Psychiatric Exam Paperwork Error

psychexamerror
Originally uploaded by fit of pique.

Something which was/is going in the burning box, but I just noticed it. This is from my application for confinement to an institution, it’s a psychiatric exam by one of the two doctors who examined me. I probably spent less than six minutes with this doctor. As you can see, the doctor probably didn’t really know who I was, because someone else’s name originally appeared on this summary of my admission and my exam. I blurred their name out for privacy reasons, I don’t recall who this person is at all actually, or why their name originally appeared on my exam. By the way, I was supposed to respond to this application to the person who delivered it IMMEDIATELY although they just gave it to me and walked away, and although all of the documentation which I was supposed to refute was written in French, which I don’t speak or read, at least not at this level. I was also told by a nurse not to contest it, even though I wanted to, because I was ALMOST out, according to her, I was about three weeks away from release. I got about three of these applications altogether, all sucessful, and each could hold me for 21 days. This wasn’t the first time my identity and another patient’s was mistaken, by the way.

Flames of Liberation

This Sunday I am finally burning The Box. The Box contains a motely assortment of items and papers related to my psychotic episode which I just don’t want to have around anymore. These include diaries, drawings, my hospital bracelet, pieces of one of my hospital gowns, my smiley face slipper (a foam travesty of mockery, I would keep it but it’s getting gross, but yes, my slippers had smiley faces on the toes), legal orders for committment, and a long diatribe en francais about my strange actions upon admission, like me peeing on the floor. I in fact did pee on the floor, because they refused to let me use the bathroom even though I asked about fifteen times. So it’s a huge deal, I’ve been carting it around with me for ages. And it’s shit I really didn’t want to throw in the garbage, I have to destroy it in a more specific way. And so for years it was a vague thought, figuring out how to burn The Box. And by now it’s symbolic of so many things. There are some prescription medications I have around which I don’t take anymore, and they are getting burned too, including Zyprexa, Celexa, and Lamictal.

My mom took me to Bazaar and Novelty and I stocked up on about 71 dollars worth of fireworks. I have twelve roman candles, two fountains, and several exploding stars, I think one sets off about 70 balls in five different colours. One is a box of roman candles that all go off sequentially after lighting one fuse. I also have 3 ft and 12″ sparklers. I will be making some paper bag lanterns to place around the area, and I will also be burning incense, some huge sticks that are used in outdoor altars. It all happens this Sunday night at my uncle’s place in the country. It has two other meanings as well, Sunday is Chinese New Years, as well as being the birthday of my cousin Christopher, who died in June. It’s the first birthday of his since his death, and his immediate family went out of the country but I think the rest of us feel like we need to mark it somehow, and he happened to love fireworks. So it has several layers of meaning. The whole family is invited, along with some people I know here in town. It’s a celebration really, of liberation from psychiatric oppression, because it marks my release from the hospital. I’m hoping to transform my anniversary into something more positive, so this is the first time I’m doing anything celebratory around it.

Plus it’s the burning of the box!! I mean, that is a huge step for me. I had such a difficult relationship to that stuff, I didn’t know if I should destroy it or keep it and then in the end I realized I didn’t need it and I didn’t want it to fall into someone else’s hands either. I will be taking pictures of course, I’ll probably post them all on Monday. And yes, after it’s burned we’ll be using the fire to cook weiners and marshmallows. Although my mom keeps trying to get me to turn it into just a weiner roast. No no no, it’s burning the box, setting off the fire works, and weiners somewhere in between. Ceremony people, ceremony. The box is the number one thing. I think she just doesn’t want to have a late supper.

Crabby, but not wanting to be Normal

Mom and I crabbed all the way home. Actually, I crabbed, and then she crabbed about me crabbing. It was kind of funny. But soome of it had nothing at all to do with her, I was on a tangent about homophobia in reggae music and she seemed to think I was confronting her, although to my knowledge she’s not into reggae. Oh no! It was about if I got married somewhere far away, like in Jamaica, and then I said something about homophobia in Jamaican music and thinking probably same sex marriage isn’t legal there.

