Law discussion paper 5 pages minim

Citation: 2 Can. J. Women & L. 159 1986-1988

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Vol. 2 1986

Ka-Nin-Geh-Heh-Gah-E-Sa-Nonh- Yah-Gah

© 1988 by Patricia A. Monture

Following the oral tradition of her nation, this comment shares with the reader the experiences of "Flint Woman. With racism in legal education, this personal account centres around the events of a conference held in the summer of 1987, interwoven with the author's experiences at law school. This comment also deals with theories of racism and disadvantage, coping with racism, and conflicts between Native women and their feminist sisters, making connections between racism and sexism that are rarely made.

Dans ce commentaire, et suivant en cela la tradition orale de sa nation, l'auteure fait partager d ses lectrices(eurs) les sentiments d'une "Flint Woman". Elle y fait part d'un certain nombre d'6vnements qui se sont produits lors d'un colloque qui s'est tenu pendant l't 1987 et de Vexperience d'une Indienne inscrite dans un facult6 de droit. Elle y traite egalement des theories sur le racisme et lafagon avec laquelle on peut l'affronter ainsi que les conflits qui peuvent opposer les femmes autochtones et leurs consoeurs ftministes. Elle 6tablit par ailleurs entre le racisme et le sexisme des liens qui, jusqu't present, n'ont pas etefaits.

I have come to realize the importance of the experiential because without human experience we will never achieve a true form of equality. In order to understand equality, people must understand caring. Without understanding caring, we cannot understand "peoplehood," be it in a community as small as a gathering of a few people to something as large as the global community. Each person must be respected for whom and what they are. Only when we all understand caring will we have reached equality.

Ka-nin-geh-heh-gah-e-sa-nonh-yah-gah translates roughly into English as "the way Flint Women do." The way of Flint Women is a way of strength in which the fire of our nation shall be kept kindled. This is the responsibility of the women of our nation. In this way, this comment follows the oral tradition of my people.

Native history is oral history. It is probably fortunate for Native people today that so many of our histories are oral histories. Information that was kept in peoples' heads was not available to Europeans; could not be changed and molded into pictures of "savagery" and "paganism." The tradition of oral history as a method of sharing the lessons of life with children and young people also had the advantage that the elders told us stories. They did not tell us what to do or how to do it or figure out the world for us - they told us a story about their experience, about their life or their grandfather's or grandmother's or auntie's or uncle's lives. It is in this manner that Indian people are taught independence as well as taught respect because you have to do your own figuring for yourself.

Following this tradition of oral history and storytelling, I want to share one of my experiences with you. Like most other academics, I spend at least a little bit of time going to conferences, listening to other people, and learning and sharing what we are thinking. This is a story about a conference I attended, a legal conference, that I want to tell you. It is also a story about anger. My anger is not unique to this conference; it is paralleled at many other conferences I have been to and the classes I have been to, most other days in my life, so it is an important story.

I arrived at the conference at supper time. That was no mistake. I wanted people to be busy doing something else when I arrived. You see, when you know you are going to be the only Indian in the place, it is not exactly a comfortable feeling. Although the drive from my home to the lodge where the conference was being held was only forty-five minutes, it seemed much longer.

I was scared. I was scared because I was going to be the only Indian person in pretty much a room full of White people. And it just was not any old bunch of White people; this was a gathering of university professors - law professors from elite and nonelite schools all across the continent; the kind of people I had held in awe and respect through these last eight years of university; people who are published and doing the things now that I am still dreaming of doing and working toward.

I was scared too because I know that those people do not think the same as I do. White people do not line up reality in the same way that I do. They do not understand life and creation the same as I do. They do not know things in the same way that I do. I guess what I am not saying, because I am trying to be polite, is that I know that racism exists in Canada. I know that, because I have lived it.

I planned well; everybody was busy when I arrived at the conference. I checked in and got unpacked and settled without incident and decided that I would go for a walk to stretch my legs. I was happy and relieved to be out in the woods again, near the water. As the earth is my mother, being close to her is always calming. As soon as I got outside of my room, I bumped into a couple of women friends, women that I went to school with at Queen's. They are students too, so that lessened the burden of feeling a little out of my element as a student in with all these law professors. I started to unwind and feel much more comfortable.

