Laurita Dianita

I have waited so long to write here about my travels to the Northwest Arctic villages of Buckland (Kaniq) and Noatak (Nautaaq) in January and travel to Georgia and Alabama in February because, being sort of a perfectionist, I want to write the perfect thing, but being an epidemiologist and adjunct faculty member and volunteer, I don’t have time to write the perfect thing. And what would the perfect thing be anyway? I am a visitor to both places and still know so little. So I will, instead, leave you with a few photos and these links to my Flickr collection from rural Alaska and The South. The photos on Flickr tell many stories through the captions.

Oscar took this picture of me as I was preparing for the trip to the Northwest Arctic region (Nunaqatigiich), where it had been -30 to -50 for the last month before we left. I didn’t end up using the goggles while there, in Buckland’s -35 or Noatak’s -48, but instead let my eyelashes turn white only a minute or two after going outside. I liked this feeling, and liked being able to see clearly. I also felt like Arctic Darth Vader with them and everything else on and I wanted to look as friendly as possible. Meeting people, conversing, gaining trust, forming relationships, finding out who you have in common, all these things were the basis of our work up there–and if mouth and nose are covered, I at least needed to show my eyes to do so.

The wolf parka, borrowed from our friend, Kiatcha, helped as well. It is so beautiful, rare, and warm a parka that many people came up to me and touched it, saying, “Aarigaa! What a parka!”  I would tell them how lucky I was to have been able to borrow it. One man hugged me because he was so happy for me to have this parka. As I told Kiatcha when I returned it, her parka is truly magical, and I feel blessed to have worn it.

Much of this talking and relationship-building happened indoors, of course, after we had stripped off a few of our layers. One of the most memorable conversations of the trip was with a woman we met in Buckland and her elder father. They told me and my colleagues about their reindeer herd and how every once in a while, the caribou will migrate through right by the herd, and some will stop and mate with their more domestic counterparts. The children of these couplings, the elder told us, are wilder than regular reindeer and harder to contain. This image of animals that blur the lines between domestic and wild—being a part of or leaving behind their herds—is one that I layered, in my head, with the white and sometimes pastel ice fog hanging over that beautiful, flat land of tundra and waterways. This image of animals and land and sky is one of the images that I most carry with me from this journey in Nunaqatigiich.

I miss it there. A lot.

I took this picture with my Holga. In it, I am on the rocks jutting out of the Chattahoochee River , between Alabama and Georgia, with our 3 and 1/2 year old niece, Lilly, teaching her how to hop from rock to rock, how to balance and climb and descend, how to trust her body and eyes. She was an avid and quick learner and it filled my heart up to see her move from fear to courage so quickly. I love the sponginess of young children’s brains and the adeptness and energy of their bodies. This capacity of theirs to absorb so much, however, is also what makes them so vulnerable, and I have been thinking a lot about this lately as I get more involved in the epidemiology of Adverse Childhood Experiences and health, and as I teach about determinants of health. Children, because they are so open to learning at this age, are also so vulnerable to the violence they see around them or experience, to poor eating habits, to a sedentary lifestyle, to television and computers, to neglect. These years are so important. I’m glad I can be a part of her life and take on the awesome role of auntie during these years, if only in little bursts or via Skype. I’m so happy I can do this with the young children in our community in Anchorage as well. I am so glad that when Oscar and I have children, we will have aunties and uncles—both biological and not—to watch over and teach them as well.

I dreamt about Stephen last night, my dearest friend from high school. He came to visit–back from the dead, but just for a little while, he said. In my dream, it seemed normal, but also very significant and powerful that he was allowed this quick visit with me. I cried as I hugged him and touched his face. He was back in the flesh, looking like his grinning, strawberry-blonde, 17-year-old self. He was wearing the red Bad Religion hoody that he always wore, the one I wear right now as I type this, the one I inherited, as an 18-year-old, after his suicide and have kept since to wear in my home.

