also mentioning the writing of the other siblings - Aunty Martha, Uncle Fatty, Uncle Martin, Aunty Nanie - too.

We're getting so close to the one year anniversary of Grandad's passing and it feels right to be talking about him now. Remembering him, thinking about returning home, thinking about the journeys ahead.

I'm on the road again, but it's not a lonely road. It's a good one. 

lolly mix: CACLALS, apartments, independence, babies, homes

Tonite's blog, being written after a brief hiatus while I've been - um - scrambling around, too tired to blog before I fall asleep. Why? Well, here's the rundown of the lolly mix this week has been... all good stuff! But, lots of it. No complaints, just an opportunity to reflect and be thankful.

CACLALS
The second two days of the CACLALS conferece, which I did intend to blog about (honest!), were great. Plenty of opportunities to talk, learn, listen and think. Some of these opportunities were because I agreed and was being extended and affirmed and challenged in my thinking, and some of them were because I took exception to what was being said - but by so doing, I got to clarify for myself how I really think. I gave a keynote at the conference on Monday, using Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm's amazing poem "from turtle island to aotearoa" as the basis for a talk about Maori-Aboriginal connections. In her poem, she recalls going to Aotearoa and being welcomed onto a marae. As she spends time at the marae, she realises how closely connected she is to where she is from, and eventually finds - through her experience with Maori - a way of returning to her own context having been affirmed and refocussed.

apartments
I've left the Spadina Ave apartment. This is where Matiu and Megan had Christmas with me, it's where Mum and Dad were based for a month, it's where friends like Ra, Dominique, Chad & Joel, and Shirleen & Alyssa & Katherine came to stay. This is where local mates like Nadine, Sarah and Anne & Michelle spent time, picked me up, dropped me off, gossipped, ate, drank, and so on. This is also where I learned that cousin Pete had passed away, where I applied for a job which would wrench me away from my beloved Aotearoa, and where I wrote some  things and failed to write others. Everything is in boxes now: two boxes are on their way to Hawai'i already, I'm surrounded by boxes here in the downstairs of Anne & Michelle's place where I'm staying until the 15th when I fly home, and the rest of my life is in boxes in Wellington. I don't live anywhere, I'm  not unpacked, I have no housekeys except for the spare to this place which I'll hand back in a fortnight. It was sad to leave Spadina Ave, but it is also the right move: it's time, it was only ever for a year, my season in Toronto has been amazing and is irreplaceable but it's also ending.

independence
Samoa is 50 years old today! Or not, depending on how you feel about marking the age of a nation by the time elapsed since it seized independence from European (in this case New Zealand) colonial domination. But, milestones like these are worth celebrating because they remind us of histories and people and, especially, the hard work of people who sacrificed so much for the sake of such moments. Ia manuia lou aso fanau, Samoa. Samoa mo Samoa!

babies
My cousin Daniel is now a father! He and Briar welcomed little Pania into the world this week. She's the newest addition to the Te Punga line (as well as many other lines, of course) - the first mokopuna of Aunty Jill and Uncle Mike, the first great-granddaughter of Roi and Thora, the first great-great-grandather of Hamuera and Lydia. I will get a chance to meet this precious little girl when I'm  in Sydney in July - but for now, it's just so exciting to have a new baby in the family! Nga mihi nui, mihi aroha ki Danial raua ko Briar :) You'll make lovely parents for this lucky little chicken.

homes
How many homes have I packed up and shifted from? I start to lose count... here, Wellington, Sydney, Honolulu, Ithaca, Auckland... so many boxes and bags... so much carrying stuff out to the car. So much stuff! It's nice to be staying with Anne and Michelle in these last two weeks of my time in Toronto- it feels kind of right. I stayed with them the first time I came to Ithaca, part of the process by which I moved to the US and - in some ways - became this girl, with this life, involving so many boxes, bags and suitcases for so many years. I am hopeful that Honolulu will be a chance to stop again for a while, and live with an eye on a calendar rather than a clock for time. Measuring time, measuring homes, by months and years rather than hours.

 
solid
In her poem about visiting Aoteaora, Kateri notes:

“Weeks from now

I will fall through the sky to turtle island

Clutching a bit of papatuanuku in my fist

I will create a new beginning for myself

On the solid back of Canada”

She is referring to the origin story of her people here, including the falling of a woman from the sky down towards the water and her being caught ultimately by a turtle. I'm conducting the reverse journey, leaving Turtle Island (as North America is known) for Aotearoa, but with a bit of this place clutched in my fist. I will be landing in Aotearoa but moving to Hawaii soon after. Where's the solid back in that? Well, gentle reader, it all depends on how you look at it... (And Miigwech to Kateri for the amazing poem...)

