She calls me back to my body

Our hair is saturated with sweat and stories, smoke and ash. Our bodies are wild and changing. Sometimes, we are a voice and sometimes we are a feeling. Sometimes, our eyes turn into galaxies and you can see where we come from, our skin falling to the earth like a soft blanket, shadow emerging from flesh to rise to the stars in a flash of light. Us Anishinaabeg, we cannot be contained. Us Anishinaabeg, always dancing wildly and escaping linearity and rigidity, we are many things at once. Us Anishinaabeg, so deeply threatening to the colonial project that depends on the unmoving, the static, the compartment, the box, the boundary. 

It is 2000 and Rebecca Belmore enters AKA artist-run centre in Saskatoon donned in an all-white jumpsuit with feathers hanging from her arms and shoulders. For this piece, The Indian Factory, Rebecca moves through ritual and grief, mourning and laughter, to presence the realities of starlight tours and anti-Indigenous police violence against Native men in Saskatoon. I visit this moment as an outsider to the community directly affected by these deaths. I do not hold perspectives on how this piece impacted these communities, and I cannot speak to the complexities of creating performance art about such intimate and painful realities in a community not your own. These community perspectives are the voices that I hope are centered as The Indian Factory nears its 20^th anniversary. What I offer is my perspective as an Anishinaabe person from the same treaty territory as Rebecca, engaging with this work many years later while living in a city notorious for anti-Indigenous racism, hate crimes and police violence. What circles have brought me here, a 27-year-old Anishinaabekwe using cyberspace to bend time to visit this crowded room in Saskatoon that Rebecca moves through? What circles have brought me here, watching her body move, watching her body scream that this has to stop, the violence has to stop, while my own body lies immobilized with the weight of how I know it continues?

Our wild and changing bodies. In one moment, my body is a river. In another, it is this brown skin marked with images that make me feel whole. In one moment, I am my ancestors sitting around a woodstove laughing themselves silly. In another, I am stardust and stories that exist beyond time. Sometimes I wonder if this understanding of ourselves is what allows us to persist, if this understanding is the reason my Dad has survived all of the violence his body has endured. He tells me, on a cold night when the cops drop him off on the outskirts of Thunder Bay, that his ancestors walk alongside his own body so that they can give him warmth. We are always many things at once. 

Rebecca is pacing throughout the room in a circular motion, carefully dipping shirts in plaster, lighting candles; later, she puts on a cowboy hat and dances. At the same time, I am somewhere in Toronto, eight years old, watching cartoons or perhaps walking home from school. Although I do not know Rebecca and, admittedly, have had very few opportunities to engage with her work, we come from the same Treaty territory, and I find myself living and working in Thunder Bay, moving through the same spaces she must have. Rebecca, have our paths ever crossed? Did you happen to be in Treaty 3 when I traversed Northwestern Ontario as a baby? Have you stopped on the corner of Bloor and Spadina to buy art from my Dad while I sat with him and my brothers? I have so much to ask you, Rebecca; I have so much to say. Did you encounter vitriolic settler violence in response to your artwork when you lived in Thunder Bay like I do now? Did you fear for your safety moving through that city, not just as an Anishinaabe person but also for the art you create? What circles have brought me here, to speak to you through these typed words, to witness you through computer screen and taped footage, so that I may see how we presence our bodies, our beautiful Anishinaabeg bodies that have always been our greatest teachers?

Our hair, saturated with sweat and stories, was cut. Our bodies, wild and changing, were harmed. They cut us open, forced air from lungs, left us out in the cold, but they could never lay us out flat. They could never figure out how to reduce our beautiful dimensions. Our harmed bodies dance into nearby rivers and make the earth shake. Even in death, we remain in earth, in stars, in hearts, in song. And the harms, though they continue, can never reach all of the ways we exist. 

In this moment, I am thinking about settler colonialism as the structuring of space in ways that promote Indigenous dis-embodiment and settler embodiment. In this moment, I am thinking about how Rebecca is holding space and time for Indigenous embodiment, for us to come back to our bodies within a colonial context intent on removing us from them. As an Anishinaabe person, my body is not limited to my physical being but also refers to my homelands, my ancestors, my spirit helpers, my animal kin and all of my relationships to creation. As an Anishinaabe person, my body is my technology, the way I communicate with my ancestors through my own skin and heart, the way I feel my homelands in blood and tears, the vessel in which I both experience linear time and exit it to dance into the great beyond. Dis-embodiment, to me, is something beyond disassociation. It is not just the ways we are removed from our bodies through violence and force perpetuated from the colonial state. It is also all of the ways we are displaced from the relationships that make us whole, from all of the relationships that make up our beautiful bodies. 

Rebecca moves with such intention—her presence within her own body tangible, she is a holder of space and time. Our bodies are often marked by such intense experiences of violence, both our firsthand experiences and those of our communities, our homelands and those who have come before us. To be present in the body, to hold space and time, to call us back to our bodies, is a profound act of love, a profound act of labour, a profound gift that Rebecca has given us. I am thinking about all of the times I have travelled far away from my body in order to be further from the experiences within it. I am thinking about how embodiment, in all the ways I have described, is a privilege that our communities often do not have. We deserve to be full. We deserve to be whole. We deserve to exist in bodies unmarked by violence, in worlds unmarked by genocide. Us Anishinaabeg know this, and so we create technologies to bring us into the realities we deserve. 

