Weaving Academic Home: Metaphor,Insurgent Culture,and Transnational Indigeneity

Abstract

I use theories encoded in the metaphors and proverbs of my foremothers’ insurgent siinqee culture to tell the story of my struggles in weaving an academic home for my oxymoron transnational indigeneity. I start by positioning myself and my autoethnography. I then use basket-weaving as a metaphor to story the siinqee epistemology and methodology that guide me in the constitutive processes of making home in academia. I slip in and out of times and spaces to share with you the woven stories of my weeping basket, hurting basket, and healing basket.

Twigs and Feathers

Welcome to my transnational autoethnography. Please come in and walk with me through these rugged terrains of my struggle to create an academic home. Imagine a bird building its nest, twig by twig, straw by straw, feather by feather. For me, home doesn’t just fall from the sky. It is created through a labor of love and care, but it is also a space of struggles and contestations. As a transnational bird fluttering between multiple nations, I pick a twig from here and a feather from there to weave my academic home. But I am also a wounded bird. I came to Canada hurting and flapping on broken wings. My refugee landing paper said I was stateless. That was 1991. I just escaped ten years of imprisonment and torture in my homeland, Ethiopia.

My broken wings still bleed from the historical wounds of my Oromo ancestors, a people broken by colonial violence and incorporated into Ethiopia. My broken wings bear the name of gadaa, my ancestors’ broken Indigenous egalitarian self-governance system. My broken wings bear the name of siinqee, my foremothers’ broken Indigenous institution of the empathy and solidarity once woven into the checks and balances of gadaa egalitarianism. Being an Oromo from multinational Ethiopia, and now a citizen of Canada, positions me as a transnational bird fluttering between multiple nations, nation-states, and nations-without-states.

My wings are broken by many layers of oppression: as an Oromo in the brutal silencing of national oppression in Ethiopia, as a woman in the brutal silencing of gender oppression in the Oromo anticolonial national liberation struggle, and as a racialized citizen in Canada, to name just a few. Ironically, my broken wings are also soothed by my struggles against the many layers of oppression that broke them in the first place. Far from innocent, this brokenness is a space of struggles and contestations. In weaving my academic home, every feather of vulnerability and victimization is scaffolded by a twig of power and agency. My broken wings seamlessly interweave histories and biographies. They bear witness to my transgressive practices.

My autoethnography is a sacred space. I enter here bowing my head to honor my ancestors’ ways of knowing, the lens through which I experience the world. I draw from their deep wells to soothe my broken wings. I reclaim and rework my foremothers’ siinqee. I follow them in blurring the boundary between methodology and epistemology. Specifically, I acknowledge my Akkoo (Grandma). My autoethnography is a specific strategy of storytelling that I learned from Akkoo, a tradition she learned from many generations of grandmothers before her. Her storytelling mends my broken wings by seamlessly weaving together the individual and the collective, the biographical and the historical, the spiritual and the material, the personal and the political, the now-then temporalities, and the here-there spatialities (Ahmed, 2004; Kumsa, 2013).

I also acknowledge drawing on many others. As you will see, my autoethnography is activist (Gale & Wyatt, 2018), decolonizing (Chawla & Atay, 2018; Bhattacharya, 2016, 2018), performative (Upshaw, 2017), experimental (Marcus, 2007), interpretive (Denzin, 2013), and evocative (Ellis, 1999). However, it is not reducible to any one of these; please don’t pigeonhole it. I offer it with a focus on social justice and creating possibilities of change. My use of Oromo language and proverbs, as you will see in italics, is to validate and lift my ancestors’ theories and ways of knowing from the ruins of colonialism and progress. Weaving this peculiar tapestry of transnational subjectivity and siinqee indigeneity is my contribution to the call for decolonizing autoethnography (Atay, 2018; Chawla & Atay, 2018; Bhattacharya, 2016, 2018).

