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This text is an adapted transcript of a keynote presented at the Indigenous Scholars Conference: Indigenous Epistemologies: Re-Visioning Reconciliation on 26 March 2015, at the University of Alberta. It has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies.

I am from a family with Indigenous Latin American and German ancestry. I have been to many different countries and lived in different places. I believe this is partly because the Indigenous tradition my family comes from is nomadic. They see the earth as a living entity, and if they stay in one place they believe the land gets sick. They travel to where their ancestors send them, and this and other important messages are conveyed through their dreams. I married into a Cree and Blackfoot family where ceremonies are performed with the Blackfoot in Alberta. My son also married into a Maori whanau (family) in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

This inter-weaving of bloodlines gives me a perspective of many different Indigenous communities. I am no expert in any of them, and I do not speak for any of them. I also find it difficult to pinpoint only one place where I “come from.” In part, this is because I believe that the earth is alive and upset about fences and divisions. It is also because the tradition of being always on the road, crossing many different types of borders means one has to feel the pathway itself as a place too: one that enables you to see different patterns, different connections, as well as many similarities, and that offers a different kind of contribution to the whole. From this place, I would like to offer a story that speaks to the crossroads and the in-betweens.

I was coming out of a meeting at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where I work, and I found on the floor a dead hummingbird; it looked like it had died recently. At first I did not know what to do as I did not want people to step on the tiny bird. I could not leave it there, so I decided to wrap the dead body of the hummingbird in my scarf. I sang it a couple of songs, and put it in my bag because I was going to a lunch meeting and could not go straight home. I went to the meeting, had lunch, and really forgot about the hummingbird.

As I was leaving the restaurant, I remembered the hummingbird and decided to show it to a friend. I took my scarf out of the bag and exposed the body of the hummingbird. As we were looking at it, to my greatest surprise, the hummingbird started to flex one of its legs. At this point the hummingbird’s heart began to race, and I thought that if I did not do the right thing, I would end up killing it. I decided to go straight to my office.

The hummingbird was slowly awakening and started flexing his wings, but his feet seemed to be entangled in my scarf. I took him outside in the scarf, but he would not fly. I thought: I’d better take him back to the tree where I found him, and then maybe he will know what to do. I started walking on campus; to get to the tree, I had to go counter-current through a lane full of people. It was a busy time when students had just finished their afternoon classes. I was carrying a scarf with a hummingbird flexing his wings, as if he was hovering on top of it. I had a miracle in my hands, going through that crowd. What really broke my heart is that nobody looked at the hummingbird. Nobody saw it. As I approached the tree the hummingbird flew away. And that was the end of my encounter with the hummingbird.

I went back to my office, and I started to research where those UBC hummingbirds come from. They come from Mexico. I also found information about the state that the hummingbird was in when I found it. When hummingbirds find an external threat, they go into a state of sleep where just eight percent of the bird’s metabolism keeps it going. This state is called torpor. In this state, they look dead. They take about an hour to “wake up” when the threat has been overcome. Maybe being in my bag protected by the scarf just gave him the warmth to come back to life again.

As I told the story to my Cree partner, he asked me to pay attention to what the hummingbird came to teach me. Reflecting on the hummingbird’s teachings took me back to the people walking without the ability to notice the hummingbird flexing his wings on top of my scarf. I believe the hummingbird was trying to teach me about torpor — the state of torpor of the people, who could not see him, as well as my own torpor. If we cannot see the hummingbird, it is because we are sleeping. People who were oblivious to the hummingbird, seemed to be so much in their heads, in their minds, that they could not really notice him: they were in torpor. I spend part of my life in torpor too.

From that point on, I started to think about an education that can awaken us all from torpor. I also started to think about this state of torpor in relation to what we are protecting ourselves against: what has created the state of torpor. If there is a threat that is prompting us to fall asleep, if we do not understand or face this threat, it is going to be extremely difficult to wake up from that state. And if we do not see the implications of being asleep, we might not want to be awakened, because we may be afraid of being awake. I imagined all these people coming to me with huge sleepy heads and very little bodies–heads that scale up our sense of importance, our sense of entitlement, our sense of control of everything, our sense that we are in a bubble that separates us from each other and protects us from the world. It is this sense of separation that presents the world as a threat, as something we need to be protected against and this creates a form of existential poverty.

Existential poverty is a denial of relationship (Donald, 2012), a denial of entanglement, a denial that our lives (both human and non-human) are all inter-woven. This denial leads to torpor and to the fear of awakening. Existential poverty also leads to material poverty because by trying to protect ourselves from each other, we start to accumulate stuff as walls between ourselves. We think that “stuff” is going to give us the affirmation of individuality and security that we believe we are entitled to.