But what I was really thinking about it the evolution of the c/s/x civil rights movement as compared to other civil rights movement, and noticing that we’re stepping out of the phase most fledgling civil rights movements go through. As in, when various POC groups started working towards rights, there was this attempt to be less threatening to the ruling class by appealing to them based on a principle of sameness. You know, the old line “The only difference is the colour of our skins.” It’s total bull. We have lots of cultural differences, our lives are totally different from someone who’s white, and that’s not based on skin, that’s based on something else. Same with the gay rights movement, when the lesbians would wear dresses and the men would wear suits and they would calmly walk back and forth holding signs and trying to look like heterosexuals. If that wasn’t bad enough, for a long time gays and lesbians would also say “If I had a choice, I would be straight!” Which is homophobic in and of itself. I don’t want to be straight, fuck that, how boring. I like the extravagant mess that is the Queer community, even with all our infighting. And the sex is great, which is just another perk. And then even among transgendered people, those who went for sex changes often were pressured into saying they hated their bodies completely and were just regular straight people in the wrong body, and now of course it’s much more complex than that, there are trans people who don’t even want to end up at a specific gendered destination.

And the same is happening in the psych survivor/consumer movement. I mean, we all had to go through this phase of “I would be sane if I could, I hate my mental illness, I wish I never had it,” and now some of us are saying, actually, it’s not so bad, it’s the system that makes it really hard. I mean, there are a lot of things that could be done so we can just be who we are and live in society, disability access issues that are particular to people with psych disabilities. And also, a lot of my symptoms are things I can live with more or less. I know sometimes normals will tell me to slow down when I speak, sometimes I get insomnia, sometimes I get super sad and need someone to hang out with me so I don’t turn into a lemming. And sometimes I hear things or can’t be around large groups of people. But it’s not really so bad, and I don’t know that I would want to be cured or fixed or whatever you want to call it. The insomnia sucks most of the time, but you have no idea how useful a hypomanic episode is when deadlines are approaching. So, enh, why should I want to be a normal person? I think this kind of sentiment is being expressed in a lot of disability rights thought nowadays. I don’t think it is a tragedy when bipolar people are born, or people with Downs Syndrome, or Autism, or Cerebral Palsy, or Deafness, or Blindness, etc. Why should we all be the same? I don’t want to live in a world that misses all the diversities of human experience, whatever they may be.

Med Withdrawal Update

Since the Lamictal is still inching it’s way out of my system, and therefore my epival levels are still going down, I haven’t changed my medication much. I am hoping to start cutting down on the Epival more in April, but already it’s getting below “therapeutic” level. I’m doing well, essentially. I had some racing thoughts last night and a hard time sleeping, but that has happened irregardless of whether or not I am on my medication.

What I can note, however, is that two MAJOR symptoms have resolved themselves. I have ceased having auditory hallucinations, for the first time in years. I never had hallucinations before I took medication, but somehow it never got linked to the meds. I didn’t tell my doctors about hearing things either because I knew they’d FREAK OUT. So it’s gone away. Not only that, but the two types of seizures I most commonly have have also vanished. No more staring spells, no more intrusive memories/thoughts. It’s miraculous really, and just goes to prove that some psychiatric issues are completely iatrogenic.

I’m really quite happy, not bovine happy though, and not manic although some might try and classify it as such just because any emotion expressed by manic depressives gets pathologized. I’m having some really nice feelings again, a cornicopia of feelings really, not med induced flat affect for me. I’m also aware though that I might get sick before I get better, just because getting off the drugs makes people unwell. You try having your brain get used to chemicals and then get off them!

So far the doctor is letting me just stay where I am in terms of meds, I am getting another blood test. It’s so weird though, I really don’t know how to tell her I’m getting off of it. Clearly I do better without medication.