I must give you some caveats, however. Neither claiming transnational indigeneity nor weaving academic home is innocent. These are transgressive practices woven into the tangled webs of global and local relations of power and vulnerability. I am not a stateless refugee anymore. I am a settler on a land stolen from other Indigenous nations. That aligns me with the Canadian settler colonial state while I also deeply identify with the Indigenous peoples of this land simultaneously. My desire for academic home is a desire for privilege. My decolonizing methodology is a colonizing practice simultaneously. These caveats off my chest, I will now share with you my struggles of weaving an academic home.

Basket-Weaving as Research?

The ivory tower of academe is chilly even in the sizzling heat of summer, a lonely place even amid cheering colleagues. But Akkoo warms my heart and keeps me company. She reaches from across times and spaces and embraces me. She puts a smile on my face at the depth of my ongoing academic sorrow. She gifts me with the baskets of her foremothers.

The lofty colonial tower I’m in casts its long ugly shadow on my foremothers, but I get glimpses of them through drifting patches of cloud. Now I see them; now I don’t. Here they come into sharp relief. In that distinct African sun, I see Oromo women weaving baskets. They weave many kinds using reeds, grass, bamboo, false banana leaves, and creepers. They gather their materials meticulously. Hush! This is not data gathering! They split reeds into fine fibers, dye them in different colors, and sort them into various hues, textures, and grades of flexibility and fineness. Shush, this is not data analysis! They weave different baskets for different purposes and share their unique creativities with others. This is primitive. It’s not scientific research or dissemination! Nor is it the production and mobilization of knowledge.

Like other Indigenous peoples (Absolon, 2011; Lugones, 2010; Smith, 1999), my foremothers are engaged in a fertile process of creating and being created at the same time. Basket-weaving is a mutually transformative process where both baskets and weavers are altered (Boas, 1955; Ingold, 2009). With every stitch they make, every fiber they bend, and every loop they pull tight, they weave together the past and the future, the here and there, the individual and the collective. They bring to life something new and age old at once. As they weave their baskets, they weave their lives and livelihoods. If this is not research, what is?

In a cosmological sense, my foremothers are also weaving home. Like the reeds of their baskets, they form the backbones of communities though they don’t belong to any community, ironically. You see, females are halagaa [strangers] in their own communities. As girls, they are halagaa because they would be given away in marriage. As married women, they are halagaa because they are from elsewhere. From this in-between space of halagaa liminality, they weave together the disparate communities of males and create home out of their own homelessness. In Oromo cosmology, such spaces of liminality are spiritual spaces closest to Waaqa [God]. Flowing between communities without belonging to them, women become a floating glue that holds together everyone. This parallels the floating cosmic glue of safuu, the deeply desired egalitarian checks and balances of Waaqa. As closest to Waaqa, women consider it their sacred duty to nurture and protect the egalitarian checks and balances of safuu.

Embracing Akkoo’s gift of baskets, then, I flutter in the liminal space of halagaa transnationality in-between nations. Like my foremothers, not belonging to this or that nation, I weave together my home from the liminality of homelessness between the disparate nations. I love metaphors; they are my gifts from Akkoo. Remember I used twigs and feathers to symbolize power and vulnerability in home-weaving. Here, I draw on Akkoo’s basket-weaving metaphor to signify a distinct research approach. As a way of decolonizing my academic home, I weave together my foremothers’ siinqee epistemology and basket-weaving methodology to glean three basic principles: relationality, solidarity, and not knowing. To elaborate these principles, I share with you three home-making baskets that I wove from selected reeds of my life, reeds I split into fine fibers, dyed, and sorted into colors.

Elaborating relationality, Weeping Basket stories the relational context of transnational indigeneity and the inseparable entanglement of academe and nation-states. Hurting Basket delves into the everydayness of academic suffering and elaborates on the principle of solidarity. Healing Basket stories my pursuits of safuu healing and elaborates on the centrality of not knowing. Here, take them all please. They are for your critical engagement.

Weeping Basket

Migirri lagaa gubannaan gingilchaan golaa boosse [when reeds are burned in the valley, baskets weep in the kitchen]. In this Oromo proverb, migira is a special type of reed. Its natural habitat is the valley. Gingilchaa is a special type of basket woven from migira for the functions of sieving, sifting, and filtering. Its place is in the warmth of the kitchen. If beautifully decorated, it doubles as a décor and is hung on the wall. Despite the warmth and comfort of home, however, gingilchaa weeps when its migira kith and kin are burned in the valley. It feels deep kinship and empathy.