I started to think about what has been scaled down so that the head could be scaled up. What has been scaled down for me is our sense of visceral connection with each other. We have been told that thinking is everything; that “we are” because “we think”; that reality is only what fits our enlarged bubble thinking heads. We have been taught to think about ourselves as much smaller and more limited than we actually are. I started to wonder about an education that could scale up what has been scaled down, that could un-numb the sense of visceral connection, and the responsibility that this entails. But also, the idea that we can scale up and connect the unique healing medicines located in our (different) bodies so this combination of medicines can contain and heal our collective pain, all the pain we have inflicted on each other.

We tend to think about hearts as limited, and to be afraid of the pain that we are going to face in the world because we may feel that our hearts are not strong enough to take it in. But as I was thinking about the teachings of the elders that have been in my path — and I have had the privilege of having elders in different traditions — I realized a common pattern. They have taught me through different stories and by example that we can scale up and connect our hearts. The same way that we can scale our hearing, so we can focus our hearing on something that is near or something that is far in our sight, we can make our hearts smaller, or bigger, enormous. Our sense of identity can also be perceived in the same way. We can be just this body, this ego, a defined identity, or we can be unbound spirit, we can be part of everything. Our sense of land could be just our home, our reserve, our country, or it can be the whole earth, or the whole universe.

Part of the problem with the kind of education we receive at university and schools is that we forget how to scale up the important things. And we scale down things like generosity, compassion, humility, in order to be able to participate in a system that has given us a few gifts, but that depends on violence to be maintained. So here I draw on Cash Ahenakew’s  (2014) work to talk about this paradox that we face as Indigenous people all over the world. This paradox has two sides. On the one hand, there is the necessity to survive in a modern capitalist context that is inherently violent and completely unsustainable, a system that makes life outside of it almost impossible, unless we are “off the grid.” We have to fight for our lands, our rights, our languages and our cultures using the language of the nation state, if we want to be successful.

On the other hand, and at the same time, if we know that system is unsustainable, we have a responsibility to give our children an alternative mode of existence that might not be defined by that system. So how do we do the two things together, knowing that the first system tends to define our existence very quickly? Do we as Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, as people who are here to support young people, just support them to get through the system and then they become one of the people who came towards me and could not see the hummingbird? Or do we just socialize them in traditions where the hummingbird is one of the most important things to be seen? Can we train them to be successful in the existing system and to be awake, to be able to see the hummingbird? If they are awake and within the colonial system, will they be able to survive the pain without knowing how to connect and expand their medicines and hearts?

I believe these are discussions that we need to have. We have been thinking about an education for walking both worlds, but we have not yet really talked enough about the difficulties and the complexities of doing that, in the sense that young people feel torn, or sometimes fall through the cracks of both worlds (Battiste, 2000). Perhaps one way to think about it is through the concepts of material and existential poverty, and material and existential wealth. We need to think about the ways that material wealth, which has been associated with affluence, competition, and individualism, has caused a lot of existential poverty. So, how do we pass a notion of existential and material wealth to our children that upholds the dignity and wellbeing of every being, both human, more than human, and non-human, a notion of wealth that does not harm other people or the planet and that honors ancestors as people who have come before and of people who are yet to come?

This is the kind of education that I have been thinking about in terms of working at a university that, after this experience with the hummingbird, feels very much like an ivory slum, in terms of the existential poverty it promotes. Within this context, I also wonder about what reconciliation means and what it looks like. When I get really frustrated, part of me starts thinking about exiting: I just want to get out of institutions, return to community, forget about the university. Another part of me remembers that the process of reconciliation requires us to be where the problems are. I am not talking just about the reconciliation related to the effects of colonial violence, but about the (difficult) sense of wholeness and oneness that we have to have if we want to open the possibility for another form of existence in this planet. It is a reconciliation that starts in our guts and stretches out to recognize our inseparability. In many ways, being in the ivory slum is extremely important. And it is also really hard. And it is very difficult to face that existential poverty and not know what to do.

I find courage when I manage to de-center and to trust that there is an ancestral vision guiding where I go, a vision that knows why I was sent to this place, even if I do not know. That is what I try to say to myself in moments of extreme frustration. This helps me remember that the process of turning towards existential wealth involves dealing with the existential poverty that we see around us and within us. And that the “us and them” mentality works for certain things to a certain extent, but ultimately does not really speak to that yearning that we have inside of us, which is a yearning for wholeness, for wellbeing, for connection. This can only be achieved when we are together.

As an Indigenous scholar from Trinidad, Jacqui Alexander (2005) has pointed out that we confuse this yearning for wholeness with a yearning to belong, or a yearning for identity, for individuation, or for affirmation. And that, again, works in certain contexts and has saved many lives. I am not dismissing that. But maybe that yearning will only be addressed in the long term, not necessarily through more thinking or more dialogue, but through a renewal of our relationships, and our awakening to this visceral sense that we are individually insufficient and collectively indispensable. Regardless of what has happened in the past, if we use the same frames of being that create violence to resist violence, we will reproduce more violence. If focusing on thinking alone, on “making sense,” is not the answer, what else can we scale up so that we can remember to listen and relate to every being, not necessarily through conceptual language, but through our bodies and our spirits? How can we remember how to “sense sense,” to access other forms of reasoning, without dismissing the gifts of the rationality that we are over-socialized into?

I believe this is what the hummingbird came to teach me that day. I am glad that I did not kill it accidentally by forgetting it in my bag. I am really glad that we both came back alive. The ideas of torpor and of the university as an ivory slum have been very helpful, both in terms of understanding what my role is in that space, and in understanding how my own frustration reflects the same existential poverty that I am trying to address.

Seeing the frustration itself as a trickster teacher, showing me that my ego also reproduces and has been trained in that same kind of thinking, has been very useful. Being able to let go and allow this other vision to come in is very difficult, especially when you have to keep your webpage updated saying how great you are at competing with others: how much research you do, how much knowledge you have, how many articles you have written, how much money and how many awards you have received. I look at it and feel my stomach turn. But I trust there is something beyond myself that moves us where we need to be. It points to the life force within every single one of us, even when we do not want to listen. I believe it sings us a song that speaks of being awake, of breathing, of knowledge coming in dreams, of being undone, of healing and dancing precisely because of the scars we carry. It invites us to a natural state of vulnerability where obsessions with the meaning of an individual lifetime loses centrality as we see the same matter (or flesh), animated by a life-force that precedes it, as constantly morphing into different forms and different learning experiments. In this sense, awakening requires an interruption of our satisfaction with torpor and the false security we have with the illusions of individuality and of control that come with it. Once we let go of that arrogance, we can un-numb our senses and renew our relationships, by noticing that we are, simultaneously, one, many and the creative potential of ‘nothing’, as we inhabit bodies/flesh/form in linear time/reified space – and not – all at the same time.

On the other hand, I do recognize that I cannot be in that state all the time, and that there is anger, trauma and childishness within me. And these forms that I take, take me to enclosures of thinking and to a sense of entitlement absolutely grounded in the “us and them” separation, which depends on a denial of my entanglement with everything else. Maybe these entities are also part of entanglement. In this case, the question is how can I encounter these forms of my self productively without being overcome by their narcissistic tendencies? How can I identify and name the colonizers who appear as external to me (obviously I have to do that sometimes) without allowing that definition to determine my relationship with those people, and without seeing myself in them? When should we play the political game, in the pre-defined political context, and when should we breach those definitions and insist on other forms of relationality? Can we do both at the same time? When should we center ourselves for the benefit of our specific communities and when do we de- center to allow the land to imagine through us, for the benefit of all life forms (Longboat & Sheridan, 2006)? If this is not a matter of ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and more’, as my brother Hemi says, how can we mobilize both strategies without having the one least practiced subsumed by the other, which currently colonizes both our hopes and our imagination, giving us safety in a state of torpor?

I must acknowledge the elders who have taught me the most about this. These elders are Keith and Karen Chief Moon and Leroy English who are Blood elders from the Kainai reserve where I sundance. Above all, they show me that humility, generosity and compassion are not intellectual choices, not attitudes you decide to have, but waves that are radiated through you, when you tune to a different wavelength of being. Keith’s story is a beautiful story. For the past six years I have witnessed the process of him sustaining a Sun Dance created from a vision he had forty years ago: of people from the four directions dancing together to reconcile on the land’s terms. According to the vision he received, people would arrive at his Sun Dance, and he would not be able to send them away because it is not the bodies that would arrive – it would be people’s spirits asking to dance. I have witnessed people from other Sun Dances coming and telling him that what he is doing is wrong, because people in the dominant culture are used to appropriating Indigenous knowledge and using it in bad ways. I have heard people saying, “White people will come here, and in five minutes they are going to be bossing Indigenous people around thinking they already understand everything.” And it is true; they are trained to do that.