I’m also trying to accept the fact that there are things about me which aren’t really typical of what has been called “normal.” I think normal is really just a word for average, and I don’t see why we should all be average people. Yeah, I think really fast, and I can think about six things all at the same time. But is that a medical problem? I really only got into the hands of psych care because I had suicidal episodes, and that has never been adequately resolved. Besides that, I can see why I was suicidal for so long, I know why, I have some damn good reasons to have turned out this way. But those early issues are not so present now. I have pretty good self esteem now, Mom still tries to tear me down on a regular basis about whatever, she’ll just bring up some onetime thing I did that she disapproves of and makes me feel guilty about it, but now I’m just kind of like fuck it. If you want to disapprove of me that’s your business, I make mistakes, whatever, I learn from them, life goes on yes. It’s not her job to smother me for the rest of my life or make me feel like an emotional cripple, but clearly it’s a pasttime she likes to engage in. So I’m trying to just shrug it off as her being a silly bat, and move on with life. I don’t really want to feel admonished anymore and end up being the little girl holding a razorblade to my wrist crying in my bedroom because I wasn’t good enough. At this point she says stuff that I just filter out and agree to only to shut her up, I don’t even hear half of what she says. It’s a terrible relationship that is obvious deeply problematic, but I don’t envision it changing because I’m the nutter with the problem, and if I do confront her about it she just gets defensive and uses the stock “I’m the mother” defense, which means nothing.

So yes, we have a terrible relationship. I wish it wasn’t such a horrid relationship, but everytime I try to start a nice conversation with her she brings up some deficiency I have. You know, her sentences start out “You should” “You need to” and “You have to.” I guess fogging only goes so far with that, and then I do eventually snap, and then she starts talking about everything she learned about bipolar disorder from Dr. Phil.

What is it that parents of the mentally ill turn into wardens, particularly if they have had a hand in creating the problem in the first place? I had a really great self esteem when I was tiny, until I got chipped away and chipped away into a shadow of my original self. First I talked too much. Then I talked too little. Now I talk too fast. I dunno, I shall probably be someone who talks too much again. I was told I was terribly ugly, and then I was asked why I always stared at the ground and felt crappy. The classic though was when she would yell at me and I would point it out and then she would yell really loud that she wasn’t yelling.

Maybe it is terrible to blame my mother, but I also am tired of being the one who’s taken all the blame for how I ended up. I don’t want to be this family’s scapegoat, they can go find someone else to project all the fucked up ness onto.

Realler and Realler, why I lost my mind

I was thinking last night, specifically about something my Auntie had said to me about visiting me in Montreal, in my apartment. Something about how it shocked her that I was living like that, but she wasn’t judging me, but said in a way that implied I was living like that because I was mentally ill. No no no no, I was mentally ill because I was living like that.

“That,” being, of course, a situation of extreme poverty. I mean, I had literally two suitcases full of my possessions and a DVD player, and my two pet rats. I had a fork, a spoon, a bowl, and a tin soup pot. I had a sleeping bag, which wasn’t mine, and I did have an air mattress until it sprung a leak, after which point I mainly slept on the floor. A badly tiled floor. The walls were full of bullet holes, and we lived above the infamous Mile End poutine diner, Chez Claudette’s, so our apartment smelled like poutine all the time. Our couch came from the garbage, and it had springs coming out of it which we’d covered in a piece of cardboard and then used a second hand pillow for the cushion. We did have a television set, a huge hulking behemoth which was left in the apartment mainly out of a desire to avoid moving it from the last tenant. To get proper reception you had to tie the cable to your toe. I’m *serious*. The only routine visitor we had was the drug dealer, who sold us pot, because it was the only way to cope with living such a fucked up life.