***

Academe keeps me running day and night. I’m a subversive educator (Kumsa, 2015b) on the run. Academic gatekeepers are chasing me with canines, sniffing my footsteps, hounding me. They are after the Akkoo I embody. I throw some bones at them and run as the canines fight over their catch. I grab a precious moment to revive my embodied Akkoo. Soon they catch up with me. No, academe is never satisfied. The greedy beast doesn’t know when it’s full. The more I feed it, the more it demands. It consumes the whole of me. In the belly of the beast, life means jumping from deadline to deadline. I haven’t signed up my life for this at all. So, I work to subvert it, tapping into my own resources and burning my candle from both ends.

I’m out of breath. I’m tired. I’m going to miss my deadline. I can’t think; my brain freezes; my back hurts; my eyes burn; my feet swell; my head throbs. Academe is not just getting under my skin; its colonial violence is also eating into the core of my embodied Akkoo spirit. I’m depleted. Shouldn’t it get better after all these years? I’m haunted by what my Black colleagues say: we must work twice as hard to get half as far. I refuse! It’s far into the night already. Deadline or not, I’m taking my aging aching body to bed and close these tired eyes to catch a few hours of sleep. The aromatic candle I kept burning to reduce stress gives its last breath and flickers out. It’s about time I went to bed.

But wait! Ring! The phone rings in the wee hours. It can’t be from this part of the world. It’s from distant time zones. It’s daybreak in Oromia, Ethiopia. Folks are just waking up. Oh, how I dread these calls! They rarely bring good news these days. I pick up the phone, hang up, and call right back to save them some money. Dreadful news of my homeland comes pouring in. A friend is just murdered. A loved one just got arrested and tortured. Militias just gang-raped the elderly mother of a dissident. Soldiers just broke into university dormitories, raping and murdering students. The distant voice cries softly and fades into desperate whispers, asking me daunting haunting questions: you are the ones we have out there. Do something, anything! Tell the world. What about the international community? Our people are dying off like flies. Aren’t we human? What about Amnesty International? Human Rights Watch?

Tears stream down my cheeks. Like the weeping basket, I weep for my kith and kin. My wounds are reopened, my trauma relived. So, starts my new day in the middle of the night in my double-day transnational life. So, come the cries of another world. I stay up far into the morning. Colleagues receiving my emails in the wee hours assume: Do you have trouble sleeping? They don’t get it. No, I have no sleep issue at all! I sleep the moment my head touches my pillow. I just can’t get my head to meet my pillow. Too many reeds burning out there. My Akkoo spirit is restless. I’m working incessantly. This violence must stop! Here again, my colleagues don’t get it. They assume that I’m playing the “white savior” and they taunt me: Surely, you’re not saving the world, are you? You’re not playing God, are you? You have the dream job that some would die and kill for. Relax! Enjoy your life!

Even my immigrant colleagues don’t understand why I bury myself in subversive work. It is home. I hide in it from the inseparable colonial violence of academe and nation-states. It soothes my twisting pains and churning aches. I find comfort even in its discomfort. It nurtures me even as it depletes me. It connects me to Akkoo, to my foremothers’ sacred duty of protecting safuu, to my people’s struggle for justice. In an unjust world of homelessness, my home can only be in ongoing struggles for justice (Kumsa, 2007). This dream job in the lofts of academe is an accident I bumped into along the way. It’s a survival space of self-preservation, a tentative toehold from which I weave home. It’s a means, not an end. I am not a walled-off individual who can simply enjoy life. I still live the deep relationality of my safuu collective “we” without collapsing my individuality into it.

You see, I may have left, but the colonial violence I fought in my homeland is still raging. I face a different face of colonization here too. So, my struggle continues, but the colonial violence I’m talking about is not just the harsh drumbeats of warring nations. It’s also the soft epistemic violence of academe that rob my foremothers of their safuu epistemological home. Epistemic war must be won first to declare a people primitive and rob them of their home. Academia is the institutional arm of nation-states. They are inseparably entangled.

***

As others lament (Bhattacharya, 2018), my own sense of home was also disrupted long before I crossed oceans to get here. Colonial violence made me homeless in my homeland. I am a perpetual refugee in all colonized spaces. I did not come seeking the land of milk and honey. I was torn away from one. Not all migrants seek home in the same way, and we must attend to the particularities of our contexts (Ahmed, 2000). I feel like a halagaa stranger, like a body out of place, only because the global family of nations territorialize home and identity and evoke deep desires for belonging (Ahmed, 2000; Ilcan, 2002; Malkki, 1992). By obscuring the processes through which this global family of nations becomes the natural order of things, nations and their academic institutions embody in us the reified system we take for granted.

Home is not something neat and given; it’s a messy process of making and remaking, (Atay, 2018; Bhattacharya, 2018; Kumsa, 2007). Furthermore, as Ahmed, (2000, 2004) argues, if home evokes a sense of comfort and safety, then home is also affective and affect is a relational process. This is much like safuu relationality. We cannot reach deep down and touch it in our bodies. Nor can we reach out and grab it from outside. Nor can anyone present it to us on a silver platter. Whether it is national or academic, home is a deeply emotional and mutual process we create through relationships, hence the powerful emotion of weeping baskets.

In Oromo cosmology, this highly emotional relationality of home is extended to all cosmic beings, living and non-living. It is expressed in the egalitarian caring relationships of safuu, as in the weeping basket and its empathy for kith and kin. In the broader home of safuu, this empathy and kinship is with humans, flora and fauna, and all layers of the environment. Safuu is in ongoing movement constantly settled, unsettled, and resettled (Kumsa, 2013). From Akkoo’s drumming of safuu into me, I know the comfort and safety of home is not a given. Home-making is an ongoing process, especially for girls. This message permeates proverbs, riddles, hearthfire stories, and children’s games. Home-weaving is an ongoing emotionally charged and relational journey between joy and sorrow. There is no transcendence where we overcome this wrestling and take a sigh of relief once and for all. It is like eating food. We can’t eat once and for all and exit from food forever. Home-making is an ongoing engagement.

Hurting Basket

Abbaan iyyatu, ollaan birmata [neighbors respond if one screams]. In this Oromo proverb, iyyata is a scream, a cry for help, and birmata is a response of empathy and solidarity. Both scream and solidarity are important because if you don’t cry out no one will know you’re hurting. Hurt is part of life. It signals ongoing disruption of safuu. How we respond to hurts determines whether safuu is restored or further disrupted. Here I weave my hurting basket to engage the concept of solidarity in siinqee epistemology. Siinqee is a stick a mother gives to her daughter on her wedding day. It symbolizes female ties and solidarity. A woman must raise her siinqee and scream if someone hurts her. It’s her sacred duty. Other women must also raise their siinqees and join the scream in solidarity. The siinqee scream signals the loss of safuu, and women deploy their sacred duty to restore the disrupted checks and balances. Safuu is restored when the collective soothes the hollering woman and redresses the injustice. As halagaa strangers in men’s communities, women stick together and society sanctions siinqee solidarity.

***

I’m not naïve. I didn’t come to academe expecting a bed of roses. It’s a colonial institution after all. I knew things would be hard. The ongoing disruption of safuu suggests that home is made through constant wrestling. What I didn’t anticipate is that every inch of my way would draw blood, sweat, and tears; that I would scream and not receive empathic solidarity. Speaking is not enough; I need to examine what blocks possibilities of hearing (Spivak, 1988).

