Tapwe
Busy
I’m stressed beyond all reason.
Nope, that’s not quite right.
I’m busy.
Sunday night, I stupidly pulled an all-nighter to finish two assignments: a paper that I had gotten an extension for (I was in Edmonton for a week for the wedding, then stayed an extra week for a funeral) and an assignment that was due Monday morning. After whipping through my essay, which was interesting and well-researched, I started in on the second assignment. It was terrible. The bulk of the work was there, but I was lacking a lot of the supporting information: what standards are relevant? Where does this information come from? And yet, I slogged on. Even a bad mark is better than an F, right?
Wrong.
Guess whose assignment is due Monday next week, rather than this week?
*raises hand sheepishly*
This is just the pattern of how this semester (and maybe whole year) has progressed. I’m not enjoying my assignments and studying, and yet, I really like my assignments that I choose and the subjects I’m studying. I think I’m done with school and I’m ok with that.
As I was rushing to the bus with my two assignments in hand, thinking about where I could print them and if I should edit them and what other assignments were waiting to be completed, I had a weird experience.
This is how other people feel all the time.
Busy.
I’m not someone who thinks through the steps. I like spontaneity and that’s an obstacle for project management. I do best when I break work into manageable chunks, and then set myself deadlines for those chunks. I procrastinate terribly. I mope and moan around the house about the assignment and then finally do it. And then I often enjoy the actual process of writing or completing a project and get frustrated that I didn’t allow myself enough time to enjoy the process.
But I rarely worry days or weeks in advance about something. Other people do. And, sleep-deprived and looking at the world through a haze (could have just been early morning in Vancouver), I got a glimpse of that kind of neurotic life.
No thanks.
Views from my parents’ house
I’m in Alberta for a wedding this weekend and all my senses are being bombarded with the familiar.
Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry
“Isolation from economic processes has meant that a number of neolithic cultural features, including undisciplined work habits, tribal forms of political identification, animistic beliefs, and difficulties in developing abstract reasoning, persist despite hundreds of years of contact“
This gem is from the book Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation by Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard. This book was written in 2008; it’s well-written, published by a respected academic press, and very comprehensive.
However, this book is pretty terrible to read. I was shaking my head (#smdh) within 5 pages. The authors start with a story about traditional knowledge and how it’s being used in an emperor’s new clothes kind of way: you can’t possibly understand traditional knowledge because it’s mired in cultural context. They struggle with that. If we can’t understand it, how can we provide a solution?
The authors are very clear about positionality from the start: before they lived in the North, they couldn’t be bothered to worry about Aboriginal concerns – these are limited to the isolated reserves or behind boardroom doors. But in the North – hey! – natives everywhere, and suddenly they have to deal with them on a daily basis.
Native people who have successfully integrated into modern society are lauded in a cartoonish way: see! They can be civilized, as though this isn’t assimilation and the horror of residential school wasn’t founded on the same civilizing condescension. The problem of the Aboriginal Industry is discussed, and the authors are all in favour of getting rid of the industry so that the real problems can be dealt with. They want to find solutions. That’s their overarching question: how do we find a solution to all these Indian problems?, or as the conclusion is titled: “What is to be done?”
There’s an unbelievable amount of privilege seeping from the page. When I was reading the discussion about traditional knowledge and how it can’t be understood by certain people, it struck me: for these authors who have lived with unconscious privilege their entire lives, here they are, in a situation where they are being told “I don’t think you can understand,” and it wounds them. They try and make concessions that will allow this knowledge to be shaped into a framework or structure that makes sense to them. Yet the knowledge exists in an indigenous context that, perhaps for the first time, puts them in a new position, stripped of privilege. This is the experience of many indigenous people daily: our experiences are not given the weight of white experiences.
This book is well-intentioned. It’s trying to push past the bureaucracies and red tape and mysticism that makes dealing with these issues (like consultation, land rights, etc) so problematic and lengthy. Yes! I agree! I’m all for figuring out a way to standarize the categorizations of traditional knowledge – I’m a librarian! – but I think that it has to come from the source. Otherwise, the paternalism that has characterized non-native and native people just continues and we have books that speak about my people as though we all have “difficulties in developing abstract reasoning.”
