tacocritic-blog

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“scholars are taking a deeper look at the writings of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who fled the Holocaust and later coined the term "genocide". He argued genocide didn't only have to involve mass killings, but the deliberate destruction of a group's essential foundations of life — the social and political institutions of culture, language, religion and economic pursuits that form a group's identity and give them security and dignity.The idea of cultural genocide is particularly important for Canadian First Nations because few mass killings or instances of direct physical destruction occurred in Canadian history. But, there are many cases of policies whose indirect intent was to destroy culture at the very least, and First Nations would argue the upshot was the same — the end of them as a people.Tacking on the word "culture" somehow signals something was less than real genocide. Instead, scholars are arguing that destroying a group's culture amounts to genocide plain and simple, with no need for a qualifier that softens the blow.“

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“Even after the last residential school was closed down, though, the government continued to remove Indigenous children from their families at alarming rates. “Some estimate [that] close to 20,000” children were taken between 1960 and 1990, and that “70 to 90 percent of Indigenous children were placed in non-Indigenous homes.” Today there is an “ongoing removal of Indigenous children from their families in numbers that exceed those taken by the residential-school system and the Sixties Scoop combined.” 

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“The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”

“[...] Death rates among indigenous children at residential schools were higher than among Canadian soldiers in the second world war, the report found. These were schools that often had no playgrounds but always had graveyards, according to commissioner Marie Wilson.“

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One of the issues with being Native is our identity has been very shaky, of course, as the result of genocide and the attempt to cloud our political system. I’m a citizen of the Navajo nation. These are actual, legal ... it’s like being French, or German ... Descendancy is not the same thing.

Jacqueline Keele

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“The Massachusetts Democrat shared the analysis of her genetic background – which found "strong evidence" of Native American ancestry going back six to 10 generations –  with the Boston Globe on Sunday and shared the full report on her website Monday. Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante conducted the analysis and concluded that while a "vast majority" of Warren's background is European, "the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor." 

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I am not a person of color; I am not a citizen of a tribe. Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes, and only tribes, determine tribal citizenship, and I respect that difference. I grew up in Oklahoma, and like a lot of folks in Oklahoma, we heard stories about our ancestry. When I first ran for public office, Republicans homed in on this part of my history, and thought they could make a lot of hay out of it. A lot of racial slurs, and a lot of ugly stuff. And so my decision was: I’m just gonna put it all out there. Took a while, but just put it all out there.

Elizabeth Warren

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Step No. 1: Write first. Possibly the most unconventional suggestion I give clients for creating a first draft is: Write first, then read, then write again, read more, and write one last time.

Yeah, don’t do that. Instead, at the beginning of a project — even if you have only the vaguest idea what it should be about — I suggest you set aside a week and free-write. On each workday of that week, spend 25 minutes twice a day (two "pomodoros" a day) and write down all the things that you know, want to know, are interested in, are confused, or are excited about in your new venture. Don’t try for paragraphs or even full sentences. Revel in the mess.

At the end of that week, you may have 1,000 to 4,000 words of semi-gibberish — but it holds the key to your future brilliance.

Step No. 2: The baby bibliography. From that inspired semi-gibberish, you will then mine your first annotated bibliography. And the annotations are the most important part. You should never read anything without writing something down about it. Look up about 10 sources on your subject — the 10 best or, at any rate, the most famous, or most recent and "exciting," or most in vogue, or most something. Just start somewhere. For approximately two weeks, spend every work session reading (or rereading) those sources carefully, creating a full bibliographic entry for each one. Annotate each entry with:

The source’s main thesis.

Its primary impact on the field.

Two or three representative quotes.

Your own opinion about the source — what you think is brilliant, what you think is flawed.

Step No. 3: A skeleton draft. Using your baby bibliography, begin to merge some of your insights with your free-writing to form a primordial outline.

Organize under subject headings all the quotes, summaries, and opinions inspired by your free-writing.

Copy, paste, shape, and cut stuff.

Always, always create another document to save everything you’ve cut.

Make note, at every turn, of unanswered questions. This is, in effect, the most important part: It’s the part you can’t write yet.

What you’ll have at the end of about two weeks — provided you work on this in two or three 25-minute sessions a day, five days a week — is essentially a skeleton. It will have the vague shape of an article or chapter but will ask a lot more questions than it answers and will have a fair share of bracketed "notes to self" (à la Find a thing that ties these two ideas together).

Step No. 4: Close reading. Your skeleton draft is also a road map. Instead of attempting to read Everything (which you will never do), you now know what sorts of sources you need to find and read in order to flesh out your arguments and fill in the gaps.

To identify those new sources, look to household names in your field, to scholars you’ve met at conferences, to people with whom you already collaborate, to that one exciting new hotshot you keep hearing about. And, of course, consult the bibliographies of your first 10 sources. Get to mining!

With an expanded list of sources in hand, it’s time to read more intensely. Spend the next three to six weeks diving into those new sources and expanding your annotated bibliography. Again, do the reading two or three times a day, in 25-minute sessions, five or so days a week. Give yourself a deadline: Set a specific number of work sessions (such as 20 or 30), and when you’ve reached that number, cut yourself off. (Don’t worry, you’ll soon have time to read more.)

Step No. 5: A workable draft. At this point, you’re ready to dive into your now-massive annotated bibliography and do more surgery.

