Thread by @ZoeSTodd

1. I seem to have a weird compulsion to tweet today even though I know this platform is a chaotic place to focus or entrust my energy. But I have a story I’ve carried since last September and I’m ready to share it.

2. Deep breath. This story has to do with the bizarre, chaotic experience of moving to colonial occupied Ottawa as a Red River Métis person lovingly raised by my settler Mom+Métis dad in Edmonton, along the North Saskatchewan River my dad’s family is tied to they many generations

3. When I moved to #YOW in late June 2015, I was excited for what this experience would bring. I’d only visited the nation’s ‘capital’ once, as an Army Cadet selected for an Outward Bound Wales exchange in 2000. We spent one day in the city at a luncheon, & hiked in Gatineau Park

4. So my mental map of colonial occupied Ottawa was pretty blurry. I imagined it would be similar to my hometown of Edmonton, a mishmash of complex politics and paradoxes shaped by both French and British colonial imaginaries. I suppose that was a fair way to start!

5. What I was not ready for was how ignorant many white settlers in colonial occupied Ottawa are of the history, sovereignty, being of the Red River Métis Nation. This was a shock after doing 2 whole degrees at the University of Alberta surrounded by brilliant Indigenous scholars

6. In Edmonton, I had distinct honour of witnessing the only standalone Faculty of Native Studies in North America in action. I TA’d for a prof who taught a course in research methods & quickly learned how invaluable careful, methodical archival work on our nations is. Vibrant!

7. But when I landed in Ottawa I quickly learned that although the Red River Métis Nation is, as Brenda MacDougall (2017*) has argued, ‘one of the most documented groups in Canadian history’, in the ‘white possessive’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015) climes of Ottawa we were not sovereign

8. My then employer quickly made clear it did not understand the richness or complexity of who the Métis (otipemisiwak — People Who Own Themselves) were as a distinct legal sovereign entity with our own unique geographically rooted laws, language, and citizenship protocols.

9. My Nation is distinctly+concretely bound by our political & historical relationships to very real, embodied times & places. We are recognized by First Nations on the Plains through Treaties (like the nehiyaw pwat*) that outline our specific ongoing duties to First Nations.

10. In Ottawa, reams of archival data documents housed at LAC shows how colonial actors sought to control us as a distinct, geographically rooted collective with our own language, laws, & recognition by other Indigenous peoples as a distinct and cohesive group of political actors

11. The Manitoba Metis Federation today houses much of this material, initially collected through the Métis Archival Project, as the metisnationdatabase.ca

This exhaustive project outlines our political history, where we lived, who we are related to, and how we became a Nation.

12. I outline all of this to make clear that thousands of hours of careful meticulous work has gone into documenting what Métis ourselves already know, which is that we are geographically & historically bound to a specific homeland + specific inter-nation agreements on the Plains

13. This is not controversial to assert, given that ‘Canada’ was very clear on who the Métis Nation was when it labelled us enemies following our armed resistances on the Plains against colonial imperialism throughout the Lake Winnipeg watershed+adjacent waters in 1869-1870+1885

14. Which is to say, as a Nation, we had long since asserted our sovereign collective identity as a distinct people (with obligations to particular Plains First Nations who had names for us in their own languages), and with distinct places/waters/relatives we owed obligations to.

15. So, in 2015, after 200 years of the Red River Métis Nation asserting our distinct political identity (as many argue we coalesced politically as a distinct people through the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816*), there was no excuse for white settlers to override our sovereignty.

16. Which is to say I was wholly unprepared, as a Métis person mentored by kind, brilliant, powerful First Nations, Inuit, and Métis thinkers and community advocates back to home to enter a settler university with only two full time (tenure/track) FNIM faculty on staff in 2015.

17. I was part of a cohort of four brilliant Indigenous women hired that same year to tenure-track positions. In one fell swoop, we tripled the employers’ Indigenous faculty. It was a daunting task, as I still was a PhD student finishing my dissertation while teaching full time.

18. Ps — anywhere I’ve put an *, I will come back and add a bibliography with sources so you can review materials on your own.

19. Before I proceed, I am about to delve into painful experiences that shaped my mental, physical, spiritual, & emotional well-being for the better part of 7 years. I have lived in abject fear of sharing these experiences due to fear of serious retaliation from those involved.