It was not very long before it was time to go to the evening session. It was a large group session. It had been explained to me earlier that we would be

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breaking down into four small working groups first thing the next morning. In order to set the stage for that, the entire group (approximately fifty people) was meeting for a discussion that evening. The discussion was down the road and around the bend in a community hall in this small village where the lodge was located. It was kind of nostalgic and rustic and I had managed to shake most of my fears before I got there.

I think the topic of discussion that evening was racism. I am finding that my memory is a little bit foggy after the events to follow. I know that I sat and listened. I wanted to know where people were coming from. I was not going to jump with both feet into a situation and gathering I knew very little about.

I know that I was not entirely happy about what I heard, that it did not sit well and I lost the comfortable feeling that I had carried with me into the room. I know that because I spoke, and if I remember right, I spoke about understanding and respect. I spoke about how it is that the position of Native people is so frequently described as a position of disadvantage. This is not true simply for Native people, but also for Black people and Chinese people and Chicano people and Mexican people and anybody else who does not fit into the norm of White and middle class. Generically I am speaking about racism and sexism and classism and all the other 'ism's' and of how the individuals who fit those stereotypical classifications get qualified as disadvantaged. We are only disadvantaged if you are using a White middle class yardstick. I quite frequently find that White middle class yardstick is a yardstick of materialism. We will see how valued you are by the size of your bank account or the number of degrees you can write after your name.

I explained how I just could not understand how Native people are disadvantaged. Looking only at the materialistic yardstick, just about everybody in the country knows that we have less education and less income and more kids and less life expectancy than the majority of the other people in this country, but I still do not see, I said, how we are truly disadvantaged. You see, when non-Indian people are not satisfied with the world they see around them, and it seems to me that more and more of the people that I meet are in this position, well, those people do not have anywhere to turn. They have nowhere to run to. I have an entire community, or rather, pockets of community all over this land. Wherever you find Native people, things are done in a different way, against a different value system. And the measure is not materialism. It is not what you are that counts, it is who you are. So when the world of the dominant culture hurts me and I cannot take it anymore, I have a place to go where things are different. I simply do not understand how that is disadvantaged.

I also do not understand that by having the teachings of the elders available to me - different ways of learning, different ways of knowing; the ways of traditional spirituality - that I am more disadvantaged than White people. I have had the opportunity to learn Native teachings, to learn about body, mind, and spirit, to learn about balance. Most of the time I am a happy and complete individual, but when I look around me at the people at university, this is not by and large what I see. I see a lot of people who are hurt, a lot of people who know how to live in their heads and do not know that anything else even exists. I have a hard time understanding again how my experience is an experience of disadvantage. Disadvantage is a nice, soft, comfortable word to

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describe dispossession, to describe a situation of force whereby our very existence, our histories, are erased continuously right before our eyes. Words like disadvantage conceal racism.

When I left the gathering, I remember I felt a little bewildered. Why was it my professor friend had so insisted that I go to this conference? I had spoken, but I did not feel like many people had listened. I know they did not listen. It did not seem that people wanted to hear what I was saying, it did not seem like most of the people in that room wanted to understand how it was that we are different. This bewildered me, but it did not surprise me. This refusal, this inability to accept difference and respect difference and rejoice in difference is the point at which my anger grows. Equality is really a celebration of difference.

There was a reception after the gathering back at another room at the lodge and I went to that. I really did not talk to anybody except for the two students that I had met earlier, and looking back I think that was because I was looking for a safe place to be. A safe place to stand, one that was not threatening. My experience of the first evening at the conference set the stage for the following day. I did not stay at that reception for very long. I did not feel comfortable. Why should I stay? I was tired, so I went to sleep.

The next morning I got up and went over to breakfast. What a breakfast we had! The food was so good. Again I stayed pretty close to the women I knew from Queen's. I had decided through breakfast that I just wanted to watch again for a while because I definitely was not feeling like I was in a safe place. This is pretty typical of an Indian person who is not feeling comfortable. We are taught that inaction is a better course than action because it is in that manner that we learn where it is we are and how to participate.

