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From the Outside Looking In: One Woman's Acimowin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2020

Lorraine Mayer*
Affiliation:
Department of Native Studies, Brandon University Faculty of Arts, Room 101 Clark Hall, 270 18th Street, Brandon, ManitobaR7A 6A9, Canada
*
Corresponding author. Email: mayerl@brandonu.ca

Extract

I struggle mamere

To bring

Your words

Into nokum's

Cabin

But the words

Are in battle

Competing

for my mind

I am a mixed-blood woman raised in Canada where my two ancestries have competing worldviews, from social, political, and religious ideology to ancient philosophies. These mixed ancestries also come with different social expectations. In the social-political world of Native Studies where I walk daily, my French grandmother, mamere, is argued as coming from a world of privilege because she was white-skinned, and my Cree grandmother, nokum is thought to come from a world of oppression because she was dark-skinned. Yet both my grandmothers experienced abuse and prejudice. How and where the abuses originated may be different, but they did occur. I have a lot to learn from my grandmothers, but it has taken me many years of inner conflict, self-righteousness, and pain to get to this understanding. To acknowledge both grandmothers having been oppressed means I cannot continue to think of the world in simplistic, binary terms of colonizer/colonized. I must legitimize the equality of suffering in both cultures. Indeed, my worldviews had been turned upside down as I began to identify with the feminist movement, nonetheless it is nokum's world that was shattered, demeaned, and distorted, so it is her world I bring to you today with this story. Another day I may talk about my mamere's patriarchal world, but today is for nokum.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © by Hypatia, Inc. 2020

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Footnotes

In the Cree language “acimowin” means story

References

Mayer, Lorraine. 2001. Mama don't cry for me. Eugene Oregon: Butterfly Editions.Google Scholar
Lynn, Gehl. 2019. Episode 15: The green new deal and Bill S-3. The Skoden Podcast. https://soundcloud.com/skodenpodcast/episode-15.Google Scholar