I share my siinqee approach to decolonizing research with colleagues. I chatter breathlessly, passionately: It’s Indigenous, it’s critical, it’s reflexive, it’s transgressive, it’s relational, it screams for justice, it works through empathy and not knowing. “But that’s not African!” a colleague says, shattering my excitement. “Of course not!” I opt for precision: “It’s Oromo!” But Oromo is African! Did she think Africa is a village? It’s the heart of diversity for goodness’ sake! “You see what I mean?!” She grins. No, I don’t! I don’t see what you mean at all! What makes it OK for others to rob African knowledge and call it theirs? Why is it hard to accept when Africans reclaim their knowledge? Oh my god, I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean! “I really like the approach,” another colleague says, “it works for simple societies.” Oromos, who boast of inventing a complex egalitarian system are a simple society? I’m dumbfounded. Something tightens in my stomach. Fiery words wrestle to come out, but they die on my lips. “Did you see Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies?” offers another colleague, filling the awkward silence. I’m still too tongue-tied to respond vocally. Yes! Smith’s book is like my encyclopedia. But siinqee is a different Indigeneity. Do you not see the plurality in Smith? Just take a glance at her title, pleeeease: methodologies . . . Indigenous peoples!

More than what my colleagues say, what they leave unsaid hurts me deeply because that’s what blocks possibilities of hearing (Spivak, 1988) and prevents empathic response. More than withholding empathic response, this is an assault on my identities. My knowledge is automatic suspect (Atay, 2018). But this is not African! When did Africa crawl out of its primitive cave and produce this complex knowledge? . . . Yes, it makes sense but only for simple societies. Take it to Africa! You see, Africa conjures up fantastic imaginaries of human savages crawling on all fours with tails dangling between their legs (Fanon, 1967; Kumsa et al., 2014). But the affront on my siinqee epistemology unfolds yet another layer as its indigeneity is suspected too. To decolonize settler academy, I must be an authentic Indigenous person in my own homeland, so my colleague offers me the Indigenous methodology book he knows as authentic. My transgressive practice is neither settler nor Indigenous, and for him transnational indigeneity is an absurdity. I am an absurdity! I’m comfortable in the struggle of weaving together what colonial violence tears apart. This is home!

Cloaked in progressive critique, colonial violence is pervasive in academe. Who do I call on for solidarity? Some African colleagues are worse, thanks to the ugly colonial violence they embody. Some Oromos don’t get it even as they boast of embracing safuu. Some progressive colleagues tear me down to pieces daily. I get the constant message that I’m here for my skin color, not because I’ve earned the position. Even my picture posted on my institution’s website becomes a space of spewing colonial violence. You’re just their token Black face! I know I’m exoticized! I’m that weeping basket hung on the wall for décor. I know making my skin color visible invisiblizes my racialization simultaneously. It’s exclusion by inclusion. Enraged, I pick up the phone to have my picture removed. It’s busy. I storm out of my office to speak with a colleague. She’s not in her office. Frustrated, I come back and throw myself into my chair. These brisk body movements calm me down. I reread the inspiring emails I saved for such moments. The heart-warming words of those who saw me on the website soothe my gut-wound. If my décor-presence inspires marginalized groups, I won’t take me down.

But the battering is relentless. “When are you leaving?” colleagues ask about my retirement. I fill in the unsaid: I can’t wait to see your back! I’m sick and tired of your critique. Your very presence here is a critique. I don’t feel comfortable around you. Academe is squeezing me out, as if it has accommodated me in the first place. It has chewed and sucked me dry; now it’s spitting me out. I make colleagues uncomfortable. I puncture their colonial safety, like I do mine. I unsettle their settled beliefs and invite them to do the same for me. Where home is contested, critical engagement is my way of making home. So, when do you leave? Soon. In the meantime, I hurry to nurture siinqee in my work. My footprints of Akkoo’s subversive insurgent refusals are strewn all along my path. My foremothers’ foods and drinks, objects and crafts, ancient lyrics and proverbs, songs and dances litter the spaces of my research, meetings, and classrooms. My siinqee epistemology doesn’t attract big research funding or big publishers, but, thanks to community publishing, I see younger academics catching the fire. I’m fired up.

