11biteofpassage

[11biteofpassage]

#19 The Creature Collective

Earth violence: a dysphemism term used for “extinction,” which hopes to directly lay the ugly truth behind the decay of biodiversity—in which colonialism and capitalism was the direct cause behind it—before our eyes.

The Bawaka Collective records their singing of the songspiral to share with the future generations. The songspirals contain teachings from nature that help the people of Aboriginal people to navigate the world, nature. They learn and teach together as a group.

The unsettled settler is an author to multiple books discussing genocide, colonialism, and neo-liberal use of miliary in different regions.

Zoe Todd is practicing tenderness with the world. They learned from Inuvialuit Knowledge Keepers Millie Thrasher and Andy Thrasher in Paulatuuq that fish can decide whether to be caught or not. As an example, they don’t practice catch-and-release in order to honor the fish who chose to be caught.

DeVos, Rick. “Introduction: Unsettling Subjects.” Decolonising Animals, edited by Rick DeVos, Sydney University Press, 2023, pp. 1-18.

Dunn, Kristy. “The birdwomen speak: ‘Storied transformation”and non-human narrative perspectives.” Decolonising Animals, edited by Rick DeVos, Sydney University Press, 2023, pp. 219-240.

Supporting: Hernández, KJ, et al. “The Creatures Collective: Manifestings.” EPE: Nature and Space, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp 1-26 at https://www.academia.edu/43642593/The_Creatures_Collective_Manifestings.

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#18 Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit

In 2021, the Trump administrator sold eleven out of twenty-two tracts of Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, The Sacred Place Where Life Begins, to small oil draining businesses. It was said those lands will be developed to suit corporate greed.

The Gwich’in people let themselves and their culture thrive and survive through self determination. Part of it is to follow the ancestral way of living by finding food through plants and animals near them. In the modern days, human pollution and disturbance in the environment in which they self determine destroy those food sources. The Gwich’in culture is intertwined with its land: the Gwich’in people and culture rely on animals such as fish in the Arctic sea or the caribou reindeer on the Arctic planes to survive. When the pollution breaches the area, those food sources will die away. So will the Gwich’in culture, and thus the Gwich’in people. Without the Gwich’in culture and its people, there would be no Gwich’in self-determination in the first place. To prevent this from happening, there is a need to protect Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit from corporate greed.

Opt-in 2: The film title “Diiyeghan naii Taii Tr’eedaa,” meaning “We Will Walk the Trail of our Ancestors,” corresponds to the Gwich’in culture’s way of survival: through living the ways of their ancestors, generation by generation. In the film, the Gwich’in grandfather teaches his grandchildren a belief from the Gwich’in culture, in which they shouldn’t sharpen their knife until they catch the animal, or else it will bring them bad luck. They hunt and eat what their ancestors hunted and ate: caribou. From the film description, it was mentioned the child of Alisha went to a school that teaches the Gwich’in language so the language lives on. All of those that are part of Gwich’in tradition are taught to the new generation so they can continue to live the way their ancestors did, and in another word, walk the trail of their ancestors.

Tonya, Garnett. “Preserving Iizhik Gwats’an GWANDAII Goodlit.” Native American Rights Fund, 23 Aug. 2022, narf.org/arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-2/. 

Johnson, Princess Daazhraii and Alisha Carlson. Diiyeghan Naii Taii Tr’eedaa (We Will Walk the Trail of Our Ancestors) at https://www.reciprocity.org/films/diiyeghan-naii-taii-treedaa. (The film’s “Learning Materials” are also on Brightspace). 

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#17 In Central Park

I met a squirrel. In fact, I was spooked by the noise they made when it suddenly jostled the fallen leaves, dry and thin, laying out on the grass lands in thick piles. The animal was buried in it, and seemed to dig themselves further into it. In their piles of leaves, the squirrel moved fast. They seem to always anticipate something to come after them, and they expect to be aware of it by stretching and spreading their attention into every possible corner of their environment, looking around wildly with precise movements of mechanical grace and lightning speed. As I kept my movements small and slow, the squirrel seemed unbothered by my presence, it didn’t leave the area of leaves for a long while and I just stood there watching. The fact that people often visit the park could perhaps also be reasoned into why the squirrel wasn’t worried about me.