Kwe’s wild and changing body. She paces around the room, so certain of herself. Within each movement of her body, her ancestors join her to help hold the space. Within each movement of her body, a slow drum beat that some of us may hear in our chests, a slow drum beat that calls some of us back, a slow drum beat that we can hold onto amidst the chaos. Us Anishinaabeg, we know our bodies well. Us Anishinaabeg, we know our technologies well. Kwe’s body, through performance, is our technology rooted in our knowledge of how to bring us back to ourselves. 

In that crowded room, I am looking around at all of the people who stand on the periphery, watching Rebecca intently. I am wondering who was there and who has visited this moment as I do now, face aglow with the light reflected from my laptop. Settler colonialism promotes Indigenous dis-embodiment to remove our presence from our lands in order for capitalist occupation and production to continue. Settler colonialism also promotes settler embodiment, structuring space along the logics of white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism and capitalism creating spaces made for some at the expense of others. I am thinking about the privilege of feeling safe and comfortable while moving through public space, and I am thinking about how this relates to the entitlement of Indigenous homelands, Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous bodies, Indigenous labour and Indigenous art. As Rebecca holds time and space for us to be present in our bodies, I am wondering who already has the privilege of embodiment and feels entitled to this space, consuming our grief, our pain, our loss, without seeing their own complicity in these structures of violence.

You only seem to come around when I am crying, when you can drink a cup of my tears and throw the rest down the drain when you choose to be finished. You always show up when I am praying and singing, when I am drumming or dancing, to fill up on me. When you walk into my space so surely within your own body, you push me out of mine. And so, I dance and maneuver to dream spaces for us where you cannot enter, where you cannot fill up on us, where you cannot consume us, our bodies, our art, our relationships. But this is such lonely work, the type of work that is dangerous and laborious, the type of work that sacrifices career and opportunity, and sometimes I long for so many others to join me. 

I am sitting within a row of strong Anishinaabeg at the Office for the Independent Police Review Director press conference for what will be a scathing report about systemic racism within the Thunder Bay police department. The commissioner reads aloud his incredulity at the overt racism and blatant malpractice with the subtext of the countless deaths of Indigenous youth and community members resting below the surface. Many of us are travelling far away from our bodies. I am dis-embodied, unable to sit within my own body at this particular moment in time. For Anishinaabeg in this space, we are remembering the cops who drop us off on the outskirts of town, the cops who do not take adequate action to prevent anti-Indigenous hate crimes in this city, the cops who assault Indigenous teenagers confined to ambulance stretchers. All at once, we are feeling the enormity of the violence we endure, feeling not only our own bodies but all of the bodies that came before us. We are feeling our relations who were left to freeze, the young ones found in the river. We are hearing how we are deemed unworthy of life and justice and, at times, unworthy of a cop even bothering to look at the autopsy reports of our bodies. 

Moments like these often feel like too much. Moments like these sometimes sit dormant within my own body, packaged up discreetly, waiting for a time when they can be seen and felt without my body rupturing before my very eyes. Now, I am back with Rebecca in that white room, and yet, I am carrying this moment of dis-embodiment with me. I am watching Rebecca, and I remember the way my back straightened as I listened to the commissioner speak, the way tears formed but were released back into myself, the way I prayed silently, asking to carry the pain of others in that room so that they may stand, so that they may speak. When I visit Rebecca in that white room, I am within many moments all at once. We are always so many things at the same time. When I visit Rebecca in that white room, she is calling me back to my body. And so, I watch Rebecca dance, watch Rebecca move, and I feel all of these realities land in my body in a way that I can bear them, in a way that I can see them, in a way where, perhaps, she is teaching me how I may carry them.  

Your body, kwe, it teaches us so much. Your body, kwe, a holder of space and time for us. Your body, kwe, calling us back to ours, so that we may feel, so that we may continue. 

Quill Christie-Peters is an Anishinaabe arts programmer and self-taught visual artist currently residing in Northwestern Ontario. She currently works as the Director of Education and Training for the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective where she is coordinating the Emerging Curatorial Training Program. She is the creator of the Indigenous Youth Residency Program, an artist residency for Indigenous youth that engages land-based creative practices through Anishinaabe artistic methodologies. She holds a Masters degree in Indigenous Governance on Anishinaabe art-making as a process of falling in love and sits on the board of directors for Native Women in the Arts. Her written work can be found in GUTS Magazine and Tea N’ Bannock and her visual work can be found at @raunchykwe.  

Images: Rebecca Belmore, The Indian Factory (performance documentation), AKA artist-run centre and TRIBE, May, 25, 2000. Documentation courtesy of Bradlee LaRocque.

This article is published in issue 36.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue