Welcome to Litsy!

(1/2) Oops. Just completely forgot to post about the last two books I read lol. Been completely swept up in the new school year!

My last read of the summer. I figured it was short enough to squeeze in before school started & would be nice to knock out before I started the September seminar on CLR James that I‘m taking with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research! 🙂

An excellent read: a mix of short stories and poetry, interweaving deep love, acidic humor, and vigourous critique from an Indigenous feminist perspective. The multiplicity of styles, voices, and issues—class and race, monologue texts, connection and right to land—is really rich. My only regret here is that the author read it: I think someone with a more dramatic voice would have been more engaging.
#Booked2022 #CanadianProvince

She is proudly attachment-parenting a chick.
The chick follows her around as she puts all the girls‘ hair into tidy buns. The other moms love the chick because it is so cute.Cheep. Cheep. Cheep. I feel bad for this chick. It‘s in an impossible situation. Imprinted to a crazy person of the wrong species. Alone in the world. At the mercy of these nutbars. Stolen from its natural habitat. Destined to serve humans. Colonized. Dispossessed. Oblivious.

#Bookspin
1. What is the What
2. City of Saints
3. Walking the Bowl
4. Seeing Ghosts
5. Spectacle
6. New Jim Crow
7. The Tears of a Man Flow Inward
8. Wayward Lives
9. A Long Way Gone
10. Disruption
11. When the Sahara was Green
12. Hope and other Dangerous Pursuits
13. Follow Those Zebras
14. The Boy
15. How Beautiful We Were
16. 100 Days
17. You are your best thing
18. Moonless Starless Sky
19. American Spy
20. Storied city

I always feel like a cheap trashy Indian when I‘m on the West Coast with all those goddam trees, mountains, oceans, and salmon, and all those goddam White people tripping over themselves to stop pipelines. What the fuck?

The neighbourhood we‘re going into has perennials instead of grass, they get organic vegetables delivered. They‘re also trying to make our neighbourhood into an Ontario heritage designation. That mostly means you can‘t do anything that makes your house looks like it isn‘t from the 1800s, or rent floors to the lower class… Their only job is to file the flyer on the fridge, it‘s a perfect get out of jail free card: Help the Indians in their plight.

I loved “Island of Decolonial Love” and 20 minutes in I am loving this one as well.

Excellent overview of Indigenous political & economic struggles over land rights. Sometimes while listening to this audiobook I would feel so frustrated about the way successive Canadian governments continue to ignore treaty agreements, Supreme Court judgements & our own constitution that I would either pace the floor or take a break. Narrator Darrell Dennis is Secwepemc, as is author Arthur Manuel; I appreciate hearing correct pronunciation.

The first obstacle in defining our new one-to-one relationship with Canada will be the very heavy debt from the seizure and economic exploitation of our lands for 150 years since Confederation. This debt is enormous. I suspect that one of the main reasons that the Canadian government refuses to acknowledge our Section 35 rights is that it would leave it open to paying a percentage of the astronomical wealth that has been taken out of our lands.

[On the 10 years spent drafting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples]: Even referring to us as “Indigenous Peoples” was a battle with the [United Nations member] states‘ representatives, who wanted us referred to as Indigenous populations. That term would have kept us outside of the UN‘s basic rights covenants, which offers protections to all of the world‘s “peoples.”