Wednesday January 8, 2020

I sit in my living room admiring this beautiful, brand new human who, according to a scale, has already grown a whole pound larger since last her pediatrician weighed her. By afternoon the sun has moved us outdoors. I honor mothers and mammalian and marsupial kin by carrying her in a front-facing pouch as I stroll through the neighborhood, talking with Sarah about a Nick Estes book that we’re reading together: a history of Indigenous resistance called Our History Is The Future. As readers we find ourselves wondering: How do we join the resistance to settler-colonialism so as to lessen the latter’s hold on lands, peoples, and nations? Perhaps I can begin by rethinking Hippie Modernist art, literature, and culture in light of Indigenous resistance movements of the 60s and 70s like Red Power and AIM. Rewatch counterculture westerns, movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Little Big Man, and Midnight Cowboy. Watch, too, as F. lies on a couch listening to songs from Jeremy Steig’s Howlin’ for Judy, Karen Dalton’s “Reason to Believe,” Amen Dunes’s “Lonely Richard,” and Jessica Pratt’s “Moon Dude.”