eZine: Conversations
Part 1: Conversations with Heather
I met Heather through Saber Guild--we fight with lightsabers for charity--
Click to viewand since then I've become fairly good friends with her.
She grew up on the rural east coast
but her childhood wasn't a happy one. Not least of which because of the way she looked.
Her grandfather was Seminole though she didn't learn much about that when she was a child.
Later in life, connecting with that part of herself was something that she could hold on to.
A part of herself that she could be proud of
But this was the '90s, when the internet wasn't a readily accessible thing
That's when she found the bookstore.
This was where she found CDs of music, books, and advice on what to look up at the library (where she could access the internet).
In short, she found the beginnings of a community.
Since then, she's:
* moved across the country, to the lands of another people
* continued to build community and connect with her heritage
* able to experience parts of her heritage otherwise inaccessible to her due to geography
* able to hold conversations with people who care about the same issues she cares deeply about
To summarize, because of technology and the changing face of it, Heather has been more easily able to connect with indigenous ways of knowing and being in whole new ways, and build relations and community through those.
Part 2: Conversations with Myself
Through the course of this class, I have relied upon a graph from Dr. Littletree of Indigenous Ways of Knowing, with relationality at the center and spreading outwards, all cradled by respect, reciprocity, and responsibility.
Near the start of the class I decided that one of the best ways of understanding the material and the ISKs was to put the principles into practice in my own life and studies.
Part of that was storytelling and listening to stories, striving to understand things on not just an intellectual level, but a 'heart-knowledge' level, as Wemigwans says in her book A Digital Bundle.
This e-zine is intended to be a part of the reciprocity and respect between Heather and I.
Part of Relationality.
and turning head-knowledge into heart-knowledge
All of which are principles I hope to carry forward from this class into all my interactions with people--especially the indigenous people around me now and in the future.
(The writers would like to acknowledge that this zine was written and produced on Duwamish and Coast Salish land, per Native Land.)