I did have a bed, but it was in Saskatoon, along with the rest of my stuff, GREAT QUANTITIES of stuff. In my natural habitat, I am quite a materialist. I get freaked out when I don’t have my stuff, because I am a freak in various sundry ways, and so I have amassed a collection of books written by persons with various similarities to me. I had a computer, also not with me, and also problematic because as you may have surmised from this blog, a lot of my social interactions with people are online. The reason I didn’t have a bed was because it was my mother’s idea that I could just buy a bed when I got to Montreal. Of course, a $300 expenditure on a bed was something I was totally unable to afford. And my family suddenly decided to put their foot down on the financial support in a kind of tough love sink or swim deal, so a bed wasn’t forth coming and I slowly sank on my deflated air mattress.

If you are forced to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor for four months, I guarantee you will develop some kind of mental health issue.

Groceries consisted of things such as Ichiban noodles and Kraft Dinner, ugh, I still don’t eat either of those things. The week before I went into the hospital, this is what I had to eat, and I remember it still: 1 tin of peaches, 1 tin of evaporated milk, 1 tin of tuna mixed with cooked macaroni, 1 canister of instant coffee, and one beer, appropriately named “La Fin Du Monde.” Remember, that is my total consumption over the course of a WEEK! Seven days. I was also being harrassed by my mother about going back to work immediatement (she had sent me home early after being scared I would chase her around with a knife), which I wasn’t going to do because I knew SOMETHING was wrong with me.

So yes, poor, starving, losing lots of weight because I was starving, on high doses of Effexor because I was depressed because I was starving and had no bed AND lived in a place where I smelled food all the time. Let’s just skip ahead to the Intervention and the calling of the police to haul me away in some Mile End Blanche Dubois way.

So these people come over to the house and start telling me “This isn’t real!” because by then I was saying all kinds of wild things and running around naked. But I remember this so clearly, it was that one thing which pissed me off. This isn’t real my ass!! You’re the people who just came from a dinner party, you have food in the cupboard, you have real beds and comforters and pillows. Not real! This is as real as it gets! It just gets realler and realler. So I got mad, specifically because I felt that my extreme poverty was being dismissed, and I kicked a window in and broke it.

Which was a bad idea because this put me in the Danger to self and others category.

This wasn’t a window to the outside. This wasn’t a window affixed to any kind of a wall. It was a piece of trash, a lumpy awkward window frame that had just lived in the house and didn’t seem to belong to any particular room at any time. I don’t know why it was there. I used to use it to draw on, because I had no paper for a month (I know, this is SO dickensian, but all true). It was just garbage. And I was mad, and I kicked it, and like a good piece of glass it broke, making a delightful shattering sound.

This of course spread through the video art community like wildfire “Thirza went crazy, she’s in the bin, and she broke a WINDOW!!!” Oooh. Windows everywhere are now safe from me. Not only that, but another part of my living situation got translated into the Danger to self and others. I had the OVEN on!!!

It’s true. I don’t deny it. No one asked me why it was on, and people doing the intervention and judgement were lower middle class people. This is an important point to make, because very poor people often heat their living quarters with their stove.

It’s true. And one of my heaters didn’t work, and I was tired of playing the little matchgirl and so I had turned the oven on.

Later on, of course, when I moved back to Vancouver and my friends who were also extremely poor, I saw one of them absently turn his burners on because the kitchen was freezing cold. It really is just something poor people do. Is it safe? Well NONE of being poor is safe.

I find it interesting that is was only at this terribly late juncture in time that people decided they had to step in, and still missed most of what was fucking me up. I mean, perhaps a more meaningful intervention would be to bring me some food and then talk to me and decide what to do, instead of just running over like some shock troops calling in the Quebec Police for back up. And afterwards, I still didn’t have anything to eat. I mean, After The Hospital. I still only had one soup pot, and the handle had jiggled off by then. And by then someone I kicked out really did break a window, to the outside, and tried to fix it with pink tissue paper (???).