Waking up from that dream was really hard. Today is really hard. While I am grateful for this dream visit (I haven’t had such a dream in years), I am also shocked by his presence, his absence. It’s been 11 years since his suicide, and most of my days go by just fine. We learn to cope with loss and have healthy lives. But today I am shaken, sad, vulnerable. I’ve been re-experiencing my grief all day. The wound is freshly re-opened and it feels like I’ve lost him yet again.

During the day, I couldn’t quite put words to this vulnerability that I was experiencing that made it hard to concentrate at work until that Adele song “Someone Like You” came on the radio and she sang:

“I had hoped you’d see my face and you’d be reminded

That for me it isn’t over.”

As tears poured down my cheeks I thought, “That’s it. Suicide is NEVER over.”

It’s never over for the survivors. Yes, it gets farther into the past, and  if we are allowed to grieve, then we can continue to live our lives well (and if we aren’t, then it has even more serious long-term consequences). But a dream like this makes us grieve all over again. Or another suicide in our community sets us back into hurt and guilt. Or a song transports us to a deep sadness, like the way “I See a Darkness” by Johnny Cash did for me two months ago when I first heard it.

Most importantly, suicide is never over because we can never ever have that person back.

I write this not just for my own processing. I write this to tell you, if you are considering suicide, to understand this fact of suicide. It may be quick to kill yourself, but the pain is never over for the rest of us. You leave great scars behind you that never quite close. Forever, there is someone missing who is supposed to be here. We always feel that absence. We always hurt from that absence. You are supposed to be here.

Please, if you are in pain, if you see no light in life, if you have been abused and mistreated and see no other way out, please call the suicide hotline (# below). Or please tell a counselor or teacher or friend and if they can’t get you help, tell someone else until you find someone who can. You do not deserve abuse and you do not deserve to die.

And to the friends, family, teachers, and counselors: Please ask. Notice that they are sad. Invite them, with compassion and a non-judgmental tone, to talk. Show them love. And please ask them if they are considering suicide. I wish so much that they had taught us this when we were in high school. I wish I had had some tools to keep Stephen alive. I wish our high school teachers had brought in suicide prevention experts after the first suicide in our school. Or, better, before it. Silence won’t keep your loved ones alive. TALK. ASK. Be there.

I keep hearing in my head Adele’s song:

“Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead.”

Love is supposed to hurt sometimes, but not like this. Never like this.

Resources:

Alaska Careline (Suicide Hotline): 1-877-266-HELP

National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-TALK

Jason Foundation

List of contacts and organizations prepared by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

For those of you in the Anchorage area or wherever KSKA comes in, on December 1st at 2 pm and 7 pm they will air a panel discussion on preventing youth suicide.

Bring “The Winter Bear,” a thoughtful, funny, and powerful play about preventing youth suicide (set in Interior Alaska) to your community: www.winterbearproject.com or look for “The Winter Bear Project” on facebook.

My husband, Oscar, and I recently combined our last names after getting married. Beyond the ordinary awkwardness of having to introduce myself by a new last name and sign with different letters, plus the burden of having to explain to confused people that, yes, my husband changed his name too, I also have to deal with my name changing colors.

My name used to be:

And now it’s:

This is a significant change. Those aren’t just the colored pencils I happened to choose. Those are the colored pencils that represent as closely as possible the colors that those names are. The names are those colors and there is nothing I can do to change that. This is because I have a condition called synestesia.

The word comes from the Greek “syn” (together) and aisthēsis (sensation or perception), referring to the crossing of multiple types of sensory information. Some people see music or smell touches, but the most common type is where people automatically assign colors to graphemes (written symbols such as letters or numbers). This is called grapheme -> color synesthesia. Some people project the colors; that is, they see them out in the world, while others just see them in their mind. I am off the latter type.

Growing up, the fact that every letter, number, and word had a color—an absolute, unchangeable color—seemed to me a useful and enjoyable fact of existence. It never occurred to me that this was unordinary or that in the medical literature I was known as a synesthete.