However, Keith’s response has been really interesting and has taught me something that I did not expect. His response is always that he agrees, on political grounds with the criticisms, but that the land is a sacred place, that his vision is also sacred and that this vision does not require consensus. What he has taught me is that spirituality trumps politics. Seeing him respond with generosity and with compassion to people who act arrogantly or stubbornly due to their torpor or training has helped me to identify and not be afraid to learn from my own arrogance. Keith has established a distinction between necessary political relations that require political agreements and frontiers, and existential relations grounded on visceral connections and wholeness that create a wavelength where frontiers do not exist, a wavelength where all our 99 senses point to the fact that we are each other.

At that Sun Dance I learned there are two groups of elders (who come in many ages): those who insist they know (which is a sign that they don’t), and those who insist they don’t know (who could be on to something). Both are important. Elders in the first group see education as the distribution of answers to be consumed or wrestled with. Elders in the second group see education as a recalibration of a search beyond meaning and the individuated self – a search driven by doubt that often gets stuck in distractions when certainties creep in. The first education gives us languages, concepts and ideas to play and experiment with. The second education demands that we loosen the grip when these things get confused for the path itself, when they become the cement of our ontological securities, getting us entrapped and immobilized precisely by giving us the impression that we are moving somewhere. Combining both types of education requires patience, humor, self-compassion, vulnerability, discernment, and, above all, a healthy skepticism towards one’s own and other knowledges and desires.

Perhaps torpor could be considered as a consequence of the overdoing of the first type of education. When knowledge becomes an instrument of existential arrest we get stuck in distractions. Awakening from torpor does not mean dismissing or banishing knowledge, rationality or identity, but recognizing unhealthy attachments and investments in these things that foreclose on our capacities for a multitude of other possibilities for sensing, reasoning, relating and being. In times of exhaustion or scarcity, hummingbirds shut down their metabolic system. Under conditions of perceived existential scarcity, we may likewise shutdown our capacities, and forget that they exist as we embrace the illusions of safety in our sleep. Perhaps the second education can help us to learn to let go of the strong faith we have on detractions. This may, in turn, loosen the grip that they exert over us, allowing the search to unfold otherwise, awakening our capacities to fly again.

senses
of resonance
of awe
of fusion
of possibility
of form
of being
-in-breathing
-in-beauty
-in-flux
-in-vulnerability
-in-time/space
of embracing
the miracle,
the privilege
the responsibility
of being alive:
both one, many
and nothing,
entangled
unfinished
and free

References
Ahenakew, C., Andreotti, V., Cooper, G., & Hireme, H. “Beyond Epistemic Provincialism: De-provincializing Indigenous resistance.” Alter-Natives: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 10, no. 3 (2014): 216-31.

Alexander, J. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Battiste, M. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2000.

Donald, D. Forts, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Aboriginal-Canadian Relations: Imagining Decolonizing Educational Philosophies in Canadian Contexts. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012.

Longboat, D., & Sheridan, J. (2006). The Haudenosaunee imagination and the ecology of the sacred. Space and Culture, 9, no. 4 (2006): 365-81.

This text was first published as: http://artseverywhere.ca/2016/06/21/torpor-and-awakening/

As I wondered about the best way to write this text, two related events caught my attention. First, I received a call for publications with the title “After De-colonizing…What?” issued after an extremely productive (albeit difficult) 2015 gathering in Portugal on the theme of ‘Eco-versities’. In the same week, in a different context, I was gifted a wooden USB stick with the word ‘decolonized’ hand stamped on it. Both events attest to the fact that the word decolonization is becoming a popular way to describe changes people want to see in society.

Different people use the word to name changes in processes, thinking or institutions that they feel are unjust or are causing harm to themselves or others. Therefore, decolonization has come to mean many different things in different contexts, and, although this is to be expected, Indigenous scholars have taken issue with certain uses of the term [i]. In any case, it is very important to ask questions about what assumptions, politics, and theories of change inform the analysis of colonization and the invocation and desire for decolonization in each context of use.

For example, in the first event I mentioned, the question “After De-colonizing…What?” can be interpreted by assuming a number of things; for instance, that there is consensus about what colonialism is, what it has done, how it is reproduced, who and where we are within it, how things could change, and when it is over. It seems to assume that decolonization can be a point in time (e.g. I was colonized, now I am decolonized), rather than a lifelong and life-wide process. It seems to assume that we can — and that it is desirable — to articulate and determine what comes after decolonization even before decolonization can happen. And it also seems to suggest that the question itself is located in an already decolonized space, that colonialism is not at work in the question itself, and that it is “time to move on” to more “concrete” things rather than keep on discussing the problems “of the past.” What the question does not convey is that there are very different understandings of colonial violence, of what the job of decolonization is, and of what it takes to get the job done.

