What is now is not what must be

a memory exercise

I don’t know if my family had a proverb or truism or anything like that. The only thing that comes to mind is from when I was quite young and my mother tried to instill compassion or empathy in me by telling me that “my people” had a saying, something about not judging people until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. I doubt that that saying is any more native than the thing about the two wolves that Billy Graham made up.

You didn’t know that? There’s so much about Indigenous people that’s just been made up. Like that Indian who cried a single tear over the trash at the side of the road and turned out to be some Italian actor. I remember him but that was also the time of the American Indian Movement which I did not know about and they were mad about a lot more than garbage at the side of the road. Honestly, if that was all we had to worry about we’d just clean it up ourselves and be done with it.

Let’s try an exercise.

Imagine something you are nostalgic for. Something from your childhood or adolescence that was simultaneously normal and special. You know I’m about to ruin it so I’ll understand if you want to stop. It didn’t glow the way it does now but it still holds something important. Maybe it holds something you lost, some way of living or thinking that you want to find your way back to but you can’t so you paint it gold in your memory to explain why you don’t live or think that way anymore. Why you can’t. That glow keeps it apart from whatever mess you’ve gotten yourself into and it feels like something good just out of reach. I don’t know. Maybe it’s society’s fault for changing too much or maybe it’s the government’s fault for letting society change but it’s somebody’s fault so you hold that memory like a talisman. Like a map to a better world.

Got it?

Say goodbye because I’m going to ruin it. But that’s ok because I’m going to give it back to you differently, I’m going to make it more expansive and filled with possibility.

Where are the Black and Indigenous people in that memory?

Where are they? Look down on your memory as if you are floating above it and ask yourself where they are.

Float up and expand your view. How far up to you have to float in order to find them? What is going on for them? You can do this now in a way that you couldn’t do then. All I knew back then was that my father’s family, and maybe all the other Indians, lived out west somewhere. I had no idea about anything other than what Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie taught me.

But now I can zoom out and add the American Indian Movement to Bonanza and Little House. I can wonder if they were a reaction to a Civil Rights movement that included Indians and if that’s why the networks filled our televisions with reminders of how primitive and unpredictable we could be. Sure we were helpful in ones and twos. The Lone Ranger had Tonto after all, but too many of us was dangerous and even Pa knew that.

I can zoom out and see that redlining and real estate practices kept Black people out of sight and out of mind. That police pushed them into prisons when that didn’t work. On television, which was really the only place I saw Black people until there was a boy in my class in grade 7 who had been adopted by a white family, I saw that for them too one or two were ok, as long as they helped white people. And families of Black people were funny, I learned that.

I can zoom out and see that some of my memories exist the way that they do because I was the only one and I start to wonder if maybe that glow, that shine that infuses these nostalgic moments is actually the shine of whiteness and a world that was so unthreatened by Black and Indigenous people you could be friends with a couple if you needed to be. One or two posed no threat. They might even be nice, worth defending against the impolite racism of others. Too many was dangerous, but redlining and police took care of that.

So now I’m going to give back your memory in a more expansive way because I don’t want you to blame yourself or your parents for that glow. I’m going to let you off the hook a little bit because we were all raised in a world that meant we didn’t have to think about racism. It was just baked into the structures around us, the systems around us and that is good news it really is. Because systems can be challenged and dismantled.

Don’t just worry about what you didn’t know, about those stupid lies you were told about wolves and moccasins or crying Italians. Focus on WHY you didn’t know. Why you had to zoom out so far to find Black and/or Indigenous people. Because answering that question will help you make changes today. Answering that question will give you something you can take into your community today.

And if you are Black and/or Indigenous you can do this exercise too. We all absorb the roles we are supposed to play in settler colonialism, in white supremacy. We all absorb them and we all do things that support it. It’s important that we do the work of extricating ourselves from it.

There’s still a hook and you knew there would be. The downside to doing this exercise is starting to recognize the way that you still participate in these structures. The nostalgia you have for them because these structures, that whiteness, that’s the glow you see around your memories. And if you can recognize it in your memories you can start to recognize it elsewhere.

But that’s hopeful right? Because what is now is not what must be.