On watching #ScholarStrike

I wanted to say something about the #ScholarStrike 2-day teach-in which occurred Wednesday and Thursday of last week. 

Bonnie and I decided to treat this as though we were going to a conference: road trip and hotel, going out to dinner, making new friends, but since our lives are in the same full sweep of covid-19 that would mean we would stay at home to do all of this.

I hadn’t listened to more than two sessions, when I discovered that the event was too intense and I knew we would never make it through every session, as I had planned.

BC Scholars Support #ScholarStrike

I did take 11 pages of notes. 

As well, I have gone back over the notes to highlight some places with yellow colour, or big stars, or some kind of colourful asterisk reminder that I want to revisit an idea.

I want to say in response to the session by Bonita Lawrence called “Indigenous Responses to Black Resistance”, that I also felt an irresistible response to write her a letter, something I rarely feel when I listen to a speaker. 

Her argument was tight, concise, compelling, and struck to the heart of why coalitions are so difficult. She said that her research has centered around her own indigenous identity. When she spoke she looked like a retiring academician to me. She posted a younger picture of herself, long dark luminous hair past her shoulders, like a triangle spreading out over her back. I don’t know if she would have called herself radical, but I love that word and I could imagine it cemented across her photo like someone might print a WANTED poster to be hung in on old west post office bulletin board.

I am going to have to accept that I could only watch the number of sessions I got in, and that I am not gong to be able to take in all of them. Sometimes that happens at a conference to me too, though not often. 

In person I seem to be able to make myself walk to and sit in every session, but given the technology set up seems harm to me, I find it is just too many clicks away.

At one point the moderator to the session said, we’ve had 30,000 people tune in to #ScholarStrike. I think she also said 3,000 were attending the session I was watching. That’s one of the nice things about today’s electronics, you can count the number of people in an instant who are watching with you.

I wrote a note to at least 7 young people I know who are attending University right now, and alerted them to the fact that they could attend this free. I don’t think any of them did. As well, I know some professors who didn’t attend. They were busy with the extra burden of learning how to teach electronically, a hard task when much of their teaching skill is centered around watching their audience, picking up on cues of when people are lost and when it is time to move quickly ahead. I think they’ll miss seeing the twitch of an arm or the furrow of a brow on a student’s face as a signal that the lecture needs to broaden at that point. At any rate, I can see why people’s lives made it impossible for them to find the joy in those two days that I found.

It’s a week away now. I’m sure I’ll read my notes over one more time. There are some phrases I am not going to forget. 

One of them is “1492 Land Back Lane.” 

My typist just asked me what treaty occurred in 1492. I reminded her it rhymes with “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” She laughed and shook her head in disbelief that she had missed that one. I also want to say that for the first time in all of my studies about Indigeneity the penny dropped for me about two different world views: the one that the settlers have as contrasted with the one that the Indigenous people share.  The two major view points stem from the different creation myths they hold.

When I first began working at the University of Calgary, I was working in the University Library. The pay was low, but  the perks were high.  One of the benefits was that the department believed in educating its workers, so anytime we wanted time off to go to a lecture or a conference it was made available to us. I developed a taste for going to lectures, conferences, and talks at the Nickle Arts Museum.  I was up to exploring new forms of knowledge, and I’m glad that I still have that taste even though I don’t work there anymore.

Arta

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The Power of Stories

... a quick selfie in front of Killer Whale before we leave our room ..

I am still thinking about the power of stories – in the lives of adults.

Adults listen to complicated stories – mostly told to us with our electrical devices -- which are a modern day gift.

I am wondering if there is a place in adult lives for old-fashioned story telling, the kind that originated our fires when the sky got dark and people were gathered and talking to one another in the deep of the night sky.

Rebecca has been telling the story of Cannibal Boy lately to all who stop to listen.

She practised at the lake and Michael Hunter Johnson was often listening to the story. When Coyote first steals Cannibal Boy from his community and takes him home, the boy is on Coyote’s shoulders and he begins to pick away at a boil that is there.

Rebecca uses her hands to pick at something on the back of her own neck, her face grimacing when she does. Then Cannibal Boy sucks some of the puss out of the boil and Rebecca uses slurping sounds so that her listeners will know that what is there may be disgusting to them, but it is delicious to Cannibal Boy.  Rebecca's tongue reaches far out of her mouth to get every last delicious taste of the puss and the slurping sound reaches far to the back of the room, although she is not micked up.

To jump to the end of what I want to say about this story, one day Michael finally asked Rebecca to stop telling it. He was tired of the story and didn’t want to hear it any more. She agreed to do that, but in doing so, she just wondered if he could perhaps tell the story on his own. She was just curious, she said, to know if he remembered it.  And off he went … almost word for word, gesture for gesture, and slurp for slurp to the end of the story.

I am not tired of the story yet although she has stopped telling it to him.

 I noticed that when I put on a favourite fleecy yesterday, that the label at the back of my neck was scratching the skin there. I have tolerated that scratching for years. I wondered why it is I just haven’t taken the time to clip the threads that hold the label there, and give myself a better day – no more scratching there – just get Cannibal Boy off of my neck.