In the same way, the “Decolonized” USB stick mentioned before works as an icon of past and present colonization while, ironically, announcing its end. On the one hand, it represents an attempt to raise awareness about the endurance of colonialism; it attests to the fact that colonialism is not something that happened in the past, and that there is a need to decolonize “today.” On the other hand, despite using critical language, the USB stick can be interpreted as supporting a colonial economy and way of being, while giving us the stamp of approval we are taught to seek and to consume. Symbolically, it turns decolonization into a brand literally stamped into the wood structure of the stick, associating it with ideas of sustainability and activism mediated by an individualist consumerist techno-culture (that, some would argue, represents colonialism itself). It feeds and is fed by our desires to look, feel and be seen as doing “good”, especially on our Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds, while the business of colonization goes on as usual.

I have tried to imagine scenarios that could have made the message stamped on the USB stick seem reasonable. The manufacturer could have used electronic materials and manufacturing processes not associated with exploited labour, dispossession, destitution, and unsustainable extraction in its production. The files stored in the USB stick could have been developed using open source software and contain everything we need to know about living “off the grid.” The USB could have been laden with a Trojan horse virus that will put a halt to a destructive global economy or reveal data that would compel us to look for different ways of co-existing on the planet. This could be a magic stick that could erase our colonial history or make people not be attracted to consumption. The files could have been created to help us question whether meeting any or all of the criteria described so far would merit the stamp “decolonized.” The USB stick illustrates that, if driven by aspirations for innocence, decolonization is also a colonial desire.

Difficult Learning
Both events indicate that creating learning spaces that require us to move beyond the desire for self-affirmation and engage in difficult, complex, and agonistic conversations is not easy. We tend to want change to happen on terms that do not jeopardize our perceived entitlements, securities and self-images. For example, we may claim we have been “enlightened” in one breath and in the next, reproduce a colonial violence, finally feeling defensive when someone points that out. This is particularly difficult for those of us who are engaged in various forms of activism, critique, and alternative practices, as we would like to be seen as the ones who have risen above the colonial imaginary, becoming the role models of decolonization and able to teach others about it.

We enter debates to “win,” using moral high grounds, self-righteousness, or even self-blame to re-center ourselves in the struggle for voice and for the power to (continue to) define the direction of the process. The claim of awareness of oppression becomes a claim to innocence that re-centers the needs, entitlements and investments of those who are claiming it. We may even say we want to learn from discomfort, but when it actually happens, when we lose epistemic privilege, we feel wronged and fight to re-gain that privilege again.

When we protect our personal and collective investments and perceived entitlements, we tend to project our expectations of outcomes and outputs, and when these expectations are not met, we get upset and frustrated with those who got “in the way.” We have been taught to seek consensus and validation and to resent the productive discomfort of learning from dissent. We tend to overlook the complexities and paradoxes in our contexts, as well as our own contradictions. We tend to polarize, to antagonize, to vilify, to victimize, and to romanticize, looking for a moral space beyond critique for those with whom we identify and ourselves. In this context of mistrust, struggle for power, and protection of perceived entitlements, it is difficult to disagree without hurting each other. And since vulnerabilities are not evenly distributed, it is important to remember that people born into non-normative bodies are often (again) made responsible for a heavier load of work in spaces for difficult learning.

So, where do we go from here? Facing the magnitude of the task of enabling a world without colonial relations requires more than a change of narratives, convictions or identities. It requires an interruption of harmful desires hidden behind promises of entitlements and securities that people hold on to, particularly when they are afraid of each other and of scarcity. It requires listening without projecting our ideas of ends and means. In order to take us to the point where we really want to exist differently, we need new, provisional and transitional frames that can help our conversations move in different ways without over-determining its direction: like a bridge that should not be confused with the path itself, which is foggy and does not give us a clear picture of the horizon. These frames should take us to the edge of what is intelligible to us, they should help us de-center, disarm, discern and disinvest in harmful practices and desires. Sitting at that edge, we can look differently at what has sustained us so far, notice the ways in which these things prevent us from ‘being’ differently, and, perhaps, accept an invitation towards what, right now, may seem impossible.

