Manifest Matters

We are more than a curious medicine bundle on a museum rack

We are tricksters in the blood

Natural mixedblood tricksters 

Word warriors in that silence between bodies 

And we bear our best medicine on our voices 

In our stories

In other words

Both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources 

As commodities to be exploited 

In the first instance 

By capitalists for personal gain

And in the second by Marxists 

For the good of all

(For the good of all)

(For the good of all)

This comprises a settler move to innocence 

Because it erases and then conceals 

The erasure of Indigenous peoples 

Within the settler colonial nation-state 

And moves Indigenous nations as “populations” 

To the margins of public discourse

This settler move to innocence 

Is concerned with the ways in which Indigenous peoples are 

Counted, codified, represented and included/disincluded 

By educational researchers and other social science researchers

Indigenous peoples are rendered visible in mainstream educational research 

In two main ways: 

As “at risk” peoples and as asterisk peoples

Relationships do not merely shape reality 

They are reality

Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism

Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires

The postindian warrior is the simulation of survivance in new stories

The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization 

Is yet another form of settler appropriation

The miracle is that so much was maintained in spite of it all

Our nations today are the embodiment of the fierce, desperate hope 

And relentless insistence of our ancestors to continue on

Without those ancestors

Without their stories

there is nothing to carry forward

This, to me, is a vital way to think about being and becoming a good ancestor

Our traditional language 

Has words that contain huge amounts of information 

Encoded like a ZIP file within them

We have much to learn from the other-than-human world 

But that learning can only come from humility and relational understandings

Relational accountability means that I am accountable to all my relations

To all of creation