20. As a Red River Métis person, I have traced the stories of my family carefully along the rivers, roads, and regions we moved through. Followed lines of lost livelihoods. Found paperwork that shows ggg grandmothers forced to give up Treaty post 1885. Listened to painful stories

21. There are things I hold very sacred & dear to my heart, stories of colonial trauma my immediate family members endured that are between me, my family, my therapist, & sometimes lawyers when I’m required to share that info to colonial bodies. I will not betray confidences here

22. I will not share that trauma here, but know that it shapes every cell in my body. Shapes my dreams & haunts my failures. I hold sacred the material fight my relatives fought as a people on the Plains, targeted as RR Métis by scrip commissions & church officials & the state.

23. So with this bundle of sacred fleshy history lodged in my heart, I moved to #YOW & started my first academic job. And, immediately, it became clear that to white settler scholars, the Métis were not a sovereign nation but in fact an amorphous colonial category they possessed.

24. Nowhere was this more clear than in how many white folks in Ottawa (& Ontario, Quebec, & the Maritimes more generally), Metis was frequently an adjective used to describe white people with a distant Indigenous ancestor. Sometimes an ancestor as far back as the 1600s!

25. As a 32 year old PhD student fresh from surviving a deeply anti-Indigenous enviro at my doctoral institution in the UK, I was inadvertently thrust into the emerging ground zero of a national scholarly & legal fight over who the ‘real’ Métis were. & my employer was hosting it.

26. Within 7 days of starting my job — having just uprooted myself from my homelands, family, & friends to take a job in #YOW — a colleague at my uni who disputes the rights of Red River Métis as a sovereign nation bounded to Plains places & laws compared my nation to the Gestapo

27. How does a Métis PhD student from the prairies thrust into this environment proceed? As it turns out I would spend the next seven years fighting for my life in the murky rapids of white colonial possessive ideas of Indigenous lives, worlds, existence. And it was rough.

28. As shown at minute 10:30 on APTN Investigates in 2017, the same colleague not only compared my Indigenous nation to Nazis, but also appropriated West African enslavement histories to shore up claims for white settler possessive ideas of Metis life.

29. Within days of starting my job, senior Indigenous mentors & colleagues across the US and Canada began to reach out in concern. They could see what I was still too naive and green to see: this work environment was explicitly hostile and unsafe for me as a junior Métis scholar.

30. If a uni is ok with an entire Indigenous nation — that was targeted by the state, experienced Road Allowances, had our children sent to Indian Residential Schools & Day schools, had our kin stolen in the 60s scoop — being called Nazis, it was irredeemable. I wish I’d listened

31. The irony of my predicament in Ottawa became even richer as the links between some ‘Eastern Métis’ movements and white supremacist groups came to light. maisonneuve.org/article/2018/1…

32. In spite of this, I was an optimistic otipemisew. I would transcend white possessive (Moreton-Robinson 2015) logics that cast white settlers in eastern Canada as being ‘bullied’ by native people for…checks notes…clearly asserting our impeccably documented history.

33. But even the most resolute, clearest hearted optimistic otipemisew is no match for the daily grind of colonial ignorance and arrogance. And over time my body and spirit bore the cost. In February 2018, after some scary incidents at work, I noticed my eyesight failing.

34. Over those years I often bawled my eyes out in therapy: detailing examples of white settler colleagues yelling or raising their voices at me in meetings & myriad other micro+macro-aggressions at work,& my constant concern about the safety of students targeted by settler profs

35. I recall visiting the campus medical clinic in Dec 2017 with a mysterious virus (I was constantly sick with every virus back then) & when the doctor asked me how I was doing I burst into tears & explained I was exhausted from the constant anti-Indigenous hostility at work.

36. Other Métis & ally colleagues outside the institution who raised concerns about what was going on were routinely harassed, reported to their employers, and/or threatened with vague or explicit legal retaliation. I myself received the following in June 2020 for speaking out:

37. long story short, by February 2018 my eyesight was failing. The stress of my work enviro was threatening my ability to keep doing my job. The doctors did a battery of tests. They ruled out brain tumours and settled on a chronic inflammatory condition eating my optic nerves.

38. As if to prove it was work-related, the minute I went on leave for a fellowship, my eyes miraculously recovered. Doctors had threatened I would need steroids and spinal taps and a host of invasive treatments. But. Simply moving out of ground zero was all I needed.

39. I promise I will wrap this up! & I am weighing my words carefully. I recently shared a mildly critical experience about my previous job & an admin contacted my current employer in what felt like an attempt to censure me in spite of my academic right to critique institutions.

40. But the heaviest thing I carried through that whole experience was the knowledge that I could not protect students from the anti-Indigenous and anti-Red River Métis attitudes pervasive in occupied Ottawa.