Art can do this. The story I share next attempts to do the same. In proposing a transitional frame, it invites us to move from epistemic certainty (knowing through fixed categories), to epistemic reflexivity (tracing the origins and limits of knowing), then, perhaps, to (onto)epistemic openness (experimenting with other possibilities for being/knowing without grafting them into what we are familiar with). It asks us to consider colonization and decolonization, care and responsibility across four different realms of existence; four different ways we can experience ‘being’; four different layers of ‘sensing’ the world, acknowledging the limitations of ‘sense-making’ in each layer.

Multi-layered Selves
The first layer is where “I” experiences the world as “me”. “I” exists in a temporal and temporary body, with a unique chemistry and physiology, responding to the world from a particular dynamic constellation of affects, desires and narratives that are grounded on particular collective ideas of what is real, knowable, and ideal.

The second layer is where “I” experiences the world through the interface between “me and you”: the in-between spaces and collective imaginaries of common territories, causes, identities, ideologies, and struggles. In this layer, multiple senses and languages are used to negotiate boundaries, belongings, alliances, communities and collectivities. In both layers, “I” is an individual, is separate, but is also interconnected with others.

So far, so good. We are used to these two layers: They are the DNA of our modern institutions and forms of subjectivity. Through our socialization and education, these modern institutions place a grid of meanings, relational practices, sensibilities and aspirations upon these two layers. For example, in our modern experience of these two layers, it is “common sense” to place human agency and cognition at the centre of the world. Therefore, it makes sense to try to engineer identities and societies in the same way that we engineer airplanes. It makes sense to see individuals, institutions and communities as independent, autonomous and sovereign entities. It makes sense to expect human knowledge to drive human evolution. It makes sense to evoke individual or communal interests to create different types of economies. It makes sense to treat the environment as a resource at the disposal of human progress. It makes sense to rely on moral reason to decide how nations should be organized, how we should live together and how cultures should be ranked according to their stage of modern development. It makes sense to identify and eliminate ‘evil’. It makes sense to promise security, prosperity and progress for all through bordered nations, un-bordered capital, and techno-scientific utopias.

(If you are reading this text [using the technology of alphabetic literacy], this must be all very familiar. However, the next layers problematize and set limits to the very act of sense making. As such, they require a stretch of the modern imagination beyond its sensorial and cognitive limits; please bear with me.)

The third layer is where “I” recognizes that her skin does not delimit her body: that the skin is just the outer coating of a body-organ that belongs to a larger conscious body that cannot be known, apprehended or controlled. “I” recognizes that flesh extends beyond the human form and linear time to the air, the land, the sky and everything else around her. This is where “I” recognizes that there is “me in you”: that my body is made of other bodies, that the same stuff that makes my body makes your body too, and that the force that animates all these processes and bodies is one and the same. In this layer, “I” sensorially recognizes that we are all viscerally connected: viscerally in the sense that we are part of the same metabolism, that the joy, pain, shame, survival and well being of this collective body affects everything and everyone. Since “I” realizes that she carries the whole spectrum of human ills and wonders within her, she feels infinitely responsible for her participation in balancing this system, and for the well being of fellow participants. In this layer, “flesh”, broadly conceptualized, seamlessly connects everything: I am not separate, I am interwoven.

The fourth layer is where “I” disappears in formlessness, beyond time and space, beyond materiality, experience, or human consciousness. “I” realizes that it also exists in “nothingness”, in the mystery of pure energy and possibility: “I” is also the very formless force that creates everything. In this layer, there is “neither me nor you” and there is all of it at the same time: “I” is one, two, many, all, and none.

The first and second layers are layers of separability, the third and fourth, of entanglement. Depending on which layer we are operating from at any minute of the day, our relationships to thinking and knowledge can be very different. The first and second layers tend to be oriented towards practicalities of time and space, towards what is known through experience, has been tested and can be predicted with some level of success. In the grid of modernity, in the first two layers, we are socialized to equate thinking with reasoning grounded on separability.

The third layer tends to be oriented towards the weaving of relationships, seeing one’s well being as implicated in another’s as we see ourselves as part of each other. In this layer, we feel each other’s pains, we also feel the pain of the land and any harm done to another is sensed as harm done to oneself. In this layer, reasoning is not only thinking, but sensorial perceptions: we “reason” with multiple organs in multiple spaces.

The fourth layer, the realm of vision and dreaming, is the one that can be accessed intentionally by altered states of consciousness that take us beyond embodiment, space and time. This kind of reasoning often demands practices of discipline and restraint. These practices require individual intellects and identities to be bracketed for sensorial openings to experiences not constrained by normalized rationalizations of self and of the world. Although we see very differently within different layers, we can’t think our way out of a layer into another. The move between layers is not about more advanced thinking, but about a shift of locus (or frequency) of being.

