DB Graves > Recent Status Updates

Had no idea this was book 3, but here we go anyways!

If it was a monster of some kind, it was a monster that watched over me, and, at the very least, it had not devoured me yet.

"...Imagine in your literature courageously questioning and examining the values that allow the dehumanization of peoples through domination and the dispassionate nature of racism inherent in perpetuating such practices. ...Imagine interpreting for us your own people's thinking towards us, instead of interpreting for us, our thinking, our lives and our stories."
(Jeanette Armstrong, "Disempowerment" 143)

We reflect here on reconciliation as something that might be understood as "always beginning" rather than an end, and as an altered relation rather than a solution to be worked toward.

[We also have no history of colonialism.]
The reception of Harper's G20 [2009] statement underscores the persistent mythology of Canada's benevolence and innocence, and the proclivity for settler's to escape accountability. I began to develop (official denial) trade value in progress in late 2009 in response... its relatively low profile, and the general acceptance of the veracity of its claim...

Land emerges as an important recurring theme--one that exposes as disingenuous a supposedly "new" era of reconciliation.

Cree poet and scholar Neal McLeod says that the Cree word that refers to the experience of residential schools ê-kiskakwêyehk, which means "we wear it" (qtd. in Garneau 36). The phrase powerfully suggests the personal weight of residential school legacies. The idea that the experiences of colonialism are worn on the body echoes throughout this book...

Arts-based approaches to reconciliation are often touted as a positive step forward and are viewed favourably in narratives of "moving on" and "healing" in the name of a unified nation. The widely accepted truism that art heals suggest an affective process that does not not necessarily involve institutional change. Furthermore, it implies that art's function is to smooth over, to make whole rather than disrupt.

I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case.

The last time I'd had an arranged meeting with humans they kidnapped Mensah and blew me up, so. This could hardly be worse.

If you have love in your heart, the state is your enemy. If you have love in your heart, you're an enemy of the state. What in the world are you, are any of us, going to do about it?

If the state kills your father, the state is your enemy, if the state kills your children the state is your enemy, if the state kills your friends the state is your enemy, if the state kills your neighbors the state is your enemy, if the state kills strangers the state is your enemy, if the state kills, then the state is your enemy. The state kills. The state is your enemy.

The other designers told her they didn't want the government tracking them, then checked their email on their watches which were linked to their phone and monitored their heart rate and blood pressure.

...like we forgot we could do something about this, like we forget anything we don't turn into a holiday and remember only the signs and symbols of horror, like we forget each time we remember that it's not that we forget, it's that there are just too many tragedies, every week, forever and ever, and to remember them all would kill you. Your heart would break and stop beating and you'd die. So we forget.