I was still in school when I lived here, finishing an English lit degree, taking hour-long transit rides to York University, where I would read and dream my name would one day be boldly printed down book spines, too. I took a class on diaspora literatures, attracted by the elusive promise of actual Indigenous writers on a course syllabus. It was difficult, combining complex theory with complex books. On top of that, my professor was blindingly, intimidatingly smart—the type of person who mercilessly dissected any answer to any question she posed, and therefore terrified everyone into silence for a few seconds whenever she spoke.
“Why do you think I included Indigenous literature in a diaspora course?” she asked one day.
I surprised myself by answering without a second’s hesitation. “Because Indigenous people are almost always put in the position where they’re displaced on their own lands.”
My professor didn’t dissect anything. She simply smiled, impressed. I knew I should have felt proud that she approved, and I did, but I also felt a pressure building in my chest—one that perhaps was always there, but hidden away, like my own past.
I’d always been close-lipped about my family life—the violence, the joys, the poverty, the precariousness. Part of this was because my family moved so often. I knew better than to offer the sort of vulnerabilities upon which lifelong friendships are built; I was only going to move again, anyway. The other reason was that I knew that my family wasn’t a normal, charming, made-for-TV type of dysfunctional. We were the type of dysfunctional where the police could be called on our parents, by our parents; where social services could be knocking on our door if we said the wrong thing to a teacher, or even if we didn’t say anything at all, as though there were some sort of aura hanging around us that everyone identified as wrong.
How could a seven-year-old explain any of this to another seven-year-old? A fourteen-year-old to a fourteen-year-old? An eighteen-year-old to an eighteen-year-old? I can’t even write this now without feeling like I have to make excuses for my family, to explain that despite all the dysfunction and trauma, each of my siblings was raised with so much love and self-confidence that we’re all now, as adults, doing well in our chosen fields, and even if we weren’t, we still deserve to be considered more than our dysfunction and trauma, we still deserve to be considered valuable, whole.
Instead of attempting to explain any of this to any friends, I learned how to fake intimacy. Turned out that as long as you were funny and fun, people would want to spend time with you; as long as you were willing to listen to their problems, they didn’t notice you weren’t telling them any of your own. I knew so much about my friends. They knew almost nothing about me. This was how I created a double life: no matter how awful things were at home, I could go to school and, from nine to three, pretend that nothing at all was wrong. But once 3:01 hit and I got on the bus home, I could no longer stop myself from wondering what awaited me when I got off.
There was a problem with this strategy that I didn’t anticipate. The longer I went without talking to my friends about my problems, the harder it was to talk to them when I actually needed to. If I had slowly unspooled my life for them, as they had for me, they would be prepared when something particularly difficult came up. They would already know the context. Now, if I wanted to talk to them about anything, I would have to explain everything—all the truth I’d tried so hard to keep from everyone. I had no idea how to go about that, so instead I just continued on as I always had: the girl without a family or past, who you could always rely on to keep all your secrets because she kept her own so well.
This is not the same neighbourhood I left all those years ago. Time passes and spaces change, whether you’re there to witness it or not. Here, at Bloor and Lansdowne, gentrification is now in full swing. Bloor West is now the proud owner of shiny new vegan bakeries and boutique cafés—ventures that seemed unthinkable when these streets held me close. A few restaurants and businesses have already abandoned the area, the trendiness they helped create now turning on them, pricing them out.
In Leslie Jamison’s essay “Fog Count,” she goes to visit a friend in prison and, while there, realizes her experience of the prison as a visitor will never be the same as his as an inmate: “The truth is we never occupied the same space. A space isn’t the same for a person who has chosen to be there and a person who hasn’t.” Jamison can ask as many probing questions as she wants, can write down all the details, but she will always, in effect, be a tourist in that space because she can always choose to leave.
