Indigenous Peoples Day reads —
Found this book of poetry and it’s so important to talk about/read about love and hope sometimes! Especially when you feel like everything has been taken.
I’m a woman who struggles with the concept of hope because I’m always fixated on the reality and the necessity for action and hope always feels too light to me. It always feels too transient and transparent to me. It feels too dangerous to me at times. I like to keep my feet on the ground at all times and therefore, I have never really been a subscriber.
However, I know how important hope and love is. I do. I know how important it is to have gratitude and love for your family, no matter the state your family is in. I know how important it is to have gratitude for understanding, recognition, resiliency, survival, rage.. rage as a change agent, persistence.
I started reading this book of poetry this morning as a way to touch reality. It’s a beautiful work. You can read it on Scribd by clicking the link below.
I, like many, struggle with decolonizining my familial practices. Black Canadians, a lot of us celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving on Sunday and we don’t really talk about this history, we don’t talk about Pilgrims, the Indigenous experience, though we should! Coming from the Afro-Diasporic, Thanksgiving is a foreign concept but we’ll take a day to celebrate with family. We don’t critically examine the cruelty of Christianity, the Government, White Supremacy and more over our Thanksgiving meal. I’m inclined to believe that it’s because we talk about those topics so much. We talk about these topics every single day because we don’t have a choice. Instead, we use Thanksgiving as a day to come together, sit in each other’s presence and revel in each other’s spirit. We use it as a day to share in our love for each other, and in our love for the universe that has brought us together.
It is with this spirit that many Black folks approach Canadian Thanksgiving on Sundays.
It is imperative to learn the history of any land on which you reside. Especially if you’re going to engage in their customs. What are these customs and where did they come from? It’s not enough to come, to occupy, to struggle, to strive and to not look around. Yes, we got problems. No discounting that.
Today on Monday, I will spend Indigenous Peoples Day reading this book, and experiencing some of the hopes, dreams and realities of the Original Peoples, the First Nations of this Land that we live on. Yo, I can already tell you the book is a beautiful book. Check out the poem below.
A little about the main author:
Lee Maracle is a poet of the Sto:Lo Nation from Vancouver, BC.
Read this book on Scribd. I'm reading Hope Matters on Scribd. Check it out: https://www.scribd.com/book/501250235
Hope Matters, written by multiple award-winner Lee Maracle, in collaboration with her daughters Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter, focuses on th
