I Was Arriving: Exploring Healing and Knowing in My Own Creation(s)

Abstract

Aniin. Boozhoo. Tansi. I identify as Anishinaabe and Metis on my late mother’s side and of Celtic-Germanic ancestry on my father’s side. I was arriving: exploring healing and knowing in my own creation(s) is a métissage, sharing moments of a life lived in longing to become a good relation, a useful medicine, to the beings in this world of anguish and dis-ease. This is a re-presencing of some teachings I have received from the interstitial spaces of making, and writing poetry, allowing me a place to fall into when I don’t know where to go or what to do. This work is an honoring of the oral/storytelling tradition—a sharing of what I have come to know in this walk—the medicines living in me. Making puts us in our bodies where we are forced to feel the suffering and joys of others. In this embodied walk, we, hopefully, become models for others to do the same, thus creating spaces where folx are invited to grow their capacity to answer the calls to justice for All Our Relations.