41. And when this story came out, with troubling testimony from vulnerable students, and the employer retained absolute silence on the matter, I despaired more than I had in all my years tethered to that place. ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/18559…

42. Some institutions thrive on cultures of pointed, weaponized silence. This is alive+well in settler Ottawa. And some folks learn that if they shout loud enough & are perceived as litigious, the silence intensifies. But some can see through the threats. site-cbc.radio-canada.ca/media/6645/rev…

43. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, as they say, and pointed weaponized silence only assures the most vulnerable that nobody is going to stand with them. I’m so sorry that I was not in a position to speak out then. I hope you can see how deeply I have carried these things. 💜

44. I share this knowing full well that a well oiled outrage machine will likely be marshalled, with anonymous emails telling me to burn in hell & contacting my employer and all the usual gnashing of teeth from folks who have perfected the practice of silencing native women…

45. Navigating constant threats to our livelihoods that so many Red River Métis experience for asserting what we know to be true — that we are a People, bound to a place and time, with sacred obligations to specific First Nations, held accountable as otipemisiwak, is hard.

46. But I hold sacred and dear my obligations to relatives past, present, and future. And standing in fear of retaliation for simply relaying a seven year chunk of my life is a fear I refuse to carry any further. I lay this particular burden down.

47. Paradoxically, when I became intensely ill with covid in early 2020, the colonial curses of settler Ottawa that had hooked into my flesh began to flag. I found the wherewithal to move home. I travelled across the country with another Red River Métis friend. I wept in Winnipeg

48. Wow, this catharsis is way more physically intense than I anticipated. Time for a protein break. Here’s a musical interlude. That includes my beloved Winnipeg xoxo music.apple.com/ca/album/virgi…

49. Coming home, laying my body down in the cool sand of the prairie riverbeds my own ancestors had slept next to, fished alongside, loved fiercely with all their hearts. This is when my healing began. Every day, colonial Ottawa slipped farther+farther out of reach as we drove.

50. I moved even farther west, to unceded Coast Salish homelands my family holds obligations to and within as visitors in these powerful, storied places governed through Coast Salish laws. I joined my family, my loves. Cool rivers filled my spirit.

51. Admittedly, the nightmares persisted. Sometimes I woke up in a sweat, terrified someone who despised my very existence as an outspoken otipemisew had found my home address, an address and location I keep private for safety. (See: the ‘burn in hell’ email).

52. But there is no match for healing. Slowly but assuredly I came back into a body I had been frozen out of. I regained a sense of myself outside of what I’d been through. The colonial curses were breaking. One little string fraying at a time. Recovery seeps in like cool water.

53. In September 2022 I traipsed out on to the night grass, carefree. The full moon was rising above the douglas fir and a mighty oak tree. I pointed my camera at the Rocky satellite and drank in the magic of cosmic entanglements.

54. As I took pictures of the moon, my dad called me. We reminisced over the ancient moon. And I don’t know if it was the power of a full moon, that symbol of completion, but he began a story I’d never heard. A story he learned as a wee boy in the Rossdale Flats. From his grandpa

55. With perfect assurance, he relayed everything his grandfather, my late great-grandfather James, recalled from our oral histories of our family’s experiences of Batoche. A complicated history, as we have French and Scottish Métis roots. He shared it in rich tones.

56. For a transcendent moment, I was carried back 137 years, to the Northwest Resistance. To when we as a Nation asserted our sovereignty against a colonial nation-state. I could almost taste the water, hear the prairie air thick with resistance. This is the power of oral history

57. For those moments I was woven back in through time and space to those places, those people, those memories, those impossible decisions made by people from the Nation I am proud to be accountable to. Like the present slipped away and what stood was life, justice, truth.

58. As he finished sharing his story I slowly re-entered the present. And I looked around me, at the green grass, at the shadows of the trees and bushes. At that full moon rising up above the Salish Sea. & I knew. I was held to something so much bigger than any colonial imaginary

59. I wish to close with this: I am grateful for my family. For my community. For every teacher along the way. I pray every day that systems grounded in the false possession & extraction of colonial systems are eventually filled with the love & care I felt in that moonlit moment.

60. I carry no anger. Only fervent optimistic otipemisiwak hope and faith that truth and fish and water and memories and sacred obligations will stand the test of time. Thank you for listening. I wish you the most beautiful day. 🐟

61. And here is a song that helped me envision my healing through a long long time away from home. Envision reclamation of my full body mind and spirit. The ephemeral bandages of my wounds finally off. I can envision a beautiful future for all my loves.

62. Maybe someone else will feel brave enough to break those colonial curses and weaponized silence in settler-occupied Ottawa.