During breakfast, the professor friend who had invited me and who was involved in organizing the conference came over to me and asked me if I would mind changing small section groups because one group only had one "person of colour" in it. My friend did not want to leave that person all by themself. On one hand I was really pleased that this professor was conscious enough to know that when you leave a minority person alone in a gathering of non-minority people, you are leaving that person in a vulnerable spot. But at the same time, the conscious shuffling of bodies from one group to another made me uneasy. Was I no more than a coloured face? This shuffling of bodies contrasts against the Indian way, in which things are allowed to happen as they should. This belief reflects the recognition that we cannot control our natural environment. We cannot master the universe. I have not been able to unpack the feeling of uncomfort that the move from one group to another group caused. But it did serve to intensify the fact that I really just wanted to watch and that I really was not trusting the people that were around me. This should be understood as my fear and my difficulty and my problem. It has to be my problem as it is my daily reality. If what I am saying is going to be understood, it must be understood as what I, as one particular person, am feeling and am experiencing and what I think of it. I think it is of value in that experience is the experience of a member of a dispossessed group within this society.

The morning session and lunch were rather uneventful for me. We had a good intellectual talk in my small section and a good effort at getting to know

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one another. For the most part, I sat back and listened and did not have a whole lot to say. My friends will tell you that is somewhat unusual. I was starting to feel probably a little bit comfortable again. After lunch, we went back to our small session.

I should probably tell you a little bit about the woman who stepped forward as chair at this particular small section meeting. She was not the group facilitator. She is a White woman, I would guess from a fairly privileged background. She teaches at an elite United States law school. She conveys herself in a caring manner.

She started the afternoon session by telling a story. That story was about a sixty-seven year old Black woman, whose name I forget, who lived in the Bronx or someplace like that. She was poor. She was a month behind in her rent. Because she was a month behind in her rent, her landlord wanted to evict her. She was old and arthritic and had no place to move to, so she just decided that she was not going to go. The landlord contacted the police and the police came to her apartment door and told her she had to move, I guess. Well, if I remember right, they kicked in her door and found her with a knife - she was not going to leave her home. So the policeman, another Black man, shot her hand off. I am not too sure how or why or the details, I have lost them. Then he shot her in the head, dead. The police officer was eventually charged with murder or manslaughter, the point being that there were criminal charges laid. He was not convicted. I do not know if that means we are supposed to believe that this sixty-seven year old Black arthritic woman was a danger to society or what, but she is dead.

In the manner of good lawyering, we began to pick at this hypothetical. What if she had been a White woman and he had been a Black man, would he have been convicted? What if he had been a White man, would he have been convicted? And on and on and on in the method of legalism we went. I started squirming in my chair. I did not miss the fact that the Black woman in the room was not missing the fact that I was squirming in my chair. I could not identify why, but the conversation we were having hurt.

I suppose I sat and listened for about half an hour. I am not sure how much I really listened. I was thinking quite intensely on why is this hurting me. Why is this experience so brutal. Why do I want to get up and leave the room. I do not want to hear anymore of this.

By the time I spoke I was almost in tears. What it was that I had identified was that we were talking about my life. I do not know when I am going to pick up the phone and hear about the friend who committed suicide, the acquaintance that got shot by the police, the Native prison inmate that was killed in an alleged hostage taking, ironically two days after two Indian inmates in Stoney Mountain had killed a White prison guard. This is my life. I do not have any control over the pain and brutality of living the life of a dispossessed person. I cannot control when that pain is going to enter into my life. I had gone away for this conference quite settled with having to deal with racism, pure and simple. But, I was not ready to have my pain appropriated. I am pretty possessive about my pain. It is my pain. I worked hard for it. Some days it is all I have. Some days it is the only thing I can feel. Do not try to take that away from me too. That was what was happening to me in that discussion. My pain

Vol. 2 1986

was being taken away from me and put on the table and poked and prodded with these sticks, these hypotheticals. "Let's see what happened next." I felt very very much under a microscope, even if it was not my own personal experience that was being examined.