I wonder if the people who are choosing to bring money into this neighbourhood, choosing to paint over its poverty, swat away its seediness, transform it into something shiny, clean and appealing to upper-middle-class families, recognize they, too, are tourists, inviting in more tourists to take advantage of its low rent and subway access, encouraging them to make homes where homes were already made. They see the neighbourhood as a big red X on a treasure map, and, shovel in hand, are determined to mine its bounty from beneath the beds of the natives. Meanwhile, those who live here because they have to, who have always made the most of what they’ve begrudgingly been given, are now being told that their achievements in this space are not enough, that they haven’t used the space properly, haven’t realized its “potential,” and must leave to make room for “progress.” They see the neighbourhood as their home—a space that already has inherent worth, whether outsiders recognize that worth or not.
Or, as Jamison might say, the same space, but also not the same at all.
In my diaspora class we often talked about the experience of diaspora: remembering your past in your former home and constantly measuring it against your present in your current home, knowing you can never again re-enter the time and space you left, knowing you have lost access to that possible future forever, knowing your home will change without you, knowing you will change without your home—and knowing, in some instances, none of that was your choice.
Jamison wasn’t exactly right. There aren’t only two ways to consider a place. It isn’t just about those who choose to be there and those who don’t. What about those who had never chosen not to be there? What about those who were forced out?
Tucked away in a box at the back of this city’s closet is a history. The history is this: Toronto was once Tkaronto. This city ruled by bylaws was once ruled by treaty. It was Dish With One Spoon territory: a space that was shared by my people, the Haudenosaunee, the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Huron, the Wendat. This land was not supposed to have its plenty mined and discarded; it was supposed to be treated as one collective dish each nation had to share, hunting an equal but sustainable amount of game. All would eat from that dish together, using a beaver tail spoon instead of a knife to ensure there was no accidental bloodshed—which might lead to intentional bloodshed. In this way, it was a space of mutual peace and prosperity.
But early settlers approached the land with the eyes of enterprising tourists: looking at its green, its forests, its waters—and seeing a big red X. They forced out the lands’ native inhabitants and went about realizing this land’s “potential,” laying roads and constructing buildings, later putting up condos and converting old restaurants into cafés.
It was the same space, but also not the same at all.
Before Bloor West had a chance to push me out, Six Nations pulled me back in. That box at the back of my own closet, that box holding my history tight, that I hadn’t opened for anyone my entire life, wouldn’t stop whispering to me. Don’t forget, it said. Don’t forget like this city forgot. Don’t make the same mistakes this city keeps making.
While I was taking a fiction and creative nonfiction course in my last year of university, my past started to overwhelm my work. It was as though all the things I didn’t know how to say out loud were storming the page, well past ready to finally be articulated. After all those years of forcing my past behind a dam, the pieces I was writing were like a flood. Readers weren’t invited i
n so much as they were drowned, carried by the tide of my trauma to endings that felt like gasps for air. One friend told me an essay I’d written as a letter to my mother made her feel incredibly uncomfortable, like she shouldn’t be reading it. In a way, she was right. She shouldn’t have been reading it. It wasn’t so much a piece of creative nonfiction as it was an exorcism. If no one could handle how intense that was, fine. I needed to figure out how to talk about my past the only way I could: by writing it.
No trace of Indigenous history is etched into these sidewalks, illuminated by these streetlights, cemented between these bricks—not when I lived here years ago, and not today. That past is still packed up, forgotten. Descendants of this land’s original caretakers are still here, though. We’re laughing with our friends outside the movie theatre, or trying to get by selling dreamcatchers at Bloor and Spadina, or dancing in our regalia at the tiny but perfect powwow at Dufferin Grove Park, or reading on the subway on the way to school. We’re here, in diaspora on our own lands. We’re watching as the same exploitive process that pushed our people out centuries ago continues to push out others today—an updated version with different copyrights attached.
Whenever I visit my brother, I’ll walk the streets of Bloor and Lansdowne and remember what it felt like to finally be able to talk openly about my past. How I felt a relief I’d never known until then, because I could finally be seen for who I was, known for who I was, loved for who I was. I’ll observe the neighbourhood with the warm nostalgia and cool distance of a former lover: measuring the present against the past, frowning at disappointing changes, smiling at positive ones, ultimately hopeful. Perhaps one day this neighbourhood, this city, this country, will finally hear its neglected past whispering, Look at me plainly. Look at me. Look at your patterns. Don’t make the same mistakes. Don’t hide who you were. Acknowledge it, then make something new, something beautiful, something that will make everyone proud.
DARK MATTERS
o say dark matter was “discovered” is disingenuous since, theoretically, dark matter has always been here, filling space we once thought of as empty. In that way it’s not so different from the lands my people refer to as Turtle Island. To this day, people claim the Americas were “discovered” in 1492, despite people living on these lands, creating on these lands, building histories on these lands for centuries before Columbus ambled along. Approximately one-fifth of the world’s human population made their home on Turtle Island at the time, not including all the species of plants, animals, birds and fish those people cared for. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to assume that an entire continent didn’t exist before you chose to see it.
My family and I had just sat down in a Starbucks when I found out. I opened Twitter, looked at my mentions. An acquaintance had tagged me and a number of Indigenous people I knew. Three words were written at the end of the list: “I’m so sorry.” Nothing more needed to be said. I knew at that moment white Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley had been found innocent of all charges related to his killing of twenty-two-year-old nêhiyaw man Colten Boushie.
There’s never a good time to get news that breaks you, but sitting in a Starbucks with your family in the midst of a vacation seems particularly inopportune. My husband and child were visiting Vancouver while I was on a fellowship at a major university. We’d visited the Contemporary Art Gallery that day. The main exhibit, “Two Scores,” was split between rooms. In the first room were Vancouver artist Brent Wadden’s giant woven blankets, which he apparently insists on calling “paintings.” They lacked the artistry of the Squamish weavings we’d seen a few days before at the Museum of Anthropology. The gallery write-up, however, spun this messiness into a positive, describing Wadden’s self-taught weavings as “exploratory…purposefully naïve”—even if they were “often inefficient…[and] would confound a traditionally-trained practitioner.” I wondered whether this artist, who lived and worked on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory, had any idea of the Squamish history of weaving. I wondered if he’d care that Squamish blankets were placed in an anthropology museum while his were given a solo exhibit in a respected art gallery.
Some things only matter when a white man does them.
Cynical and unimpressed, we left the gallery to wander towards Granville Island. We spent nearly an hour in a specialty stamp store. We tried terrible virtual reality, which made my eleven-year-old cry. We had fake ketchup sprayed at us by the owner of a magic shop, which annoyed me but made my husband and eleven-year-old absolutely giddy. We ate perogies and cake crafted to look like the Pride flag. It was, all in all, a pretty tame tourist experience. We only stopped at the Starbucks so we could use free Wi-Fi to map our trip back to our hotel room.
Then I saw the tweet. As I sat there reading the first article I could find, a lump lodged in my throat. Colten Boushie, who was a firekeeper, who would mow the lawns of elders in his community, whose friends were trying to get away from Gerald Stanley’s farm shortly before Stanley’s gun fired into the back of Boushie’s head, would receive no justice. His family would know no peace.
As soon as the story of Boushie’s death came to light, Gerald Stanley came to be considered something of a folk hero among white rural Canadians. He’d done what they all seemed willing—or even eager—to do: kill an Indian. Stanley’s rationale—or lack thereof—didn’t matter. The fact that Boushie was an important part of his community didn’t matter. All that mattered was Stanley had killed an Indian, and like the Hollywood cowboys his actions emulated, he deserved not only his freedom but a bounty. Over the next few days, he’d get one. His GoFundMe page amassed over $100,000 within seventy-two hours.
Some things don’t matter when a white man does them.