My alphabet:

I loved my systems and colors so much, having learned to use them for remembering words, visualizing numbers, and even teaching concepts to my third grade students, that I never felt the need to question where this came from. It wasn’t until I was 23 and visiting my then 8-year-old cousin, Keilee, that I learned that it was not universal. I was in the backseat of my auntie’s minivan as we drove through the desert, past the deep red sandstone of Red Rocks Park outside of Las Vegas. I picked up and read the back of Keilee’s book, Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass. It described, in dramatic terms, a girl who saw colors for all numbers and words. I thought, “What’s so dramatic about that? I do that…” and then it occurred to me to ask, “Wait, does this mean not everyone does that?”

For whatever reason, I didn’t revisit the thought again until I was 27, on a Spring Break climbing trip during graduate school with some classmates. Oddly enough, we were driving through Red Rocks Park after a day on the sandstone and our friend Becca was describing her synesthesia as a crossing of multiple senses, such that she sees music and sees colors for everything. I described to her my colors and she told me, “Yeah, that’s a mild form of synesthesia.” I was so excited to have a name for this experience, or condition, or, as I like to call it half-jokingly, superpower.

My good friend Virginia Speciale, a Special Ed & bilingual ed teacher, just finished reading Mango-Shaped Space and asked me to describe my synesthesia to her. This is more or less what I told her:

“I love it. The colors are absolute, meaning I can’t just willfully go and change them. Two is blue and there’s nothing I can do about that. Virginia is green because of the V and Speciale is yellow because of the S, although the reddish dark pink of the L sort of seeps through near the end. Ginna [her nickname], however, is light orangeish brown and Gina [her other nickname] is a slightly darker brown. I think this is because the N is a lighter and more orange brown than the G, so the double N in Ginna changes the color some. Shunashee [the nickname that only I call her] is very decisively yellow.

Usually the first letter decides the color of the word but some middle letters have an influence, especially green letters like K & V. W is also green, but it’s weaker & lighter and therefore does not exert the same influence. Oki [my husband’s nickname] is green, despite the white O starting the word, while Oscar is white and yellow.

Vowels are white, except Y. But y’know, Y plays for both teams, so that probably explains it.

As for numbers, usually I see the distinct color of each digit even in multi-digit numbers, and especially in dates (today is a very gray & blue set of numbers, but, to give a more interesting example, the Fourth of July next year will be yellow/orange/blue.) However, if I am thinking of periods of years, there is a dominant digit’s color that determines the color of the entire number. The 1900s are maroon. The 1800s are brick red. The 2000s are blue.

If I am thinking of precise years, the last digits’ colors show up. The 60’s, as a decade, are all green and the 70’s are all yellow and so on. If I think of a specific year, such as 1574, it’s 3 different colors (green, yellow and orange.) 2011 is blue and silver.”

I read recently that in addition to grapheme -> color synesthesia, that there is another type that describes the way I see: number form synesthesia. This is described on the Wikipedia page as “a mental map of numbers, which automatically and involuntarily appears whenever someone who experiences number-forms thinks of numbers.” I have always had a very useful and, indeed, involuntary way of organizing numbers visually in my head.

This drawing can’t really capture it, but it at least shows that numbers under 100 are as though under a roof; they are inside. The numbers climb up towards 100, segmented by the tens, each of which has its own color. I found this enormously helpful in arithmetic, and parts of it are certainly in line with the recommendation for kids to draw number lines and segment them by the tens. This is probably because synisthesia doesn’t exist in a vacuum; our brains make via visuals and colors out of the graphemes we learn in school. I learned to think about ones, tens, and hundreds, so I imagine my mental map was derived from my early mathematical education.

Similarly, I learned to first associate colors to English words. As I learned Spanish words, I began to associate colors to them. Unlike English, though, Spanish words usually reveal more of their colors to me. For example, tener is mainly blue, but for some reason that orange/brown N stands out. Pusiste is pink, yellow, blue, and white. English words are rarely so multi-colored. I wonder if this has to do with how late in life such associations were made, or the amount of consciousness I learned to have about the endings of Spanish words in order to conjugate verbs correctly or have adjectives agree with the noun or use the right gender.