I was bitten by a squirrel once. It was long enough ago that I don’t remember when it occurred, but in an attempt to feed them something out of my hand, one squirrel bit my hand after taking food out of my hand several times. Perhaps their anxious nature won over their urge to eat in peace. Perhaps they were trying to see if I’d go away. It doesn’t really matter now, but since then I have been suspicious of squirrels. This experience doesn’t directly relate to my encounter with squirrels in the central park, but perhaps if I open my heart and arms again, I may learn to trust squirrels again eventually.

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#13 Us vs The Big Nose

One of my favorite childhood memories is when me as a sixth grader led a fifth and a fourth grader to rebel against my percussion teacher’s distribution of instruments.

We were a percussion section for our school band of wind instruments. In percussion, there are multiple genres of instruments like drums (timpani, snare drum, bass drum, etc.), keyboard percussion instruments (marimba, xylophones, tubular bells, etc.), and small percussion instruments (tambourine, triangle, bells, wooden blocks, etc.). My teacher maintained that there is a general stereotype on which specific instruments are more feminine or masculine (drums are masculine and keyboards and small percussion instruments are feminine), and always give the drums to boys while we who present as girls (since I discovered that I’m not a girl anymore, oops) get the not-so-fun-and-major-roles. 

To solve that, I led my friends who were younger than me to record every role our teacher has ever distributed for us, which shows a clear bias between girls and boys on which instruments we could get, and presented the chart to the head of the band department. The situation improved after I graduated, and my past commarads got roles in snare drum and more instruments that we couldn’t get. While I didn’t get to enjoy the benefits of the result, I am proud to be a part of a change that is, however small it may feel like, still larger than me. 

Side note: when I went to the school band in junior school, I discovered a special interest and talent in playing timpani, one of the instruments that I didn’t get the chance to learn and play since my last percussion teacher was sexist. By the end of tenth grade, I became the principal timpanist in my school band, and performed many roles with those beautiful drums.

The image above is the paper that we documented the instrument parts that we got to play on. The information above is summarized below:

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#12 Tenderness

Tender - According to "The Creatures Collective: Manifestings," tenderness can mean to care like “[tending] to gardens,” but it can also mean to be vulnerable like being hurt by “[a] bruise.” The vulnerability can “[gather] us closer,” which makes tenderness into connections or “relations”. Tenderness is “[care], kindness[, and love]...”, but it can also create a negative condition in which there is a “vulnerability without support” (Hernández, KJ, et al.).

Through constructing and introducing positionalities/identities to the audience, the authors give context to the points they are making, and let us understand how the context shaped the stands that they are standing. For example, through Theriault’s stating on how he claimed to be an environmentalist yet practiced a “lifestyle that is grotesquely unsustainable…”, the reader understands the context to how Theriault learned to reflect and rebuild his way of life through learning from indigenous people (Hernández, KJ, et al.).

I identify as Taiwanese and my ethnicity is a mix of Taiwanese, Chinese, and Hakka. Both of my grandfathers were people who escaped to Taiwan from the war between China and China’s original government. None of my grandparents are indigenous people in Taiwan and none of them except for one grandmother are native to Taiwan, which makes me a descendant of settlers from partially China.

When I am considering connections, which is part of how Todd interprets the meaning of tenderness, with my personal stance, I realized that me and my heritage were linked to so many places that I have never been to nor witnessed myself, but they do sweep into me through the smallest ways. As a descendant of people not native to Taiwan, this gives me the responsibility to pay more attention to the indigenous people of Taiwan, to make sure the government and government system that we brought from over the seas is treating them with respect and in communication with them.

Hernández, KJ, et al. “The Creatures Collective: Manifestings.” EPE: Nature and Space, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp 1-26 at https://www.academia.edu/43642593/The_Creatures_Collective_Manifestings.

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#10 On Humility & Humbleness As Our Relationship To Land

Professor Warren wrote:

In “Wilderness and Traditional Indigenous Beliefs: Conflicting or Intersecting Perspectives on Human-Nature Relationships,” Kaye claims that “the need for humility, respect, and restraint in relating to nature” is something in common “uniting many traditional Indigenous beliefs and the Wilderness concept.” In the same poly-vocal article, Polly Napiryuk Andrews and Bernadette Demientieff each include these same two sentences in their single-authored contributed essays. They each say: “More than any other modern category or management system, Wilderness recognizes our way of relating to the land and the Earth. The wilderness idea that humans are part of a larger ‘community of life’ (and should act like it) has been known to my people for millennia.”

