It’s a Friday evening as I sit down to write this post and I’ve officially been back to work for three weeks. I can’t believe how quickly that time has gone! Being on maternity leave during the pandemic has meant that for healthy and safety reasons, we’ve foregone time with family and friends we would have otherwise spent the last year with. And while I’ll probably be processing the sadness of that lost time for a little longer, I know there’s still much to be grateful for. This last year with my little family and our new baby has felt strangely insulated, but we were also able to spend a lot of time focussing on one another, and being able to focus on anything—much less something so positive—this last year feels like an absolute blessing.
Read moreThe Long September
September is usually my favourite month of the year, given that it heralds the start of fall, the start of school and the start of a new year for me—as my birthday falls in September. But, as it has all year, 2020 continues to reshape the familiar and expected. Case in point—I originally wrote this post on September 1st, and then just became completely consumed in getting my six-year-old ready for her Cayuga language immersion class (choosing to follow the paper option because the internet where I live is so terrible), and then felt like it was hard to know what to write about when there were so many things on my mind and in the news cycle that were affecting my community and Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island. I’ve also had a tremendously hard time letting go of the summer—a definite first for me.
And while I am someone who thrives on creating things: books, art, and stories, my great unwavering hope for this entire year has been for the continued good health of my family, my loved ones, my community members—the entire world, really.
Read moreCanoes and Other Thoughts
I’m drawn to stories that share the lives, adventures and experiences of women. Fiction and non-fiction. Poetry and Memoir. Quiet stories about someone’s life, or sweeping tales of their adventures. And of course, I am especially fond of science fiction and fantasy, so I love female protagonists in speculative fiction as well (Circe, The Broken Earth Trilogy, and the Their Bright Ascendency Trilogy are some recent favourites). There is courage, heartbreak and heroism across all of these different forms of stories and I’ve been inspired in different ways by each of them.
Recently, this interest has extended to wanting to hear and learn more from the female characters in Haudenosaunee legends. I’ve always been interested in our legends but now that my dissertation is done and defended, I’ve been spending my time reading through various story collections with more care and attention—an endeavour that requires its own post.
Read moreNew Year ~ Old Paths
I love to write and have been writing on and off for a number of years. The ‘off’ years have a lot of similar characteristics: heavy workload, creatively unfulfilling, endless searching for direction and purpose, tiredness and sadness, little exposure to books, high exposure to television.
Last year, I finished writing a story of about 52,000 words or so. I had been working on the story for a number of years but by the time I got to the end of 2013, I realized that I just wasn’t happy with it. I had originally wanted it to be a graphic novel that I worked on with my sister, then it turned into an illustrated novel and then just a novel - all of which made for a rocky narrative at best and by the time 2014 began, I knew I had to rewrite it.
So this is the creative writing project that I am working on now and I’m really glad I made the decision to rewrite – letting last year’s work transform into something far more coherent and satisfying makes all previous efforts so much more meaningful. It helps that it’s been a relatively painless process. Certainly, a large chunk of the story was already in place but outlining and generating reasonable word count targets for each of the chapters has been my best ally thus far. I’ve worked through five chapters relatively quickly and outlining has helped me make smoother revisions and adjustments as I go.
In the meantime, I realized I wanted to organize the blog a bit differently. I started this blog because I wanted a place to record the positive, inspiring and exciting things that were happening in my community. I wanted to record them because there is a lot of negative press about Indigenous Peoples and an enormous knowledge gap continues to persist in the mainstream education systems. But I also got caught up in wanting to talk about my own creative efforts and struggles.
I’ve read a lot of great blogs over the last year by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and they’ve inspired me to take a look at how I share what I’m learning in a way that really reflects who I am, what I care about and the things I like to do. And who am I? A writer? An educator? A participant? A researcher? A photographer? An activist? A schoolhacker?
I realized that I’d like to find a way to include it all: a little fact, a little fiction, a little fantasizing about the totally sustainable future I hope we all have. And this year, I’m going to try.
Nu:yah Everyone! (A Haudenosaunee way of saying Happy New Year)
S.