I explained this to the group and I know I cried a little bit, I do not hide my emotions and I guess that is difficult for some people to handle. I probably talked for five or so minutes trying to explain what it was that was troubling me at the same time I was trying to understand what it was that troubling me, upsetting me. I put it all on the table. When I was done, like so many times before, everybody just kind of sat there and looked at me. I watched the Black woman in the room quite carefully. She seemed relieved, so I guessed what I had done was alright and I waited.

The woman who was facilitating the conversation said essentially, "What do we do next? I think what Trisha said is important and what do we do from here? Does this mean that we cannot discuss issues of racism because we are causing more hurt when we do?"

I did not like the sound of that idea too much because I do not think until racism is understood we are ever going to be rid of racism, that is the kind of beast that it is. I thought about my criminal law class in first year. When we had to deal with the issue of rape, or whenever the issue of rape had to be dealt with, be it in the rules of evidence or whatever, people took great pains to make sure that they are not inflicting any harm on any of the women in the room. "You never know when one of the women in the room in the class that you are teaching has been a victim of rape." But as an Indian woman, I have never had the same courtesy extended to me. In my first year criminal law, for example, I remember taking a case, a case about an Indian man. I think he was charged with breaking and entering. He was under the influence at the time of the offence. I do not remember the point of the case or the legal issue at stake, but at sentencing the judge was describing this Indian man and it kind of went like this: "He is Indian and he is drunk and he is illiterate" and all of that belongs in one mouthful, "so it is not a problem if we send him to jail for X number of years. After all, he can go and see the rest of the Indians in jail." This case was only about ten or fifteen years old at the time I studied it, which was four years ago. The professor certainly made no more note than in passing, if he did that much, that this was a stereotype of Indian people that was being portrayed and conveyed by the judge. I was hurt. I had felt very exposed at having my personhood and my reality laid bare on the table in front of the people in class without my consent. In that very same course the very same professor, at some length and with great caution, dealt with the issue of rape, explaining that he did not want to inflict any harm on any women in the class. He certainly hoped that this would not be the case. Yet, when we deal with the issue of racism, very much so do we allow ourselves to be blind to the further pain that we are inflicting.

So I felt strong, although quite exhausted, at having put on the table the way I had been feeling as we talked in hypotheticals about the murder of this Black woman in the United States by the police officer. I felt that - and maybe this is self-congratulatory - my tears and my pain had brought us to a really good place. The rest of the discussion that afternoon focused on racism and how

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to deal with racism in a classroom. How do we talk about racism? When do we talk about racism? In what manner do we talk about racism? Several of the men brought up how they could identify with feeling invisible, as I had earlier mentioned, when the issue of gender was discussed. Men are seen as the perpetrator and never the victims of the social reality that we live in. I thought that was a good point and all in all we had had a good discussion that afternoon.

I left and went back to my room to have a little bit of a rest before dinner and did not stay for the wine and cheese or before dinner drinks that was going on after our small section. I needed some time and some space to be alone to let the rawness subside. At six o'clock I went to supper. I sat beside a law professor from California, a Chicano man I believe. We had an animated chat. During our conversation I remember noticing that a very heated discussion was occurring at the dinner table behind me. It involved the woman who had headed up my small section that afternoon and the two women friends from Queen's who were attending the conference as students. It also involved at least several other White men. At the time I had the feeling that something important was going on in that discussion, but I did not pay any attention to it. After supper there were no activities scheduled for the evening. It was just a rest and socializing time. I socialized a bit and chatted and then went back and crawled into my bed, still feeling quite exhausted.

The following morning, all the small sections were to meet to discuss what had gone on the previous day. I found it very very difficult to get out of bed that morning. I was feeling very exposed and raw. I just did not feel up to walking into breakfast where I could possibly have to carry on a conversation, especially a conversation about yesterday's discussions. So I waited around for the general store to open so I could go in and get myself a cup of coffee. The plenary started before I got my coffee.