***

Although academe purports to be a market place of ideas and a place of critique, folks don’t find my siinqee critique palatable. Palatability is a matter of embodied taste (Bourdieu, 1987), embodied colonial violence in this case. My colleagues have good taste for offering critique but not for receiving one and they hang me out to dry. This is a very lonely place. Others have unpacked romanticized desires for academic home and shared their lived experiences of colonial violence in academe (Ahmed, 2000; Atay, 2018; Bhattacharya, 2016, 2018; Kumsa et al., 2014). Racialized academics (Kumsa, 2013, 2015; Dei, 2010; Harper, 2012) have extended the inseparable intertwining of colonial and racial violence that Fanon (1967) passionately articulated long ago. My experiences are validated; stories are told, but what blocks possibilities of responding? I mean my stories to evoke your response (Ellis, 1999). This is precisely the point of siinqee scream. Both the scream and the response are important in decolonizing home and restoring disrupted safuu. Academe is hurting. I’m crying out. Will you listen? Will you come out and join the scream in solidarity?

Healing Basket

Abbaan of hin argu, dhakaan of hin darbu [self cannot see itself, pebble cannot throw itself]. This Oromo proverb is at the heart of siinqee epistemology. In its philosophical roots, it questions the knowability of things in general and zooms in on the unknowability of self. To weave my healing basket here, I stay with the unknowability of self. Just as dhakaa [pebble] cannot pick up and throw itself, we cannot look inside and know ourselves. This is another teaching that Akkoo kept drumming into me from my tender years. Our eyes are cut open to look outward; we need others’ eyes to see ourselves. This underscores relationality and the absolute necessity of others for any possibility of self-knowledge.

***

I’m learning how to heal. By healing I mean creating a home of justice and liberation. I mean freedom from all forms of oppression that inflict deep gut-wounds and soul-wounds (Kumsa, 2013, 2015a). At the core of my learning is the mantra Akkoo embodied in me: When you point your index finger, remember the three fingers pointing back to you. It’s a common adage she repeated umpteen times to help me see myself through others’ eyes. I realized its healing power only after suffering deep gut-wounds and soul-wounds. It’s important to point my index outward and call attention to injustice. To weave my healing home, however, it is equally important to follow the three fingers pointing back and attend to the injustices I perpetuate unknowingly. I cannot heal while holding on to the suffering others cause me without also healing from the colonial violence I embody and the suffering I cause others (Goltz, 2011).

Colonial violence comes in many layers forming the basis of global capitalist system. It fosters White supremacy, class privilege, male domination, heteronormativity, and myriad other forms of privilege and marginality. I embody all these norms of violence. Their normative threads are woven into the fabric of my identities and subjectivities. I cannot isolate one form of oppression and highlight only my own suffering because they are all inseparably tangled (Goltz, 2011). Nor can I offer not knowing as my alibi even with the unknowability of self. It is my response-ability to account for the processes of my becoming. If my embodied ableism, classism, racism, and heteronormativity are hidden under societal norms, it is my response-ability to make visible how I perpetuate these forms of violence. Indeed, failing to do this is committing ethical violence (Ahmed, 2000; Butler, 2005). Examining the three fingers pointing back is my intentional strategy to attend to the unintentional suffering I cause others. Moving forward, weaving a healing home is not a personal achievement but a relational process linking individual and collective, now and then, here and there. So, my transnational indigeneity is only one strand of this complexity.

The earliest colonial violence I re-member committing was against Akkoo, the very person I loved dearly. Akkoo held on to her Indigeneity and did “weird” things even as people disparaged her. She spoke with plants and animals; she knew their ways. They were her kith and kin. She knew herbal medicines, she spoke with birds, and she fed fresh churned butter to snakes from her palm. I never saw Akkoo feed snakes, though as a child I conspired with my peers to catch her red-handed and shame her. How cruel! Snakes were sacred before Christianity taught us otherwise. Oh, how I hated snakes! To this day, goosebumps sweep over me at the very thought of snakes. The thought of Akkoo feeding snakes makes me shudder. The person I loved is twined with the thing I hated. Folks whispered that she was devil-worshiper and we all taunted her. We made her homeless in her own home and stranger in her own land (Kumsa, 2011).

