MOGAI ABCs day 3! Today's prompt is culture. This is gonna be a long one, know I'm gonna answer for us& as a collective and gonna answer for myself.
We've got so much to say on culture and the impacts it's got on people, and on ourselfves. We don't believe that someone can truly, wholly be unaffected by culture, same way you can't speak English without a dialect. We&'re Métis and Ukrainian Canadian, a Jew by choice, white-passing the majority of the time and raised assimilated by Protestant parents (they've jumped specific denomination a couple've times). A lifelong cityslicker with rural family, hardly been outta Western Canada, though we got Protestant family most of our education was Roman Catholic. Every one of these things impacts us& in some way, contributes something to the tapestry of our& experiences, worldview, identity, values, everything really.
Collectively, we&'re two-spirit and indigiqueer. It's real important to us to reconnect, and being Métis as an anthropology student gives us a whole lot to say on how white and colonial the field still is. It's motivating and it's painful and it's impossible for us to separate our studies from our Indigeneity (not that we'd even want to). We carry in us the grief and anger of our ancestors, yes, but we carry their resilience too. We think of ourselfves as living post-apocalyptically, and that Indigenous view as colonisation being the apocalypse has a lot of weight on our& identity as a survivalist in ways we don't quite got teased out nicely.
We don't have as much to say on being Ukrainian Canadian. Sometimes when describing our& ethnic identity, we leave that bit off. It's not outta shame so much as it is a sense of disconnection. The whole conglomeration of whiteness and how it smooths out differences, I mean, whiteness builds itself on exclusion, yeah? But we&'re excluded from whiteness already cause've being Métis (and arguably from being Jewish also, though this one's got a whole lot more conversation to it that I'm not getting into right now), and so we kinda view all that Ukrainian heritage as something that's just kinda not for us. Which, I recognise that's kinda ridiculous, yeah, and conceding to that conglomeration, but it's much simpler on paper than in action. When we were young, we wanted to go to Ukrainian youth groups and all that, never really did. As we've got older, our mum's seemed to see the importance of these traditions less and less. It just overall feels like looking at a face we're told belongs to someone very dear to us, and not recognising it at all.
Jewishness, though, that one I've got a whole lot more thoughts on. You'd not be wrong to call us& a convert, but not that nor ger nor Jew by choice feels quite right to us. It feels far more accurate to say our Jewishness has been here all along, even if we'd not been conscious of it; it was wonderful comfort to us when our rabbi said at our beit din that he hears that a lot lmao. Label-wise, we&'re androgynos, finding comfort in knowing there's always been intersex Jews and the Talmud accounts for people like us. We find comfort and belonging in Jewish constructions of gender, our Jewishness too ties to our& whole survivalist thing, and our Jewishness acts as an anchor to most of the rest of our self&. It is, to us, a root we can always turn back to when things aren't making sense, when nothing around us is stable. A lens we view the world through... Jewishview, in MOGAI vernacular lmao.
As for myself personally. I'm שמעון, or Shimon of PV. I'm diamigdar isha, a Jewish butch tgirl. My Jewishness can't be separated from my womanhood, nor from my butchness (nor can my womanhood and butchness be separated from each other). My butchness draws on Jewish masculinity, peyot and a kippah, a traditionally men's name, and it'll be tefillin too when I& can afford them. Shimon bat Avraham v'Sara. I'm more a daughter of Zelophehad than I am an Esther, if only 'cause I can't keep my mouth shut lmao.