I arrived at the plenary to hear the woman who had introduced the story of the Black woman's murder in our small section quite emphatically, and almost to the point of being defensive, insist that the issue she was talking about was not an issue of gender. This puzzled me greatly, because the woman in question is a White woman, and by her own admission she does not know very much about racism. I sat through a lot of that conversation not knowing quite what to think, knowing I did not understand what I heard. The conversation kept returning to the woman's insistence that this is not an issue of gender.

At some point during that conversation, I finally figured out what everyone was talking about when one of the women there described what had taken place at the dinner table behind me the night before. During this discussion of the dinner table incident, a Hawaiian law professor, also a minority woman, offered this story. She was having dinner with a group of her legal colleagues. The topic of the conversation at that dinner was sports. As she told the story, the conversation began to centre around specific athletes, I believe football players, and what the people at the table thought of each of these superstar athletes. The woman who was telling the story was asked to comment on a certain individual and she said something like, "I used to really like him. I used to think this man was a great, great athlete. Then I saw him advertising beer or underwear or some such thing on television and I do not believe he is really interested in sports for the sake of sports. With all these endorsements that he has been

Vol. 2 1986

doing, I think he is interested in sports only for money." The unfortunate part of that comment, and the woman did definitely confess that she simply did not know what else to say and did not know an awful lot about football or sports, was that the athlete in question was Jewish. There was a Jewish man sitting at the table at the dinner, and he took offence at the woman's comments. To him it sounded like very much "those money grubbing Jews" stereotype again. This was definitely not the intent of the woman. Her point in telling this story was that intent does not excuse somebody from racism. Racism is racism, and racism stings. All the good intentions in the world do not take away the sting and do not take away the pain.

Shortly after this story was told, the session got very interesting. One of the men who had eaten dinner the night before with the woman who told that story identified himself. He was quite defensive. He took great pains to explain that he did not intend to harm anyone, but that he was seriously questioning whether the conference was accomplishing anything. I do not remember all that he said. What I do remember was getting angry. I said to one of the Queen's students next to me that I was getting very very tired of hearing White men speaking for me, especially when I am in the room. I am quite capable of speaking for myself.

At this point, I began to notice that my friend's was definitely uncomfortable. She was more uncomfortable than I was, and I could not quite figure out why. The whole morning I got the feeling that everybody else had a secret that excluded me. Something very important and very definite was going on here and I was somehow being excluded from it, and I could not quite grasp what it was. I was very shortly to find out.

After the man had finished speaking, the woman who had initiated the conversation that morning and he got into a definite back and forth - very argumentative, very quick, each attacking each other's position. Each stating how important the issue of racism was, both stating that racism had very much been dealt with. The man insisted that with all this experiential stuff we were definitely going overboard, and that it was certainly time for us to begin dealing with important things like "mega-theory." "Let's make this academic and stop feeling for a while." He also took great pains to explain all he had done to help minority people and how long he had been there for minority people. I think he was questioned about how he knew he was helping if he did not know what minority people actually felt.

Anyway, this arguing match went back and forth and back and forth, with emotions getting higher and higher on both sides of it. All through it, the woman insisted "No, we are talking about racism, not gender. The fact that I am a White woman and that two other women there were White women and that the three men that were there were White men did not make it an issue of gender. Yes, there were issues of gender involved in it, but that was not the important issue." I was getting very bewildered about how this was not an issue of gender. I mean, we were talking about White people, all White people.

Everything clicked into place when I realized why it was not an issue of gender: the comment that had gotten the entire conversation going the evening before had been made when one of the men and the woman were talking about whether this conference was too experiential. The woman from my small section

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had said: "No, it is not experiential. Let me show the good stuff that can come out of the experiential, let me show you the good stuff that came out of pain." Then she finished telling the story about the pain that I had laid on the table the previous afternoon, the man had said "The pain of minority people is like television, we can turn it on and off as we want to." The woman who had brought this conversation to the meeting and put it on the table that morning had finally let that comment slip into the conversation.

I was stunned. I was standing up speaking before I knew it. I cannot find the words to describe how brutalized I felt when those words came out. That was me that was being discussed all morning. Did the man intend to belittle my pain and my life? Did he know how deeply he had clawed into my essence? Did that woman intend to appropriate my pain for her own use, stealing my very existence, as so many other White, well-meaning, middle and upper class feminists have done?

