PLACES ‘i’ EXIST
ACKNOWLEDGMENT of LANDS

How is wrong righted, debt paid, gratitude communicated?

 

“VIRTUAL” BODIES

There is no virtual. 

My virtual body hides and distracts from the enormous and very concrete resource-hunger its physical embodiment demands.
The virtual body lives, drinks, and eats real resources on a large scale physical environment.

Avatars obscure the impact of their demands, for some. 

The data on this website and its domains seems to be stored on servers based on Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) and Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga (Haudenosaunee) lands.

The embedded Soundcloud data linked on this website is stored on Amazon servers whose data centres are based on indigenous lands of:

The embedded YouTube data linked on this website is stored on Google servers whose data centres are based on indigenous lands of: 

Links above and throughout this and other websites, each bit housed on a specific land… invited or uninvited.

Each virtual body, maintained and consumed by more people who each  consume physical resources. Cycles of consumption.

PHYSICAL BODIES

I am first–generation Canadian. 

Born on Mississauga Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga (Haudenosaunee) lands. 

Grown up on Attiwonderonk (Neutral) land and then in Kjipuktuk on Mi’kma’ki Wabanaki (Dawnland Confederacy) lands.

Home now also includes Ktaqmkuk, a Mi’kmaki name for a land which has been home to many peoples and cultures, present, departed, and exterminated… Identified in English today as Newfoundland (and for the purpose of providing more specificity, distinct from Labrador and Nunatsiavut of the Inuit people), the many peoples and cultures have had different names for this place.

The notion of ‘home’ is variable.
Differing place relations.
Visiting for resources and without continued presence, or leaving due to inhospitable environmental conditions (e.g. the apparent demise of Groswater People, possible extinctions, and my own back-and-forth travels based on resource and family).

Listing all peoples let alone their distinct names for a land is impossible for absence of available oral or material traces of pre/historic cultures. Timelines debated.

Partial Timeline of Peoples and Cultures on K’taqmkuk:

          1. Maritime Archaic Peoples/Traditions [ca. 5500-3200 years or ~7500-3000 years ago, e.g. Province at Port au Choix, Northern Peninsula]
            1. Southern Branch People [“By at least 5,000 years ago they had established themselves on the Northern Peninsula and within a millennium their campsites are to be found virtually around the entire Newfoundland coastline.”
          2. Intermediate Period peoples [3800 to 1400 B.P or 3000-2500 B.P., e.g. Northern Peninsula]
          3. Pre-Inuit Peoples/Traditions [Paleo Inuit aka Paleoeskimo]
            1. Early Paleo Inuit Period, Groswater Pre-Inuit People [2800 to around 1900 years ago or ~3000 BP -~1800 B.P. or 2800-2100 B.P.]
            2. Late Paleo Inuit Period, Middle Dorset Pre-Inuit People (e.g. ca. 2000 to 800 years ago or 2600-1800 BP or 1900-1100 B.P.]
          4. Recent Period Peoples/Traditions
            1. Cow Head Complex Recent Period (ca. ~2000-1000 years ago or 1900-1000 B.P.)
            2. Early Newfoundland Recent Period Culture (originally defined as Beaches Complex ~2000-1000 years ago or ~1900-800 BP) [ancestors of the Little Passage People culture]
            3. Late Newfoundland Recent Period Culture (originally defined as Little Passage Complex 1000 years ago to European contact or ~800 BP-European Contact) [ancestors of Beothuk culture]
          5. Historic Period Peoples/Cultures
            1. Beothuk [no explicit name for their land is found in available records, but using recorded Beothuk vocabulary I might speculatively suggest, e.g. Mammasheek (‘island/s’) or Gauzewook (‘mainland’)]
            2. Mi’kmaq/Ilnui [“Mi’Kima’ki: The original Mi’kmaq territory, encompassing the Maritimes, the island of Newfoundland, Northern Maine, and the Gaspe Peninsula.” K’taqmquk (‘across the waters’), refers to the island, with specific names for its regions/settlements, but not for the area today occupied by St. John’s. Ilnui likely arrived from Epekw’itk (PEI) and Mi’kma’ki-Unama’ki(k) (NS-Cape Breton)]
          6. European Peoples/Cultures
            1. Norse [Vinland (‘wine land’)]
            2. Portuguese & French/Latin [Terra Nova (‘new land’)]
            3. English: [Newfoundland]
            4. Irish: [Talamh an Éisc (‘land of the fish’)]

Sources:

TOXIC DEPENDENCE & COMPASSIONATE CONSUMPTION

My virtual and physical lives, past and current, depend on materials and transportation of materials, that are toxic.

Food, clothing, and tools —almost nothing is produced by me or ‘locally’.

Things i make and servers that store my avatars, and all the technologies used in the creation and maintenance of virtual manifestations: involve toxic pollutants in their fabrication, transportation, degradation-disposal, and replacement.

Toxic pollutants i use go into the land, water, and air, including into all those organisms who eat, drink, and breathe.

Each word, each letter and pixel, an infectious byte.

It doesn’t matter I use old recycled devices. Where will these toxic elements be one, two, three… hundred years from here?

What is the honourable and dignified solution to toxic circles underpinning my work and its dissemination?

What is compassionate consumption …and existence?

HISTORY, COLONIALISM, DIASPORA, GENOCIDE

Twenty years before I was born —and ten years before the country officially expelled its remaining population of Jewish survivors— my maternal line left Poland …after surviving the Holocaust and centuries of pogroms. Their properties and assets stolen.
Stateless Jews, their only option a recently formed state of Israel, which unfavourable as it seemed to my grandmother, avoided my grandfather’s continued incarceration and torture by communists.
Israel was nonetheless a return to a land after having been in diaspora for over a millennia —a diaspora caused by Roman colonisation of the Jews and their indigenous land. There, my paternal line had already returned generations earlier. But after meeting and starting a family in midst of wars, my parents took my brother and left Israel with hope for a more peaceful land.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT, GENOCIDE, GRATITUDE, DEBT

The indigenous peoples on whose lands i’ve grown up knowing peace and opportunity, continue to suffer greatly. Many indigenous communities lack basic needs (clean water, food, and dignity of land and language practices), due to exploitation, assimilation, and genocide committed by past and present settlers and their established system —perpetuated today by all who wish to survive and thrive.

The peace and opportunities i continue to benefit from… on sacrifices of my own ancestors, and at the expense of sovereignty and dignified living of descendents of earlier inhabitants–custodians of all these physical lands i exist on…

How is wrong righted, debt paid, gratitude communicated?