Back to Colonialism
Colonialism is a systemic force inseparable from our modern desires for property, security, control, choice, comfort, affluence, autonomy, and/or progress. It furtively manifests itself even when we are critical of it and when we say we are working against it. Colonization is a theft of layers, an impairment of being where entanglement cannot be sensed or recognized. Within these fences, care and responsibility are dependent on convictions. In practice, these convictions become moral-utilitarian personal choices that are mobilized to affirm colonial relationships and subjectivities, disguised as moral and benevolent behaviour. Colonization strips care and responsibility away from the visceral command that operates before will, a visceral command that is not a rational choice.

There are at least three inter-related dimensions of colonialism. The cognitive dimension of colonialism traps our imagination into singularities, especially a single story of progress, development and human evolution. This entrapment generates epistemic violence and “epistemicide” eliminating other possibilities of knowing/being. The political/economic dimension can be represented as a dynamic grid of inter-locked meanings, aspirations and relational and organizational practices sustained by exploitation, expropriation and destitution. The grid hides the harmful costs and destructive force of its architecture by giving us a deceptive sense of freedom, innocence and autonomy, and by promising unlimited possibilities for knowledge and justice, while severely restricting what seems realistic, desirable, tangible and intelligible. The existential dimension of colonialism manifests as a denial of unbound relationships [ii], fencing our sense of self and community within layers of separability (“me” and, at best, “me and you”). This denial is rationalized through notions of civilization, superiority and/or exceptionality. It generates indifference, de-humanization, and ultimately, can justify genocide.

Tackling all three dimensions of colonialism together results in forms of resistance that are unintelligible within the grid. Similarly, attempting to undo it exclusively through the first two layers of separability results in paradoxical forms of resistance. This is because colonialism: (a) is rationalized as normal, just, and benevolent; (b) is clever, flexible, and adaptive, (c) is insidious, endemic, seductive, and “delicious” (when we are benefitting from it while foreclosing its costs); and (d) it co-opts resistance by over-coding our senses, our ideas of self, our desires, our perceived entitlements, our treasured securities, our possibilities for relationships, going far beyond just defining our “thinking”. Therefore, deeper analyses and shifts of convictions can help in our understanding of it, but ultimately, we cannot simply rationalize our way out of colonialism: when we declare we have achieved “decolonization,” we are often doing that from a standpoint enabled and sustained by colonialism itself. Our disenchantment with colonialism does not translate into disillusionment with or disinvestment in it. This is partly because, in the first two layers, we don’t know how to exist outside of it, and we are afraid of being “paralysed” by the process, afraid of the loss of epistemic and agentic privilege that colonialism provides, afraid of the loss of our sense of bounded individuality and community, afraid of life beyond the fences.

Within the existential fences of colonialism we tend to believe we are autonomous individuals that relate to the world through our thinking and knowledge alone. Language and knowledge cast a net of categorical boxes that capture and rank entities in the world around us, according to the grid. These boxes deprive us from experiencing relationships not mediated by meaning. We get sick within the fences of separability and bored with the categorical boxes, but we can only imagine and desire change within the grid itself: we want different content in the boxes without changing their frames, we want change that is recognizable, affirming and familiar; like saying you want change, but thinking only about a change of clothes: something lighter or warmer, trendier or easier to wash. Only those who have torn their clothes themselves are ready to strip down naked.

Decolonization
Changing frames and fences can be very uncomfortable, since it demands cleaning up, stepping up and growing up. This involves being present (to the collective pain), remaining in resonance (with the call for responsibility), practicing release (of attachments to boxes, false promises and perceived entitlements), and keeping ourselves in balance (with truck loads of patience, humility, compassion, generosity and radical tenderness [iii]). Who would choose to do this? Or . . . can we afford to continue not to?

Jacqui Alexander [iv] refers to the colonial enforcement of separability as a process of dismemberment. This dismemberment happens both at physical and psychic levels. She says that we all feel a yearning for wholeness (which we can find in the third layer), but that we confuse this (in the second layer) with a yearning to ‘belong’. The focus on belonging then makes us build more fences and make more boxes: of citizenship, of political/cultural/sexual orientation, of struggle, of relationships bound by expectations of convictions and identities in the struggle for power and promised entitlements (for voice, identity, recognition, representation, redistribution). This reproduces the very dismemberment that caused the yearning in the first place. New fences and boxes can give us some temporary respite from perceived (and real) threats, but they unavoidably reproduce the void and sickness of separation. Jacqui states that the yearning for wholeness can only be addressed through “that space of the erotic, that space of the Soul, that space of the Divine” (p. 282), all spaces of merger and entanglement.

