In the museum of political depression, in its tidied halls, books of the sort I want to write are banned, for they are against the world that birthed the writer. Books that emerge from a banned way of thinking, that pry open space to live otherwise in an uninhabitable world, lie open in hospitals and university dorms and community libraries but rarely in an institution governed by a pessimism of the future and a romance of the present. I’m both native to and an exile in a museum where hope disappears in clouds of misery. Quickly, I learned to walk upside down on the ceiling of the museum, which is an artistic practice of sorts. That is how I wrote this book. From this point of view, I could spot breaks in the clouds everywhere.
What I try to do in what follows is shore up another kind of emotional atmosphere, one in which the museum as that which governs NDN life, that makes our bodies into vessels for a vengeful past and nothing else, is emptied of its political wrath. I call this ecology of feeling, this anti-institutional world, joy. I could call it a number of positive feelings—happiness, exuberance, wonder—but with joy I want to bring into focus a durational performance of emotion, one that is caught up in an ancestral art of world-making in the most asphyxiating of conditions. Joy by and for the racialized is what we can consider the practice of breathing in what theorist Christina Sharpe calls “breathtaking spaces” shaped by oppressive forces of all kinds.2 How do a people who have been subject to some of the country’s most programmatic and legal forms of oppression continue to gather on the side of life? Under what furtive conditions do they enact care against the embargo on care that is Canada?
Wherever there’s an injunction on something as integral to the livability of the world as joy, there is underground activity, a fugitive cooperative of feeling, a commune of love that isn’t to be perceived by the dominant eye. In this book, I track that un-Canadian and otherworldly activity, that desire to love at all costs, by way of the theoretical site that is my personal history and the world as it presents itself to me with bloodied hands. To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.
To provide an account of the ways in which NDNs enact a form of geographic escape that is still unfolding, we need to write against the unwritability of utopia. This means that joy is somewhat of an impossible desire when our sorrow is multiplied as long as daily life continues unimpeded. That we experience joy, however, that we can identify it, if only belatedly, illuminates the dead end toward which the settler state hurls. In our insistence against elimination, the logical holes in the fabric of a colonial world are revealed. Wherever light rushes in is an exit route.
These pages don’t eschew sadness and sorrow; in fact, many of them traffic in those hard feelings. I have to tell my story properly, and to do this I need to guide you through a cacophony of things that could break a heart without negating the sociological import of our enactments of care. I’m up against decades and perhaps centuries of a literary history that extracted from our declarations of pain evidence of our inability to locate joy at the center of our desire to exist. With you, I can rally against this parasitic way of reading, this time-worn liberal sensibility. Together we can detonate the glass walls of Canadian habit that entrap us all in compressed forms of subjectivity.
Join me in the ruins of the museum of political depression! With hints of a world-to-come everywhere we are and have been, a red utopia is on the horizon!
AN NDN BOYHOOD
My twin brother, Jesse, and I were born marked by a history of colonization and a public discourse of race we can’t peel from our skin. We were made to take on a mode of embodiment that erodes from the inside out with vicious precision. At the same time, we came into being because love is mathematical: when two people desire each other, they multiply, in various shapes and forms. In our very corporeality we are thus a container for the terror of the past and the beauty that it can’t in the end negate. In this way we, like NDN boys everywhere, are subliminal.
The first year of Jesse’s and my life was a hotbed of decisions, desires, and disavowals that would hover above our shared emotional worlds deep into adolescence. This isn’t my story to tell in painful and careful detail, so the picture I paint now is one that’s rehashed from a handful of sources, including something like intuition.
Here goes. My mom and dad loved while coated in the ash of history. Twenty-somethings entranced by the ecstasy of optimism, they made a family out of nothing but the human need to be a part of something less resonant with toxicity than solitude. They didn’t know how to ask the question Sheila Heti poses in Motherhood: “Who is it for me to bring all this unfolding into being?”1 Perhaps the philosophical basis for their children’s lives was that they no longer wanted to exhale smoke.
If we subscribe to the idea that we inherit bits and pieces of the psychosocial habits of our family, then my parents’ approach to life-making might also be descriptive of mine today, in their aftermath. Perhaps this pressurized orientation to memory— one by which we understand the past as a trace that pulsates in a body in the present—is always the case with life-writing. The writer is called on by others to do the politically significant and ethically charged work of construction and then documentation. This is my job: to report from the scene of an undead past colliding with a still-to-be-determined future.
By the age of twenty-three, my mom had four children, two girls and two boys, between the ages of three months and five years. My dad says Jesse (his legal name is Jesse-Lee) and I were named so as to usher us into the world of rodeo. I’ve seen the pictures of toddler-me dressed up as a cowboy, my dad positioned in the corner of the frame, smiling, perhaps bathing in the scene of self-recognition before him. Names are worldly, and it was with that knowledge, that emotional and maternal knowledge, that my mom gave us her last name, passed on to her from her dad. I imagine this was a rare practice in the nineties in northern Alberta, which was unshakably conservative. I like to think my mom did this to foreground our enmeshment, how irrevocably hers we are, how even outside of the womb we populate the affective house of her, then and now.
The story goes, my mom and dad fell out of love, hard, with an always-accelerating speed, shortly after our birth. A forest fire can’t be a refuge. My mom wanted to live in a land without a dangerous weather—in this way, we’re profoundly alike. According to my dad, he went about the drama of raising twins on the reserve, enlisting the aid of a similarly inexperienced nephew. Six months slowly inched by as his sense of maternality disintegrated. On our first birthday, having lived twelve months in an ecology of complicated love, of sociological forces that elided our awareness, we went under the care of my mom’s mom, nôhkom. It’s impossible to deny that this reorganization indelibly ordered Jesse’s and my future, those collectively and individually lost and those newly birthed. Language is inadequate here to bring into focus the communal effort, involving an extended family unit that included my parents and their parents, that went into raising two NDN boys not in a way that would ignore the coloniality of the world but so as to engender life that might breach its grip. This is the old art of parenting in order to keep NDN kids safe from what lingers of a governmentally sanctioned death wish against them.2
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