It is difficult for me to remember what it was that I said. I know I cried. In many ways it was an emotional outburst and I was aware, I think, that the people there might discount my words on this ground. But what I said what I thought needed to be thought about anyway. It has been too long, I said, that we have not been listened to. Whenever something like this happens in discussion of gender and race, I cannot separate them. I do not know, when something like this happens to me, when it is happening to me because I am a woman, when it is happening to me because I am an Indian, or when it is happening to me because I am an Indian woman. The forum has not been set yet in which those issues can be discussed. There are a lot of teachings that Indian people have about balance and harmony and tranquility, about well- being. The modern education system is not aware of these things. They have not listened, they have not understood, they still believe that they are going to help us. Well, I do not want to be a White person. You cannot make me be a White person. You cannot help me be a White person. Look at this world, look at what is around you. The earth is my mother. She is being raped. She is being destroyed. There will not be anything left soon if we do not start taking care of the earth. And you, as a White man, and you, as a White woman, stand there and tell me that I do not know, I do not understand - because I feel. I cannot know?

I was angry all right, and I was hurt. I do not know how long I stood and spoke before exhaustion and numbness set in. I responded to what had been said that day as violence, for what had been done to me that day was violence. The White people there had already decided that I was not supposed to hear about that comment. That comment was what had been making the friend next to me so uncomfortable: she was afraid that that comment would slip out and I would be hurt. Well, I am glad that it did slip out, even though I was hurt. I do not deserve to have those things kept from me. As I said before, my pain is all I have got some days. Do not take it away from me. It is mine. Understand it, understand where the pain comes from and why: I have to struggle with that. If we cannot understand this pain that women, that Indian women, that Black women, that Hawaiian women, that Chicano women go through, we are never going to understand anything. All the mega-theory will not get us anywhere because without that understanding, mega-theory does not mean anything, does

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not reflect social reality, does not reflect people's experience. I remember speaking again about being labelled disadvantaged. Sure,

Native people in this country are disadvantaged, everybody knows that. Everybody knows the statistics. But those are all social and economic variables. You cannot go out and measure how happy people are. You cannot count happiness. You cannot turn happiness into nice neat tidy statistics. Native people are only disadvantaged if you use that materialistic yardstick. If you accept those kinds of measures about who is good and who is not, Indian people are not "good." But if you want to go to a community where you are cared about as an individual who is important, go to a traditional Indian community. That is not disadvantaged. What I have had is a real and an important advantage. When that world out there has hurt me, when I grew up and I did not like what I found and did not like what I saw out there in the city, I had someplace to run to. I had another alternative. Most people do not walk into another alternative lifestyle, another alternative value structure. They do not have the same kind of access to those things because they are not people of a minority culture. I do not want to be called disadvantaged anymore. Call me economically poor, call me uneducated, call me all of those things. The education I have got does not mean anything. Do not call me disadvantaged anymore.

I think I talked a long time. I do not know. I think I was in shock. I felt brutalized, violated, victimized - all of those things - but I was not silent. I knew I had to respond, I knew I could not sit there and let it continue. I could not consent to my own disappearance and my own death. I could not watch anymore, so I spoke. I was standing up speaking before I even realized that I was standing up speaking, at least thirty seconds went by before I realized I was on my feet addressing this group, I am saying something, again. When are those of you who inflict racism, who appropriate pain, who speak with no knowledge or respect when you ought to know to listen and accept, going to take hard looks at yourself instead of at me. How can you continue to look to me to carry what is your responsibility? And when I speak and the brutality of my experience hurts you, you hide behind your hurt. You point the finger at me and you claim I hurt you. I will not carry your responsibility any more. Your pain is unfortunate. But do not look to me to soften it. Look to yourself.

I wanted to sit down but I could not. I kept talking and trying to explain until I could not talk anymore. The words were all there in my head, my mind was fine, it was going ninety miles a minute and I wanted to keep on talking. Then I just shut down, there was nothing left, no strength left to keep trying to explain. I have explained this same thing so many times that I get exhausted. But, if one person in that room understood what I had to say, understood what it is that so many Indian people I have listened to and spoken to have said, heard what the elders have taught me, if one person understood it, it was worth that last ounce of energy. If I had to speak again tomorrow and the day after and the day after, it will be worth speaking again.