From this perspective, decolonization is the process of interrupting the satisfaction we have with the perceived enjoyments, securities and entitlements afforded by colonialism. It cannot be done by merely replacing convictions, issuing apologies, performing tokenistic gestures expecting redemption, affirmation or gratitude, or presuming reconciliation through alliance, inclusion or integration on colonial terms. Decolonization requires an expansion of layers of reasoning, of sensing, of being, of visceral care and responsibility. It is a process of undoing that is initially messy and agonizing as it demands that we confront our fears: of facing sanctioned denials; of confronting our own violence; of being overwhelmed by our collective pain; of having our personal dreams, rights and self-images annihilated as we lose our individual selves and moral high grounds in realizing we are one another. The practice of this kind of visceral relations and responsibilities grounds a form of agonistic politics that finds little use for declared convictions. However, having provisional, transitional and precarious vocabularies that can gesture towards these possibilities may be useful, and that is what this story has tried to accomplish.

Counter-Intuitive Learning Spaces
Rediscovering our capacity to imagine beyond boxes, fences, posturing, certainties, and safety blankets, requires different questions and different vocabularies anchored in the uncertainty and precariousness of our entangled collective vulnerabilities. It requires a move from epistemic certainty (where we hold on to the boxes and fences that sustain colonialism, demanding a language that will “show us the way”), to epistemic reflexivity (where we get disenchanted and, ultimately disillusioned with the false promises and pleasures of our frames and fences), and to a (fleeting) state of onto-epistemic openness (where we experiment with other possibilities for being/knowing without grafting them into what we are familiar with). It is in this state that we learn to align all four layers, and start to perceive ourselves not as eitherseparate or entangled, but as both separate and entangled in a non-dialectical way. In order to do that, changing our relationship to language and knowledge, to boxes and fences, is key: we need to recognize multiple layers of sensing, of reasoning, of knowing, what these layers can do, and how they are all partial and limited, insufficient and indispensible, how they open and/or close possibilities for existence.

Learning spaces that can support this process are counter-intuitive within the grid, as they emphasize the importance of complex existential questions instead of the search for (often simplistic) self-affirming solutions. These spaces prioritize de-centering over leadership; disarmament over empowerment; discernment over conviction; consent over consensus; pluriversality over univocality; and disinvestment over revolution. In these spaces participants are called to recognize that decolonization is a life-long and wide trans-generational multi-dimensional process without guarantees, a process that requires us to keep our eyes, pores, flesh and dreams wide open. These spaces require a commitment to depth of reflection and faith in our capacity to relate, to see ourselves in each other, in ways not mediated by agreements, identities, knowledge or understanding.  Within these spaces precarious vocabularies that “refuse” to tell us the “only right way” are key.  They can help us to clarify different positions (without ranking them), to trace our thinking back and forth (without (self)censorship), to face our paradoxes and contradictions (without shame), and to develop the stamina to walk together differently, welcoming both uncertainty and indeterminacy, without the option of turning our backs to one another. From the perspective of the first two layers, this will seem impossible to initiate or to achieve.

When I think about the urgencies of decolonization, I often remember that I don’t know how young people in my family will survive the inevitable crash of this destructive casino economy. I don’t know for how long they might have access to technology, employment, health care, freedom of expression, and/or safe water. I don’t know who they will fall in love and have children with. I don’t know who their great-grandchildren will be seven generations from now: whether their bodies will be normative, where they will fit in the social hierarchies that might exist in their time, whether they will conform or rebel. I ask myself: Seven generations from now, what will I have been responsible for? What do I need to do right now to nurture the possibility of a viable world for this family? What kind of politics, relationships, language and forms of existence are necessary to enact this inter-generational responsibility? And what if the “family” is not just the people I have blood ties with? What if, beyond notions of linear time, these great-grandchildren are already around me?

[i] See for example Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, available at http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630

[ii] See Dwayne Donald’s “Forts, curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian relations in educational contexts” available at http://mfnerc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/004_Donald.pdf

[iii] Inspired by the “Radical Tenderness Manifesto” available at https://danidemilia.com/radical-tenderness/

[iv] See “Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred”, Jacqui Alexander, 2005.

This text was first published at http://artseverywhere.ca/2016/10/12/multi-layered-selves/