I have no idea how this association-making would change if I began to learn Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, or Cantonese. I don’t remember what it was like to begin to associate a color to a brand new letter, and so I don’t know if it would happen as I learn a new alphabet or not. Nor do I know if synestetic children growing up with character-based written language have the same process of color association.

I actually know very little about the science of synesthesia. It’s just exciting to learn that other synesthetes (it’s fun to have a new label for myself)experience what I do, but in their own way. And, of course, a minority of synesthetes experience it in much more vivid and intense ways, with colors projected in front of them for music and words. Virginia, ever a Special Ed teacher, asked me to reflect on any ways in which it has hindered me academically. Honestly, I can’t think of any, and my mom told me yesterday that the reason she never looked into it or told me that it was unusual when I was a child was because it didn’t seem to cause me any problems.  However, I would be interested to hear if some forms of synesthesia can be debilitating. My experience of it is just useful and beautiful, and I hope I can pass it on to our future children.

When I met Rita Pitka Blumenstein for the first time last winter and she hugged me, I thought, “Oh. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is the hug I’ve been thinking about and needing for years.” And I knew that she knew that.

Background

For those of you who do not yet know her, Rita Pitka Blumenstein is a traditional healer, the first tribal doctor in the Alaska Native Health System, a midwife, an esteemed elder, a spiritual leader, and founding member of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. She is Yup’ik primarily, from Nelson Island, Alaska, but also part Athabscan, Aleut, Russian, and a smattering of other European backgrounds. She speaks, sings, and prays in Yup’ik, in the complex and deep understanding of the Yup’ik language that I am told only the elders still have. She is called around the world to pray for people, to lead ceremonies and songs, to heal people from diseases and injuries in the body, the mind and the soul. To heal, she uses her hands, plant medicines, talking and prayer.

Recently, she was invited to attend our Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault training for rural Behavioral Health Aides held in Fairbanks in order to provide prayers, songs, stories and guidance. Since I work with Rita and have had the honor of learning from her in the past, I had the even greater honor of spending nearly every waking hour of that week with her walking to restaurants, attending the training, preparing salad in her hotel room, making sure that the baggage handlers treat her drum well, etc. I feel bless to have learned so much from her in our time together and want to share with you, dear readers, some of the wisdom Rita offered me. I think I  also share this story of Rita because in writing it I reinforce what it meant to me on a deeply personal level in my own growth and becoming.

Two important notes

1.)  I asked Rita if I was allowed to share her teachings with others on my blog and she said yes. She said she’s publishing them all into a book anyway, so they will become public soon. Furthermore, she sees it as her duty—as a spiritual person, as an elder, as a member of the 13 Grandmothers, and in her job at ANTHC, to teach—directly and through others, including non-Alaska Native others. She also consented to me using this photo that I took of her. If I have misunderstood or missquoted her, however, I apologize and will make changes if they come to my attention.

2.)  I am sharing her teachings because I think she has great insight into the world. It’s not because I claim she is speaking directly for God or Truth. I won’t join any religion because I can’t just believe whatever it is that its leaders or books tell me. But I am inspired and moved by what Rita has observed about the world, which is different than believing that it is the one and only truth. In fact, I don’t think Rita claims to have the one and only truth either. She works to heal the world; that is her priority.

Rita’s Teachings

The traditional word for creator in Yup’ik is ellam yua, which sounds something like “Chhhhamyua” though with a more g sound and throaty sound to the first consonant. As Rita explains it, the word means means “awareness of the universe.” The “yua” part refers to the person being aware, the Chhham part the universe—the dust that makes up life. It can be awareness of pain, awareness of all that is around us, awareness of that which can’t be seen, presence.

Rita begins prayers with a call to ellam yua and to agayuun. This is the idea of creator that is more the Christian idea–a creator or king that rules. Yuun means ownership, so all is owned by the creator.

She also calls out to the ancestors. As Rita explains, our ancestors are our bone marrow, our parents our bones. We are made up of them. As she wrote in a poem:

We are free to be who we are—
to create our own life
out of the past and out of the present.
We are our ancestors.
When we can heal ourselves,
we also heal our ancestors,
our grandmothers, our
grandfathers and our children.
When we heal ourselves, we heal mother earth.

Rita also includes “Mother Earth” in her prayers at times, both praying to the Earth and for the Earth. What it seems she is teaching us is that that we ask agayun—kin, ancestors—to be a part of our healing and blessing, and the healing we do affects them. Likewise, we pray to  the creator/awareness of the universe and to Mother Earth for wisdom and healing, and in healing ourselves we share that healing with the Earth and universe—perhaps because, as healed people, we take better care of the Earth.

Rita tells me a lot about her life story, of going from a rural village on Nelson Island to Montessori School in Seattle and staying there long enough so she could make sure to be able to write her dreams and visions (yes, she was having spiritual visions as a young child). She was then raised in Catholic schools and in a community with Russian Orthodoxy and Catholicism all around her. But her grandparents never converted and always practiced the old ways, and I imagine this is part of what made Rita’s connection to the faith traditions of her land and people so strong. She quotes her grandmother—and this is one of the best articulations I’ve ever heard of what I believe—who said, “I don’t understand why we would need to go worship God inside a building, facing only one direction, when there is the land and ocean and the four directions all around us.”

In conversation, Rita teaches me bits and pieces about the medicine wheel and the four directions. She tells me how the colors (gold, red, black and white) relate to the elements and how some believe that they relate to the continents of people. She told me that all journeys start in the East. The gift of the East is the ability to concentrate fully on what one is doing, the way that children can concentrate so fully on the object in their hands, the way that our mouse sister concentrates on her work. It is the gift of presence, of not being distracted by the past and the future. I tell her that I struggle with being present. She smiles with understanding.

To heal, Rita says, is to become ourselves, to become the light within. It is to accept ourselves and what we feel, and in doing so accept others. It is to be a real person.

Rita tells me that she loves me and trusts me to learn about healing, and that I have a good Native spirit. This is because I am a real person, she says, because I am not pretending, not fake, not closed, but selfless and real and open.  I tell her thank you, and that I don’t know how to be anything but open and anyone other than myself, but that I do struggle with accepting myself fully. She says that struggle is okay, and quotes the elders who mentored her, who said that it is okay that things are not okay, that I should just feel what I feel. What I suppose this means is that to be a real person, to be someone good for the world, you have to be open and giving, but you do not have to be perfect, you do not have to have arrived. Rita says she is always learning more about herself, always becoming herself more and more. And if Rita, at 78, is still in that process, that must mean that I’m okay.

I ask Rita what is the importance of faith, because it is not something I always have in abundance. She tells me:

“If you believe in yourself, you have faith.  Faith provides the courage to face the present with confidence and the future with expectancy.”

Rita also reminds me that faith and acceptance are not about accepting all behaviors or accepting injustices. Rita, like me, has always had a big mouth and has spoken up to people when they are being racist or cruel or unfair to women. She has always been unafraid to express her opinion and disagree. This is not antithetical to loving acceptance. In fact, it is crucial to creating a better, more healed world. This is why I can learn from this woman.

Rita tells me that childhood is the time for children to learn from the legends and stories of elders, and from the plants and animals and rocks and air, from all of life. Rita tells me about the wild vegetables they harvest:the lovage and Eskimo potatoes, the grass and horsetail roots. She tells me about the knikinik (labrador tea) they use for smudging and that the shamans (herself included) smoke in order to ground themselves after spiritual travelling. She tells me how to brine, dry and smoke salmon strips and how to boil down fireweed syrup. She tells me about plant medicines made from Devil’s Club and raspberry bushes and yarrow and birch. As I learn all this like a child, I think, “Yes, this should be in every child’s education. If it were, we would see so much less environmental devastation.”

We talk about childrearing and potty training (Rita potty trained her children after a few months by keeping them on her body and putting them on a little pot whenever they squirmed around like they needed to go). Rita tells me she is very excited for me to be a mother, that I will be a great one. I tell her I’ll be calling her up for advice on this potty-training-in-the-first-few-months practice.