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I’m not the only Aboriginal person to shake my damn head at this book: Media Indigena has a discussion of this misguided book called “An Ink Stained Response to ‘Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry'” by Niigonwedom James Sinclair.
Here are the two parts:
The Shins – “Simple Song”
The Shins – “Simple Song” from DANIELS on Vimeo.
Holy moses. This is an amazing video. Watch it on full-screen. Effing literary.
It’s literary in the way of slightly off-kilter fiction that I eat like treats.
The W Section
In the library I work at, the W section is for all the books on art, music, and dance.
Drool-worthy books.
Gorgeous books.
The little yellow stickers say “Library Use Only” because people fall in love with these books and don’t want to bring them back.
What’s up, W section? Lookin’ good.
Grad photos
I got them for high school. We signed up and sat on the stage and held fake roses and it took, at the most, maybe 15 minutes. Poses with the roses, with no roses, with hat, with no hat. Looking off into the future, into the shining, glorious future.
I did not get them for my undergrad. Too much work, too jaded, too mainstream. Right? I didn’t miss them. I got a shot of me coming off the stage at the Jubilee Auditorium after shaking hands with the university president, a bunch of other important people, and the best, a lovely smiling elder who gave me an eagle feather and a big hug and almost made me cry. So in the picture I’m a little overwhelmed. I don’t think I even ordered prints to give to anyone, but if I do, it’s that one.
I went today to get grad photos for my MLIS. I wasn’t going to. Really. But there are composites from all the other graduating years up in the computer room and part of me kind of likes the idea of my face lording over the new information professionals of the future. I missed the first deadline and didn’t mind, but enough people procrastinated that the studio granted an extension.
This is apparently the big time. My appointment was from 11:40am-12:30pm (Why so long?). They told me to bring a maximum of two outfits (maximum? How many others did people try to bring?) and any props (wtf) I’d like to include. We went through their sets: a white space with no edges to evoke that place that Morpheus takes Neo to explain the Matrix, a classy parlour, a faux library with a lot of old encyclopedias. We went through poses: one hand on hip, arms crossed, business-like, lounging on a chaise lounge in the parlour room. Do you feel like a star? I guess you’re supposed to.
While in the ethereal white space, the photographer said, “Ooh, you’ll love this. It’s so fun! All the girls love this one!” and handed me a prop and told me to cross my legs and tilt my head to the side and give a major smile.
So in that one, I’m definitely holding a giant styrofoam “2012.” How did this happen?
Trivia Night
Tonight’s trivia night!
Confession: I never went to a trivia night before I moved to Vancouver. But people LOVE them here! You can find one almost every night of the week; most happen on Mondays and Tuesdays, the nights when pubs are quiet and happy to have anyone – even a bunch of nerds – in their bar, buying their beer.
Most of them follow a familiar pattern. Your classic pub quiz throws together some questions on pop culture, some current events, maybe a little name-that-tune or sports or fashion or film and if you happen to remember these trivial answers better than the other drunken sots around you, you might get a $25 bar tab or a free round. Yippee!
BUT! Even if you’re the star of the show and know every question and have an HA-larious pun for a team name, you can still lose. Enter the “key-method,*” so-called because we first encountered this method at The Cove, and they used keys. This is a double edged sword: the top three teams after each round get a key (or a laminated cheese, if you’re at the Cheshire Cheese pub), and from those keys, a winner is picked at the end of the game. So even if your team is generally crap and you just managed to squeak into third place on a blissfully easy round, you could win the whole thing. But, like I said, you could be the next Ken Jennings and get nothing for your blood, sweat, and tears. C’est la vie.
Confession #2: I am comparatively terrible at trivia. I mean, I sometimes can pull out all the stops and remember ephemera from my childhood that comes in handy, but in general, I’m the weakest link. I usually go to trivia nights with a bunch of librarians and assorted other smart people. These people KNOW their shit. They remember the tiniest of details. They’re amazing! In this group are people who are further specialized: sports geeks, film nerds, music maniacs, comics connoisseurs. The host will be asking the most obscure reference and they’re already writing down the answer as though someone had asked them their birthday.
So despite my frantic derping, all we do is win. It has nearly nothing to do with me.
*No one actually calls it the “key-method.” Artistic license!
Tapwe 