I did get a bed, a second hand bed, it was the most amazing thing I ever had. I barely remembered what sleeping in a bed was like, until the hospital. And hospital beds do all kinds of weird things, and so like Homer Simpson I did the “Bed goes up, bed goes down” thing, only it’s Canadian health care so I had to get out and turn a crank each time. . .

But really, what I really needed afterwards was food, and a promise that my family or whoever wouldn’t let me get that crushingly poor again. But I was on medication, and in the view of most of the world, mad people need medication before food, friends, shelter, jobs, etc etc.

So I went back to Vancouver, I didn’t feel like I could stay in Montreal. People certainly didn’t want to hang out with me after my episode, and I was drugged to the gills so I wasn’t terribly entertaining, and I was being pressured to quit my job because I could barely think or move or work. I needed to go be with friends who would let me just kinda, sit around. And eat. And I needed to be around friends who were poor and knew how to work the system. So that’s what I did, I moved back to Vancouver, had a grant for a year so I got a bed, and when my grant ran out I ended up going to places like the Carnegie for dinner, and Coast, where I got chased away by a Nurse Rachet wannabe. I would live on like, one BBQ pork bun a day. But I also had friends who would feed me dinner, or who worked in cafes where they would run a tab for me. I was still starving to death really, but I was on Zyprexa so I was gaining weight, and so people made the grand assumption that I was getting plenty to eat. Meanwhile I’d be walking down Hastings and a car would stop for me and I would be SO tempted to get in, I’d be thinking “Jesus, in twenty minutes I could have something to eat today.” Because I only ever ate once a day, and that was if I was lucky. Other than that I smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee and took medication that cost more than my grocery budget. If I didn’t have anything to eat, I would sleep, because being awake and starving is the worst. You can feel your stomach start eating itself, you keep belching because your acid wants to digest something only there’s nothing to digest, it’s physically agonizing. So I would sleep and sleep and sleep until I could get money or food. I had to conserve my energy, I didn’t have any energy to go make money or steal food. And if I was REALLY hard up, if it was looking even more bleak than usual, I would start planning suicide. And not because I wanted to die, more because it was a logical solution, I didn’t want to slowly starve to death in horrible agony, if I had to die it was going to be on my own terms, probably painful, yes, but at least it would be faster.

So really, nothing changed, except that I had friends who were also poor and so it didn’t seem so bad. Oddly enough, I was denied services at the local mental health team because I wasn’t in such a bad way comparatively speaking.

Mental health should really include battling poverty. There’s nothing noble about dying in a developed country because you’re underemployed or unemployed and can’t afford basic necessities. And making those necessities available to us only on the condition of forced psychiatric treatment doesn’t help either, that’s just blackmail. Imagine mental health care involving daily food deliveries to persons living in poverty, without being a part of a community treatment order. Wow. But you know, fruit growers don’t have the same kind of lobby groups and money as say, Big Pharma. Chiquita isn’t going to send banana reps to doctors. I’m sure proper food could cure a lot of mental illnesses, but it just doesn’t have the same kind of industry behind it, alberta cattle ranchers aren’t giving sirloin steaks to doctors for free samples.

Beds and food are more important, in my mind, than medication.

In a world . . .

I don’t talk about it much, but I currently research the history of residential schools in Canada for a job, and it messes me up to the point where I have to take breaks to twiddle about with other things. This is one of those breaks. Did you know the phrase “Final Solution” was coined by a Canadian, and referred to the “Indian Problem” and the fact that an average of 50% of students died in the “schools”? They had kind of a Thunderdome approach to aboriginal education, a sort of two man enter one man leaves kind of thing. The last residential school was at Gordon’s, here in Saskatchewan, and didn’t shut down until 1996.

My eyes hurt, I can only read about genocide of my people for so long.

It’s still freezing cold, I think, I haven’t looked out the window at the themometer yet. I had a dream about Helen Mirren the other night, she was in Caligula, in real life and in my dream. She’s off to hang with the Queen herself, the real Queen.