All those unanswered questions you had scribbled down in your free-writing? It’s time to fill in the gaps. Extract quotes, summaries, and arguments (copy, don’t delete, them from the bibliography), and paste them into the appropriate places in your Skeleton Draft. Your writing here can still be rough — don’t trip yourself up worrying about transitions or squaring all the circles. This stage of writing is chaos. If it feels uncomfortable, you’re doing it right.

By the end of this step, you will have a slightly more fleshed-out draft. Your next task, then, is to spend another two to three weeks tinkering on the sentence level, working on those transitions and cleaning up unnecessary jargon. Follow the same basic work schedule: two to three 25-minute writing sessions a day. At the end of those weeks, you may still have more holes to fill (especially in the footnotes.) But, by and large, you will have, miracle of miracles, a real draft of a chapter or an article that’s 25 to 30 pages long.

From start to finish, the process will take 11 to 14 weeks — about the duration of a semester — of working on the project for no more than an hour or two a day. With a workable draft in hand, now is a great time to put it aside and let it breathe, as your backbrain spins its wheels while you’re on break in earnest.

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A trick I’ve learned to avoid being distracted by the potential for rejection is to always be working on an article or a book, even when you have something else under review. Another trick is to always be working. I’m constantly looking for ways to become a more efficient researcher. I know writers who work between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. nightly, since that’s when they’re least likely to be interrupted. I often write in those hours, too, but I also sneak bits of time for my research. With 10 or 15 minutes here and there, I can at least log on to WorldCat and sift through potential sources for a project and add some articles to my reading list, printing them or emailing them to myself for later. With smartphone apps and services like Dropbox, I can skim for books and even order them if I’m, say, waiting for a friend to show up at a coffee shop, or a student to show up for an individual conference.

Brian Ray, The Lessons of Failure

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English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought. Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess.

Mark Edmundson, The Ideal English Major

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Being an amateur is nothing to be ashamed of. Edward Said embraced the term. For him it was the mode of the intellectual. Amateurism, he said, is "the desire to be moved not by profit or reward, but by love for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture." It is a desire, he continued, that lies "in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.

Carl Cederström and Michael Marinetto, How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe

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Find something that sustains your happiness, something you really look forward to doing. It could be learning to knit, or starting a support group for graduate students. When I organized an annual panel this past fall that featured advanced graduate students giving advice to first-year doctoral students, three of them said that outside activities had helped them take a break from research and come back to their dissertation topic refreshed. One played tennis regularly, one danced, and one did acrobatics with a small circus. They stressed that they could see progress in those activities that was particularly gratifying when they weren't seeing progress in their dissertations. And, just as important, their nonacademic activities helped them to make personal connections outside of their tightly knit academic circles—something that's important for sustained emotional health.

7 Resolutions to Advance Your Career

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The more you fail, the more you succeed.

Alberto Giacometti 

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Although certain aspects of my story are unusual, good grad-school experiences are not as rare as you might think. When I crowdsourced positive stories on Facebook and Twitter, my mentions and DMs were instantly flooded. I was looking for common threads, and I found them. Though the hundred-plus respondents had attended all sorts of universities, from Alabama to South Florida to Pitt to Princeton to CUNY to Harvard to Idaho State, in fields as varied as history, education, media studies, genetics, neuroscience, and public health, the same three themes came up over and over again: affordability; supportive intellectual community; and high-quality mentoring.

Briallen Hopper, On Enjoying Grad School | A love that dare not speak its name

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We don’t want these people to go, and we don’t want to lose all the ideas floating around in their heads, so we say, "Please give us those ideas, at least. Please stay with us just a little bit." But we’re also asking people to stay tethered to a community of scholars that has, in many ways, rejected them, and furthermore, asking them to continue contributing the fruits of their labor, which we will only consider rigorous enough to cite if they’re published in the most inaccessible and least financially rewarding ways. [...] We don’t want to face how much knowledge that colleague has in her head that’s just going to be lost to those who remain, and even worse, we don’t want to face how much knowledge that colleague has in her head that’s going to be utterly useless in the rest of her life.

Erin Bartram, Why Everybody Loses When Someone Leaves Academe

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“It is striking that Vastey was writing a “history from below” in the early nineteenth century. For Vastey, death was not an obstacle to accessing the experience of slavery, hence the ashes and tombs that he claims he is awakening and interrogating. Vastey also wrote that he not only interviewed the victims of slavery themselves, but that he essentially interpellated their mutilated limbs and their scars, as remnants of the tortures that they had experienced, to produce a history of the enslaved of colonial Saint-Domingue from their own perspective, the first of its kind in the entire Atlantic World. He uses “we” to stress the collective nature of his writing and to stress the continuity of it. His work is crucial to understanding how we should talk about lived-memory. When Vastey published Le Système, Haiti had only been independent for 10 years. The memory of slavery was fresh and extremely vivid for those who had lived through it. Part of what Vastey is doing here is to say that just because slavery has ended in Haiti, it doesn’t mean that the formerly enslaved or their ancestors had forgotten what they suffered. How long would it take them to forget? Would our dead ancestors want us to forget? These are questions that Vastey was grappling with as he tried to write a history of slavery and then of Haiti that would oppose the dominant, colonial perspective surging through European writings about the events of the Haitian Revolution and about Haitian independence. I think today’s scholars are still struggling to fully realize and/or replicate the kind of methodology Vastey employed. Which is to say, how do we talk to the dead rather than solely about them?“