So I did.

Slurp, slurp.

Arta

Impact Benefits Agreement Conference – Second Day

... the morning sun reflects off of a building across the street ...

I had a second wonderful day at this conference.

I was reading through my notes, remembering both what I wrote to keep in my notebook, and then what I leaned over and wrote on the conference materials that Rebecca had.

My materials were all online.

She had the print out copy of all of the slides of the presentations.

Occasionally I would move into her space with my highlighter on her papers since a single circle around a word, giving it colour, is a faster way to remember than at that point in the talk some connections were falling down for me.

Rebecca presented on a panel of three in the afternoon.

I am curious about these three houses in the middle of the street.

One woman talked about Impact Benefit Agreements in the mining sector of the Yukon. Another team talked about Impact Benefit Agreements and surface water in northern British Columbia.

2.Rebecca gave a 20-minute description of a handout called Indigenous Law 101 and produced by the Indigenous Law Research Unit.

As well, in the past few years, she explained, Indigenous law has existed from “time immemorial” and then she told the story of “The War with the Sky People”.

When she tells stories I am reminded again of why we tell stories, what is captured in the telling, and what shifts for us when the words and phrases are coloured with someone else’s meaning.

I watched her hands as they swing up to the sky as if she was building the ladder to the sky and I watched how her hands lingered there as the ladder grew from a single arrow to a sturdy pathway to another world.

I notice that one is a law firm.
I also notice that the moss is thick on the roof of 1 out of 4.

Rebecca reminded me again how bear’s pride and wolverine’s taunts had devastating impact on an already failing partnership between the birds and the fish. She left me with the questions of who among us is vulnerable and could we act otherwise to protect them.

What I also wanted my words to capture is the following point about stories.

When they are in black and white, we have to trust that our own minds can do all of the work of bringing colour to a phrase about the indiscrete nature of pointing out to bear that we all know the story of how he lost his tail and how it would have been better to have shown bear respect for all of the other brave qualities he has and to not linger on the foolish one that lost him his tail.

Anyway, with one well coloured turn of phrase, a good story-teller can do that for me.

... the circular window give a panoramic effect to the view ...

I had wondered how Rebecca would do all of that in 20 minutes.

She is mid-career now and she can that skill in her pocket, the one of starting when the minute hand begins to move around the clock and stopping at that same moment when the time has passed and the only thing left is for new minutes to begin moving through my life.

Arta

Tsukino-con

Friday night Duncan called to see why no one was home.

Yes, 7 pm Friday is late for everyone to still be at work, so we gathered up our materials and headed for home – or at least to pick him up and go to Tsukino-con 2016 at the University of Victoria campus.

As we walked into the campus from the parking lot Duncan was 10 metres ahead of us, all of the way.

He has been to this conference in previous years and I know that feeling -- hurrying ahead to go to something that was good in the pasgt.

Rebecca’s faculty card gave us entrance to the Artists Alley and the Vendors Hall. The merchants were selling tsukino items: pins, posters, calendars, badges, wallets, knives, stuffies, costumes – all of us had a chance to buy all of the merchanize our wallets could afford. A person has to have interest in anime for interest in this conference. I was agog looking at the costuming of the participants: the women dressed to the nine’s, the men as well. Everyone wigged, in leotards, cloaks, lacey dresses – the merchants and the participants. I came home to look at the online programme to see if I wanted to go to the conference for the day. Rebecca convinced me that my shallow knowledge base would not make this the place for me to be for the weekend. She bought a lovely bag to carry her law books in. Duncan bought some gifts and a picture for himself.  With some training, I might like anime.

Arta

Call for Papers by the American Academy of Religion

My friend, Ruth Bailey, writes to me that in her latest Mormon Historical Association newsletter, there was a call for papers that she thinks I might know more about than she. (me being Canadian, her begin American)

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American Academy of Religion, Pacific Northwest Region

2014 AAR/SBL/ASOR Regional Meeting

University of Calgary, Alberta May 9-11, 2014

They want Mormon Studies.  When both of us attended the  Mormon Historical Association Conference that was held in Calgary, one of the speakers pointed out that Mormonism had been left out of Canadian history and shouldn't have been.  It looks like the American Academy of Religion want to include it.  They want the meeting to be multidisciplinary--history, culture, belief and practice, theology, scripture, politics.  They especially want papers that include impact of women and minorities; development of Mormon beliefs, etc.; interfaith traditions; politics, Mormon Studies within the academic study of religion; Mormonism within North American culture.

Proposals need to go though Oxford Abstracts.  For more details, see http://pnw-aarsbl.org.  Submit between October 15, 2013 and January 21, 2014.  Acceptance letters will be sent by February 1, 2014.

Looks like it is late now for submitting papers, but anyone with an interesting paper could still submit late. Conferences like these are always looking for good papers and are willing to squeeze them in somewhere.

There are probably lots of other papers out there that involve the Mormons, just waiting to be written ... or that have been written and are just waiting for a place to be read.  Just an idea.

And no, I am not going to write another paper with you, Rebecca.  I have ports to see, instead.

Arta