Aboriginals have a funny relationship to the Queen. She’s the one we have treaties with. Us and the Queen. I’m hoping to go to Buckingham palace to do some kind of impromtu performance art intervention, but I’m worried overzealous post-911 cops will shoot me for being a “terrorist.”

The Queen is a colonialist terrorist.

The other day I was going to order something from the States, I think it was Metrosexuality, a Channel 4 comedy series about some queers in Nottingham Gate, and a friend and my mother both got upset about it and told me to order it from a commonwealth country.

The sun never sets on Ebay.

My mom doesn’t want the monarchy to crumble, because if it does then where does that put our treaties? Does it get handed over to the Canadian government, or will they get all weird and try to ignore all our rights?

I like the Queen though, I don’t know her. I’ve never met her, or seen her in person. She stayed in a hotel just down the block from where I’m working now once. I don’t know what she does. I remember Roald Dahl had her in his children’s book the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) and I thought it was tremendous.

None of me is English at all, I’m all Scots or Irish or Cree. But all of those identities are ruled by the Queen. I’m a little colonial subject through and through.

She has great hats doesn’t she? It seems to be a prerequisite for royalty, to have excellent hats. Does she ever wear t-shirts I wonder?

I can’t believe I used the term Post-911. It’s like that raspy trailer voice over guy “In a Post-911 World where spam crushes political blogging dissent, one colonized racial mutt tries to make a difference . . .” Ugh, anytime I see a movie trailer that starts with the phrase “In a world where . . .” I just want to run out of the theatre screaming. Who is the guy who does that voice over anyway? Why does he always start it out that way?

“In a world where the Queen has access to the only millinery shop . . .”
“In a world where terrorism is art, and art is terrorism, and terrorists make art about artists making terrible art . . .”
“In a world where colonial burnout leads to random blogging . . .”

Engaging Disability at UVic, June

Yay! I’ve been invited to my first disability conference-y type thing to talk about my work and being a person with a psychiatric disability. I’m so stoked, and I get to go to Victoria, which is such a pretty city. It will be such a different thing for me to do, and it will look good in my grad school application too. And I get to go to the West Coast! I do like the West Coast, even though I don’t live there anymore and probably won’t again. It’s so over the top lush, and the killer whales always turn up to say hello when I’m on the ferry.

It’s minus 30 today!!! And I didn’t wear long underwear.

Hello Mr. Zebra, can I have your sweater cause it’s cold cold cold in my hole hole hole . . .

Who really killed the missing women?

This is an MP3 from Kevin Annett’s Hidden From History program, broadcast out of CFRO, the co-op radio station in the downtown eastside. This is another source of things I have already talked about in a post back in December, and the third time I’ve heard this story.

Is the mainstream media going to investigate the Canadian government’s involvement in the murder of the missing women of the downtown east side which is now being pinned solely on Willy Pickton?

If you want to know the real story behind the trial, listen to the above linked broadcast.

Ou et mon chapeau?

You might be surprised to know that even though I live in a supposedly bilingual country, I actually don’t speak French. Although I understand it way more than I let on. Sometimes people say outrageous things to me in French to see if I really understand it and I just smile blankly, although I do get the gist of it.

And then I saw this clip of Eddie Izzard talking about learning French and I realized I understood it all! Aaaah! Including the part about being an executive transvestite! Jesus Christ. I’m scared that I’m actually being a good Canadian.

Here’s Eddie talking about having big breasts.

On Transvestites in the Army:

You know, actually, this was going to be about French-English relations in Canada, but Trans comedy was actually more interesting.

Nouveau Indians

Ha! I am not the only one in this house who flakes out. I had just gotten home from work with my Mum when a television crew showed up at the door to do an interview with her they had scheduled. I was enlisted to frantically run around with her cleaning up the living room for her interview, including toting her new partially completed Ravensburger puzzle into the kitchen and putting the anxious weiner dog in the basement, where I am now. We even had to move the television so that it wouldn’t mar the view of her paintings.

So now I’m stuck in the basement, online, again. And I just signed on to the APTN Forums, although I haven’t posted yet. Mom called it “Junior Red Power” forum. It kind of is. There’s sort of a phase everyone goes through when they first become politicized where everything is really touchy, I have been there too, I probably still am in certain respects. But it seems the APTN forums are filled with really young aboriginal men who are upset about not having white privilege, but not at the point where they see other issues besides racism. I mean, some of them can be really sexist and homophobic, and then some of them have some really obvious internalized racism going on. I’ve never fit in well with Second Wave Red Power activists, because they simplify race issues in the same way radical feminists simplify hegemony issues. And as Kinnie Starr says, a bunch of them keep changing their name to Horse. And there’s also something very Nouveau Indian about it. Not that they are all Nouveau Indians, just that it’s the kind of movement that attracts Nouveau Indians. Nouveau Indians go through this awkward phase, oh man, it’s so embarrassing.

Okay, a Nouveau Indian, for those who don’t know, is someone who recently discovered that they have a North American Indigenous ancestry, OR, someone who was raised white or to believe in white supremacy and has now realized that it doesn’t jive with their racial identity. So everything is new, bannock is sacred, and dreamcatchers are given the same religious importance as crucifixes. Basically they take aboriginal culture and try to live it/be it within the same structures of thought as white culture. In a lot of ways, they have a tendency to embrace racist ideas of aboriginals. And they go for Pan-Indianism, instead of specifically researching their own tribal beliefs, which can be very different from the sort of New Age tainted idea of Indian spirituality.

And they don’t like using the word Indian. A lot of us here in Canada still use the word Indian because that is how we are legally defined, we are “Indians within the meaning of the Indian Act.”

How does an Indian act? Oh man, and this is another thing that drives me crazy about Nouveau Indians. Some of them pick out EVERY negative stereotype that exists and emulate it! Dude, drinking yourself into a black out does not an Indian make. John A MacDonald was a drunk, and that didn’t make him an Indian now did it? I once knew a very earnest Nouveau Indian who had a collection of what he called eagle feathers, but were actually from mostly ravens and seagulls. He had no idea what an eagle feather looks like. And then some Nouveau Indians, particularly men, embrace a really male supremacist idea of Aboriginal culture, not knowing or caring that traditionally our cultures have been mainly matriarchies. Take OKA for example, the public saw a group of men with guns on a barricade, what they didn’t see was a core group of Mohawk women in the background making the major decisions.

A lot of Indians will complain bitterly about Nouveau Indians, and it’s too bad. I mean, they need some way to be embraced into their culture, but no one really wants to be around them except unscrupulous neo-colonialist Indians. I was asking friends why they disliked Nouveau Indians, it seems to be mainly that they act like white people. And I don’t mean they speak english or go to university or wear clothes from the GAP, I mean that kind of competitive smarmy I’m number 1 and I won’t share kind of crap.

I curated a Nouveau Indian once and got stalked for a year by her. Actually my other stalker was a Nouveau Indian too!

But I think too, it’s just that they go through the kind of bouts of righteous anger in their mid twenties or thirties or forties that the rest of us went through in our pre-teens. Anger is a useful political tool, but it can also eat you up if you’re not careful, along with exhausting your personal resources.

I think what irritates me the most, in my personal dealings with them, is that they assume since I’m light skinned I am also a Nouveau Indian and going on the same journey as them. It’s such a wild assumption. I spent my entire life immersed in Cree culture, I was raised by Cree women, I grew up around some of the people they’re now studying to connect to their cultures! I have no idea what it means to rediscover one’s culture after living in another for so long. I know what it’s like to come out though, maybe there is something parallel to it.

Maybe we need Nouveau Indian support groups or something. They need a space to make cultural mistakes and learn without pissing the rest of us off because they’ve suddenly given themselves and all their friends Indian names.