Andrew’s essay reflects Kaye’s claims on humility through the idea that “...we all need to remember the importance of the ancient idea of living in harmony with—not dominating—this world…”(Andrew). At the same time, Andrew also rejects it with the idea that there is a “[human and nature’s] mutual well-being…” that is intertwined with each other, instead of placing human and land on a different hierarchy, with land ultimately at the top (Andrew). 

In her essay, Demientieff suggests that “we [as human] can live as respectful, interdependent, and low-impact members of this Earth’s community of life[,]” which embraces and rejects Kaye’s idea of humility at the same time (Demientieff). On one hand, humans are low-impact members among many others in this wide community of earth, which conveys humility. On the other hand, humans and the earth are interdependent with each other, which also places us on the same level of hierarchy with earth, rejecting humility.

Just like the paper “Wilderness and Traditional Indigenous Beliefs: Conflicting or Intersecting Perspectives on the Human-Nature Relationship?” suggests, being humble is crucial to address the environmental challenges that we all face. Being humble means respecting the land and the people on it. Without it, we will have little care for the land and for each other. As a result of abandoning our humbleness, we will lose the drive to find more ways to coexist with the land.

Kaye, Roger, Polly Napiryuk Andrews and Bernadette Demientieff. “Wilderness and Traditional Indigenous Beliefs: Conflicting or Intersecting Perspectives on the Human-Nature Relationship?” International Journal of Wilderness. August 2022, Vol. 28, No. 2, https://ijw.org/wilderness-and-indigenous-beliefs/.

Tallbear, Kim. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou Vol. 6 No. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 24-41)/

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#5 I hated wearing bras.

I still hate them. They restrict the movement of my ribs, make it harder to breathe, and are generally just uncomfortable. While there are movements like free the nipples that help to get rid of the stereotypical expectations for female presenting chests to be restricted and supported by bras, I would still be expected to do that in Taiwan, especially by my mother. Those expectations came from the way people sexualize female presenting chests, to the point where they became inappropriate, to the point where they need to be hidden, to the point where people with them can’t bare their chests under the sun like people with male presenting chests do. In 8th grade, I was scolded for trying to take off my t-shirt under the sun during a scout activity when male presenting kids started to do it, because I was only wearing a vest-under-wear beneath my shirt. And back at home, if I had wanted to go braless, my mom would always tell me to use pasties. My sweat washes them off of skin as if knowing I don’t want them. The societal obsession to hide female presenting nipples and areola is astonishing. I was, and still is, consumed by an uncontrollable rage when it happened or when I’m thinking about it: it really is just an organ; they are just balls of fat. Why are we required to hide it? Why are we required to be ashamed of it, to maintain the proper facade of society? I really, really do hate the sexualization of female presenting chests.

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#1 The Dive

In the past four years, losing the struggles between me and my procrastination on my academic works had led me to dark corners. (Burnout is often described as an exhaustion accompanied by a disinterest in work and procrastination.) It had nailed me into “now”: standing on the path where my future lay before me, a fog obscured my vision, I could only see my present. (During the days I couldn’t bring myself to care about the schoolworks, the days when I stare down the approaching deadlines without an ounce of alarm in my head, I wondered why.) At the height of my disinterest in school work also came the questions: have I found the limit of my capacity, (I did the research) the rim of a cup where water spills, (read the articles) the strain of a stretched rubber band where it snaps? (and did the quizzes that indicate whether I am facing a burn out or other similar problems over and over again, each time less certain in the answer than the last.) In the end, none mattered because none gave me an answer, except for time. As I marched on (sputtering and choking as I floated to the surface), the answer found me through the fog (I still came out mostly alright): the false bottom I found in me is not the limit of me at all (I have always been stronger than I thought), and my chance to find the truth (whether it exists or not remains unknown) behind the struggles I faced had faded with my short lived memories of each specific painful moment that I lived. As I dive deeper than ever, the most important thing to remember is this: return to the surface and breathe.

“Burn-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, 28 May 2019, www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases.