Brave spaces need protecting

Reading Neil’s essay on Safety or Something Like It after the last few days feels some kind of way. A white supremacist drove 200 miles to find a grocery store in Buffalo with enough Black people to be worth a shooting spree. On the other side of the country a Chinese man took his anger into a Taiwanese church, injuring several and killing one before being subdued by a chair wielding pastor. These were places where the people should have felt safe, would have looked around the room and known they were at home and did not have to code switch or tread carefully. These were places they could be brave.

Because that’s the thing isn’t it. It’s more than being safe. More than being the one or two in a room full of others and feeling cautiously safe in their midst. It’s being in a place where you can be brave because you are surrounded by others like you and I remember the first time I felt that way.

I had just found my father, was in my late 20s. He had taken a hiatus from my mother and I. Depending on who tells the story it was the other one who left, although in the end it was my mother and I in southern Ontario with her family more than a thousand miles from him and his family. Turned out that he didn’t live that far from us, he too had come to southern Ontario and then wound up in North Bay and it was there that I found him. He took me to a pow wow at Nipissing First Nation. We went to the sunrise ceremony and then he went back to the house to sleep and I stayed. For the first time I could remember I was surrounded by native people.

I was surrounded by people who looked like me and I spent some time sitting with a couple who were getting ready to dance. They gave me tea and let me ask questions, I had so many particularly since I’d been raised Christian and one of my questions had to do with the dream catcher. I asked if they were demonic, although I don’t think I phrased it exactly that way but that’s what I was asking and she understood my question. All she said was that I watch too much tv.

Now I belong to a drum group and today we celebrate 7 years of being together. It isn’t only native women, there are non native women who come too, but it is our space. It is a place we can be brave and we are brave. Sharing our lives and our stories with each other. I can’t imagine how devastating it would be for somebody to invade that space with violence, with intention, choosing it because it was a place we could be brave and how dare we.

Having these spaces is risky. Having any space is risky. Existing as somebody that the dominant society has othered is risky whether we do it in isolation or as a collective but there must be something particularly alarming about us having these spaces. History is replete with attempts to stop us, with laws that stipulated how many of us could gather together. Jesus told his disciples, wherever two or three are gathered and the courts told us the same thing, although I don’t think Jesus meant it as a threat.

Think about that. There are people alive now who either lived through times when gathering together was unsafe or illegal, or they heard it directly from those who did. Elders teach us songs or ceremonies and I think about them holding this knowledge even though it would have been illegal for them to do this in their childhood. They did it anyway. And sometimes they did it at church.

See, church was the one place that Black and Indigenous people were allowed to gather because their souls were being made white as snow and as long as you were being made white it was ok to do that together. It was not ok to do things that made you Black or Red, but as long as you were getting your sins bleached it was fine. Which is why our churches often became hotbeds of political organizing while white churches did whatever it was they did.

I had heard that we often met under cover of church services so that people walking by would hear singing and have no idea what was actually going on. Then I read the book Treaty No. 9 by John Long. It contains the diaries of three of the commissioners who travelled around northwestern Ontario coercing signatures to this particular treaty and there is one account of them walking through a small community and hearing singing in the church. They were assured that these Indians were Christians and it made me smile because I knew what was probably happening in that church while they cluelessly congratulated themselves on how civilized we were becoming.

The story Neil linked, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, ends with a sad game. It’s a story about two Jewish couples whose wives had grown up together. One couple remained in America and the other had moved to Israel and become Hasidim. At the end they get to the game that provides the title of the story, taking turns imagining themselves locked in the pantry and asking each other if they would hide the rest.

Would you hide us? It is one thing for us to be safe in your spaces, it’s quite another for you to protect our spaces. Anne Frank’s attic was a place she could be brave. Confined as they were, she did not have to pretend she was not Jewish or hope that she could pass by unnoticed or be the kind of Jew that white people liked. I don’t want to romanticize it because living years in an attic is not something to be romanticized, but in the midst of the horrors of the third reich it was somewhere she could be brave. And a Dutch family protected that space.

Because those of us who are othered live in a world that is dangerous. We live in a world with constant reminders that it is dangerous to dance at a nightclub or sleep in your own apartment or walk down the street. Where just being an Indigenous woman or two spirited person puts you at risk. I was reminded this week that even the places where we can be brave are dangerous.

Would you protect our spaces? What would that even look like?