Thursday January 23, 2020

I attended school in my late teens and early twenties — my undergraduate and early graduate years — in upstate New York in the city of Syracuse — and yet never in that time did I become knowledgeable about my Indigenous neighbors, the Onondaga Nation. They refuse to participate in the US Census, refusing to be made “knowledgeable” in that sense, available for apprehension as an object by census-takers, makers of imperial knowledge. They shield themselves from imperial eyes. How does it work? Are borders maintained with police? Is there a system of entrance and exit? Where am I, if not in the world where all of that is happening? How do I become an ally? Are there language barriers? How am I only just now arriving to these questions? A change must have occurred in the way I think. The Onondaga people live on 35 square miles of land one mile north of Syracuse. They base their lifeways on lunar cycles. They treat animals and bodies of water as kin. Are there ways for others to learn their language?