What goes around comes around. It’s my turn to be taunted and tortured for who I am and what I represent. I got glimpses of Akkoo’s torture through my own torture in Ethiopian prisons. But Akkoo came for me to prison through basket-weaving, the skill I learned when my privilege was ripped, and my humanity stripped. Basket-weaving came back to me as the return of colonial repression. In my years of privilege, as a true disciple of progress, I disavowed it as a backward practice of my savage foremothers. In prison, it came back to salvage me from the wreckage of progress and colonial violence. As I wove my baskets, I wove my tattered humanity back together throughout the ten long years of torment. Those baskets healed me and made me a new human; they created home in the profound homelessness of prison.

I also lived Akkoo’s homelessness through my own homelessness in exile. I learned that neither homes nor strangers exist separately because they can only be produced relationally (Ahmed, 2000). Guilt ripped through my heart like a lance as I lived Akkoo’s alienation and stranger-ness through my own stranger-ness (Kumsa, 2011). I cannot undo what I had done to Akkoo, but I’m researching and embracing her indigeneity to heal our soul-wounds.

***

I bring my research findings to my teaching. I sit content in the classroom while students write their reflexive journals on our class exercise: Eating Others from Elsewheres. I had cooked Akkoo’s favorite dish for the exercise. As we ate together, I shared the invisibility of my complicity in webs of power relations and my response-ability to make it visible through reflexive critique. I invited students to do the same by connecting the personal and political, the local and global. As students reflect, the delicious smell of my foremothers’ ancient herbs and spices wafts through the classroom and spills into the hallway. Akkoo’s feather weaves comfort into my academic nest. I’m home.

As another feather of comfort flies into my nest, a semblance of safuu is returning to my homeland. Discourses are shifting from hate and violence to love and peace. The unthinkable is happening! A new generation of courageous leaders is budding from the rotting repressive regime. It’s beginning to see itself through the eyes of the people it has terrorized for decades. The regime is apologizing to the people for state terrorism! It is inviting back those it banished as terrorists. The possibility of returning to my homeland fills my heart with joy even as I passionately critique the very notion of home and homeland. There is injustice in being torn away from my imagined home and left on the wayside to bleed. These feathers from my homeland heal the soul-wounds Canada inflicts and moderate my demands on this land of my citizenship. So, I voted in Ontario provincial elections this June. The last time I voted was in 1995 when I just became a Canadian citizen. That was also the year I applied for family reunification with my husband. After 23 long years of colonial violence, I am still waiting to be reunited. By voting now, after refusing for 23 years, I am letting go of the pain of separation. I’m weaving my healing home between the hopelessness of reunification here and the hopefulness of return to my homeland.

The year 1995 also marks Quebec’s sovereignty referendum. The comfort of Akkoo’s feather came for me when the nation’s broadcaster commissioned me to write a commentary. The assumption was that all migrants would take Canada’s side. I begged to differ. I titled my commentary: when two elephants fight, I hurt with the grass. For me, both English Canada and French Canada are colonial powers vying for dominance. I hurt with those hurting in Indigenous communities. My commentary was not aired, although I received a handsome pay that felt like hush money. I listened to the show. The aired commentaries took Canada’s side. No, there is no censorship here! This is the land of free expression. I may not have disrupted colonial violence, but I have wept with the hurting grass and Akkoo has soothed my transnational indigeneity.

My academic nest has other feathers of comfort. Once, I took my research findings to an academic conference and performed Akkoo’s songs as a call-and-response with the audience. The place erupted into songs and Akkoo reverberated through the conference hall, decolonizing the space. In another community research, a young woman came up with ciicoo, a kind of Akkoo’s baskets, to use as a tool for data generation and triggered excitement in the research team! Siinqee methodology is taking wings. With the younger generation budding in academe and leading in my homeland, I will happily retire into supportive roles in our ongoing collective struggle for safuu.

My weeping basket, my hurting basket, and my healing basket are all assembled in my academic nest to soothe my gut-wounds of colonial violence. The sturdy twigs of my nest hurt even as they protect me, but some feathers from Akkoo’s spirit make it comfortable.

Thank you for walking with me. Now that you’ve heard my stories, do you see points of connection and solidarity for possibilities of change? If so, do let me know please.