There Is a River in Me

Theory from Life

Dian Million

the desire is there
to catch it
knowing that i cannot;
the water flowing
rising up, falling
through
until
flying through my fingers
it goes back in
is gone
the moment ...

The difficulty and the difference between the usual social historian and me might be my unwillingness to distinguish one suffering from another. Even though I know intellectually that the agony of the child in (name community) now is not the same experience as the child raised forty years ago in the confines of (name a residential school), I cannot shake the feeling of déjà vu. I feel a desire to feel/link these experiences that is stronger than any knowledge I might have of the value of their historical "specificity."

In Native way, these are experiences already related by an archipelago of stories, the ones that we tell among ourselves outside academia. That I find these stories a useful form of knowledge sets me apart from many of my academic colleagues. Thus, I find causal agency between certain acts and others that academia will not legitimate. In my gut I know that when our articulation has centered on a "something that has happened," it has been necessary to establish our sanity, because what is really happening is too big, and we know that too. The stories, unlike data, contain the affective legacy of our experiences. They are a felt knowledge that accumulates and becomes a force that empowers stories that are otherwise separate to become a focus, a potential for movement.

Each Canadian residential school survivor's testimony is now a part of something bigger than its own witness. Each testimony carried the emotionally laden affective force to transcend the individual's experience. That affective force made it necessary that these stories become a collective story told across the lands—in poetry, in memoir, and in our new oral medium, the documentary. While there are differences between the personal story and the collective stories we tell, I believe that it was and is necessary for Indigenous peoples in North America to make new ways of seeing ascendant, to move to shape the endless spin of the discourses in play, to act in a now to change the order.

So, what do we know that we might act from? We are living in a time when the most vulnerable die (this includes many, many life-forms), a worldwide experience that affects our vital relations with life itself. There is a struggle against the capitalization, the commoditization of life even as it is happening. And because I am a scholar, and in particular an Indigenous scholar, I must act in the present to establish links; I am inhabited by the ghosts of my dead and my devoured and subjectively I cannot ignore them, nor will they be ignored. As an Athabascan woman I know we live in a world filled with spirit and what I do will matter. I look for lessons on haunting. Our collective history-filled space here is not a void as Avery Gordon once told us; the space is filled with the emotional resonance of our actions in this place, subsumed when power moves to crush voice, imagination, and spirit: "To look for lessons about haunting when there are thousands of ghosts; when entire societies become haunted by terrible deeds that are systematically occurring and are simultaneously denied by every public organ of governance and communication[,] ... when the whole situation cries out for clearly distinguishing between truth and lies, between what is known and what is unknown, between the real and the unthinkable and yet that is precisely what is impossible."

In this chapter, I reiterate a position about the worth of our lives, our Indigenous lives as the stuff of theory. I interweave the idea of the affective life force that runs through us (in a poem) with several moments or instances of thought about what theory is and why we might have any investment in doing it. Theory, theorizing is, as I have argued in other places, a verb, an action. I think that theorizing is something that we do plainly every day, in any moment where we make a proposition about what is happening and why. I usually try to avoid prescription about how theory is done; I work in large suggestive brushstrokes about its action, to be suggestive about what the power of it is. If there are themes to my sections, they could be loosely described as follows: the power of our everyday stories, the theory of stories as theory, and Indigenism as theory.

For some years now I have been engaged in thinking about narratives, narrativity, and discourse, in particular a discourse that has great resonance across many Indian lives, the discourse, the collective conversation (argument) on residential schools in Canada and the United States. These are stories told about historical trauma, past and present victimization, and the search for a redemption in personal and community healing. These are not simple stories, since their telling transitions a high-stakes political composition of what is understood to be deeply personal experience. All people who were victimized as children who told their stories to adjudicate their perpetrators never told these stories in isolation from the larger meanings put on their experiences. Each First Nations community that produced survivors' stories as an indictment of a colonial system came into this discourse in a particular way. I am exceedingly aware that our stories, whether they are told from painful secrets in an AA meeting, as traditional oral performance, or those we tell each other in these academic settings, are powerful. They are powerful because they are engaged in the articulations that interpret who we are in the discursive relations of our times. We engage in questioning and reformulating those stories that account for the relations of power in our present. That is theorizing. It offers new experiential frames, in our case, often from our lives, from our own felt experience, from our stories, from our communities, from our languages. Most important,...