I reached a point where I just could not talk anymore, but I did not know how to stop. Everybody else just sat there. I looked at them and they looked and looked and looked at me and I felt as if I had been caught under a microscope: "What is she going to do next. Let's watch." I could not think how to sit down. I

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could not think how to finish what I had started saying. I did not know what to do. Finally, I looked some more and they looked back some more and I ended my talk the only way I knew how. That was in an Indian way, and that was to say: Megwetch: I am glad that you listened. I am glad that I stood up and talked, let these words I have spoken be good words. Then I sat down. After I sat down, I looked at them some more and they looked at me. My friend put her hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze. I wiped some more tears away and I felt at least as though I had a little bit of energy. A woman across the room very much wanted to break the silence. That is another difference between Indians and non-Indians. Indians understand that silence is not a bad thing and silence can mean a lot of things. A lot of things can be said without opening your mouth. The silence itself did not make me uncomfortable, but the fact that everybody else in the room was uncomfortable with the silence made me uncomfortable.

Eventually, this woman spoke and she said: "What can I do to help?" Well, that pulled the rug right out from under my feet again, because I do not need you to help me. Helping is offensive; it buys into the "I am better than you are" routine. I know the woman who spoke did not intend to inflict that fresh pain; I know she did not understand that, but all I could think of were some unpleasant things to say to her. I was to the point where I was defensive and I knew I could not speak in that manner because I knew she had spoken from a kind and sincere place, the only words that she knew how to speak. I was very grateful when one of the other minority women, the one who had earlier told the story of how intent does not excuse racism, spoke very eloquently indeed and addressed the issue in a good way. I was very very grateful for that and it made me smile. It made me smile because when we women - we Indian women and Black women and Chinese women and Hispanic women - are together we take care of each other. She took care of me and she spoke when I could not speak anymore. She carried the ball for awhile, which is something you see all too rarely in this individualistic world that we live in. When will all peoples, all nations, all colours, respect the circle of life?

After that, the session got wrapped up and there was a lot of nervous energy in that air. People did not know what to do. Before I knew what happened, I was surrounded by the men and women of colour who sat in that room. In their physical proximity to me I felt safeness. I knew they understood, I knew they had been there too and they stayed there with me and it was good.

Another good thing happened. We went to lunch together and we did something we oh so rarely do at a racism conference: we sat together and we talked about what racism means to us. What it means to go to a conference like this and never get a chance to be together. We always end up at a conference on racism explaining what racism is and teaching. We do not get a chance to be with each other and we do not get a chance to hear each other. We do not know what the differences are between a Black woman's experience and an Indian woman's experience because we have never had the chance to talk about it. This one of the ways the racism and oppression perpetuate themselves. But we need to talk about it, so that is what we did. We talked about our need to talk about it and it was a start and it was a good lunch. The reason that we all went to lunch together was because we wanted to demonstrate to the White people

Vol. 2 1986

there that we do stand together, that there is solidarity amongst us. You cannot attack the only Indian women at a conference and think that the Black women are not going to be there standing beside her, because they will be there standing beside her.

This story does not have an end. It goes on and on and on. When I am done telling this one, I can tell you another one and another one and another one and another one. I want to know and I want to believe that it makes a difference. That what I have struggled with will make a difference to my son and to his children and to those who come after. We have an obligation to those children to see that there is something here for them, but I am scared that that is not happening and it is not happening fast enough and that it is not happening quick enough. How many hundreds and hundreds of years have we been doing this? And when is it going to stop?

Tonight these questions are just too big and too hard and I am too alone.

Vickie Loans-Arrow, 1972

© 1972 by Marnie Walsh

From Paula Gunn Allen, editor, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 136-38.

I this morning me and my cousin charlene lost-nation are in to bobby simmons bar and charlene say i tired of living there aint nothing in it and bobby simon behind the bar goes ha ha ha when she fall off the stool im laughing too she so drunk she funny

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