"Weeks from now
I will fall through the sky to Te Moananui a Kiwa
Clutching a bit of Turtle island iun my first
I will create a new beginning for myself
On the solid back of the Pacific."

CACLALS conference: day 1

The end of day one at the conference for the Canadian Assoc for Commonwealth Language & Literary Studies.

I'm tried, and had a lovely fulfilling invigorating day with great conversations and some very good thngs to listen to and get me thinking!

Tonite I'm just going to share a few direct quotes I jotted down while listening...

"at some point you just have to make it up... some of the labour you've done gives you the disposition... [but] the archive is just not there" (about the problem of missing colonial archives)

"the medicine of stories"

"he said language was his home"

One speaker couldn't work out why she had studied law. She thought it might be to she could support herself and her son. She then thought it might be the fulfilment of her father's own dream to be a lawyer. Then she realised it was so she could write poetry.

"breaking and entering the text"

"I knew the stories were in there"

"the sea is the archive; the sea is very fluid" "the words began to float on that archive of memory - the water"

"not taking it back, but getting underneath it" [about Caribbean writers' relationship with English language]

roll call

People are where they should be.

Mum, Dad and Megan are on Matiu/Somes island.
Dan and Briar are awaiting the arrival of the newest Te Punga baby.
Vula is with the matavuvale (family) in Melbourne.
LeRoy is getting ready for his school ball.

And me?

I'm at a conference; I came back from dinner with other speakers and organisers this evening, and the actual sessions start in the morning.

Is this where I should be? Yes. This is the opportunity available to me right now, and right up the very end of the sabbatical I am being given ways to connect and make the most of my time here. However, I know things are wrapping up here. Like the road trip last week by which I acknowledged the place I've been for the last year, this conference is a chance to enjoy and acknowledge the intellectual place I've been.

I'm where I should be. And, in less than a month, I'll be in the next place I should be. And, exactly a month after that, the next place. Hawai'i.

Too: on also standing up.

At the Wellington Public Library memorial event for the amazing Taranaki poet JC Sturm, one of her friends stood up and started her recollection: "Kermit the frog said it isn't easy being green, and Jacqui found it wasn't easy being brown either." 

Some days this feels so true that it hurts. Immoral legal decisions and an inefficient but brutal police state, an especially harsh National government budget, and as I have been excitedly planning a future with a certain lovely man, two men from home have received their sentences: two and a half years of their future will be in prison.

When I posted this poem on facebook earlier today, I called it 'extreme' because this what what I sat down to write about. How is it possible to feel such extremes of emotion at the same time? How does one keep the right emotions in the right compartments so bitterness doesn't bleed through into spaces which are cherished, so hard-edged cynicism doesn't bleed through to spaces where one feels (nicely) vulnerable? So gooey lovely sweetness doesn't prevent sharp attentive critical thought when it's needed?

The poem that came out was about extremes, but I have called it 'Too' in the end. This is a poem about addition, layers, also, extremes. It's a poem which says 'me too' as well as 'this too' as well as 'too much.' (And, yes, 'Too' is a pun. Tu mai Taranaki, E Tu, Kia tu. Tumatauenga.) Too.

Too.

It’s too hot on my porch today:

a concentrated dose of Toronto sun which was gently diluted in winter months

is burning a hole in the pocket of the day,

pressing into my black clothes;

it’s too bright to read Indigenous theory off white paper here.

It’s too colonial in my country today:

Four sentences, three Maori, two jailterms, one judge, zero justice,

and meanwhile a budget which catches the crumbs as they fall off the table,

places them back on laden plates

rather than letting them fall like gentle rain from heaven

to the disenfranchised who have come to depend upon them.

It’s too distracting in my body today:

a heartful, a mindful, a dreamful of love

obsessed and smiling, I try to keep focus:

such depth of connection, such delicate urgent intimacy

such lightness of being

feels inappropriate in these too-hot colonial times.

Pick up coffee cup and printed pages, open the screen door, walk back inside

My eyes take longer to arrive than the rest of my body;

they’re still adjusted for the brightness outside

I bump into things, blind, while I wait for my whole self to arrive,

and realise this is the only worthwhile way to proceed anyway

All of me, all at once:

anger, frustration, cynicism, hope

and, in the centre as well as the outer reaches, love.