* * *
The first person to realize dark matter existed was Fritz Zwicky, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. In the 1930s, he was studying orbit patterns within the Coma Cluster, a cluster of over a thousand galaxies. Zwicky tried to calculate the mass of the cluster based on its velocity, which should have been straightforward using the virial theorem and Isaac Newton’s theories on gravity. What he found, however, was that there was much more matter in the cluster than the light of its stars suggested. There was something unaccounted for that couldn’t be seen. Zwicky called this mysterious, invisible force “dark matter.”
The lump in my throat grew the entire bus ride home. I felt like I was going to vomit. I thought about Debbie Baptiste, who, upon hearing her son had died, screamed and collapsed to the ground. The RCMP, who were searching her house without her consent, asked if she was drunk. When you aren’t seen as human, your human emotions are no longer relatable but indecipherable—evidence you’re unstable or an animal or a drunk.
The injustice of Colten’s death; the injustice of Colten’s friends not only witnessing his murder but getting arrested; the injustice of Stanley drinking coffee with his family while Colten’s body grew cold in their yard; the injustice of Debbie Baptiste’s grief being read as drunkenness by RCMP officers tearing apart her house; the injustice of so many white Canadians referring to Colten as a criminal when Stanley was the one on trial for murder—it had all simmered inside for a year. And when I read that verdict and understood that, even in this era of so-called reconciliation, Canadians would continue to see Indigenous people as worthless criminals, and that pain finally, finally boiled over, I wanted to cry or scream or collapse. But I couldn’t. I was in a Starbucks, then I was on a bus. Public pain was impolite. Someone could think I was drunk. Someone could call the cops. I kept myself composed, the way society expected me to; I tried to smile and laugh, the way society expected me to. My body was sharp glass I dutifully held together.
A few Indigenous friends told me later they couldn’t sleep after the verdict. All I wanted to do was sleep. Plunge headfirst into a dreamscape where my family, friends and community weren’t seen as disposable, where our deaths mattered, where our lives mattered. As long as I was dreaming, we could be
respected and loved and seen as human.
I slept for nearly twelve hours that night.
In 1973, Princeton astronomers Jeremiah Ostriker and James Peebles were studying how galaxies evolve. They built a computer simulation of a galaxy using a technique called N-body simulation. What they found, however, was that they couldn’t recreate the elliptical or spiral shapes observable in most galaxies—until they added a uniform distribution of invisible mass. Suddenly, with the introduction of this dark matter, things reacted the way Ostriker and Peebles expected them to. Things started to make sense.
As Ostriker and Peebles were doing their simulations, astronomers Kent Ford and Vera Cooper Rubin were studying the motion of stars in the Andromeda galaxy at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. They measured the velocity of hydrogen gas clouds in and around the galaxy, expecting those outside the visible edge of the galaxy to be moving at a much slower rate than those on the edge. But the rate of velocity was the same.
For this to be the case, there had to be a considerable amount of dark matter both outside the edge of the Andromeda galaxy and within the galaxy itself. Rubin concluded that, despite dark matter’s invisibility, it must be there—and in levels that increased the farther from the galactic centre one got. It would appear that dark matter was affecting the entire universe.
APTN, a news organization that focuses on Indigenous issues, reported on a Facebook post by an unnamed RCMP officer regarding the Stanley verdict. “This should never have been allowed to be about race,” the officer wrote. “Crimes were committed and a jury found the man not guilty in protecting his home and family….Too bad the kid died but he got what he deserved.”
Colten Boushie was sleeping when the SUV he was in pulled up to Gerald Stanley’s farm. As far as we know from the testimony of both sides, he didn’t try to steal anything. He never even left the vehicle. We would later learn his friends had attempted to break into another car earlier that day, after they realized theirs had a flat. But at the time, Stanley didn’t know this. He saw them pull up, he heard Colten’s friend get on an ATV and attempt to start it. This was all it took for Stanley’s son to run at the SUV with a hammer and smash the windshield. Stanley himself kicked out the taillight before going to get his gun.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 5