Rita talks about race, cultural difference and colonization comfortably, neither shying away from its ugly history nor writing off all white people (after all, she was happily married to a Jewish man from New York for over half her life, until he passed). This is a good example for me of how to bring these conversations into groups where they don’t currently happen without triggering people’s defensiveness.

Moving Forward

If any of this resonates with you, you can follow the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers online (http://www.grandmotherscouncil.org/), read Rita’s book when she publishes it, or look for other opportunities around Alaska to learn from her or from other teachers of indigenous worldviews. If you have the chance, I highly recommend attending a presentation by my Cup’ik colleague, Uyuriukaraq Ulran, who speaks beautifully about Cup’ik worldview and ethics.  And certainly pay a visit to the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

Regardless of your faith tradition, I think it’s okay to be open to Rita’s teachings and to Alaska Native worldviews.  Rita’s idea of becoming yourself, of knowing yourself, is something heard in Buddhism and parts of most other world faiths. Her idea of thanking the universe for what we have and asking for blessings from the universe, kin, the Earth and the directions, is not unlike thanking God or Allah, in that it is an act of appreciation of all that is larger than us.  It is an act of prayer and thanks that is grounded in the land, water, air and fire, an act grounded in the preservation of this planet. In that way, it is particularly salient for our rapidly-changing world.

On a personal level, one powerful thing I take away from my week with Rita and from knowing her is a more firm sense of who I am. If I fail, if I feel desparate or sad or find myself making mistakes, I am now more likely to say, “I am a real person. And this is a struggle” rather than doubting my integrity and worth. This is a gift from Rita, as well as a gift from my best friend Jessica Laura who always helps reinforce to me who I am. It is a gift from my husband, Oscar, who always reminds me of why I am worth love, and a gift from my parents and friends who know me and believe in me. And we have to believe in ourselves (in a deep way, not in the way of the popular self-esteem movement) in order to move forward and do the work we must for the world.

I will end with Rita’s words  (paraphrased because I could not write fast enough for the exact quote):

“Some people dwell on their past lives to look for answers. But all we need to learn will be placed before us. Our job is to move forward.”

Post-script, December 6: Rita just gave me the proper spellings of ellam yua and agayuun, and a bit more clarification of those concepts, so now I have added this to the original post. The old version had my phonetic versions only, and a mishearing/misunderstanding about agayuun.

:

My wedding to mi querido amor, Oscar Avellaneda, is in 3 ½ weeks. In about 2 weeks I am officiating the wedding of my two good friends, Garret and Mystie. In light of these VERY serious events, I have been asking for relationship/marriage advice from everyone I know who has been happily married for a long time—my parents, colleagues, Garrett’s stepmom, my boss, whomever, and from those who are divorced as well. I also ask it of my best friend who has been with her wife for 6 happy years now. Here is some of the advice I’ve gotten:

1.) You are responsible for your happiness. Take care of your own happiness.

-everyone I’ve asked

My mom adds, “Your partner can only fulfil, I don’t know, maybe 50% of your needs. Of course they have to be the most important needs, and then there are some needs you can’t get outside of the marriage, like sex. But you have to find ways to fulfil your own needs. You have to take care of yourself.”

2.) Let your partner be him/herself and you be yourself.

– Connie at work, many more people

3.) “Commitment is what drives the engine, not love.”

-Garrett’s stepmom, Amy

4.) The secret to a good, long-lasting marriage? Hard work and every once in a while  a good therapist.

-my mom

5.) Don’t sweep things under the rug. They won’t go away; they will fester and grow.

-my mom

6.) Let your partner grow and learn their lessons at their own pace.

-Jessica Laura

6.) Touch each other a lot. Gentle, loving touch bonds people and diffuses anger.

-my dad

7.) You choose your partner to be your primary healer because there are some lessons and types of healing you can do only with them. There are lessons to be learned from the difficulties. Take the time and have the faith to learn them.

-Doris, our LCSW

8.) Have fun together.

-Doris & Oscar’s sister, Erika.

So, commitment and work.

Honesty and communication.

Patience and compassion.

Nurturing one another and yourself.

Acceptance. Acceptance. Acceptance.

I presume that’s why Jessica Laura and her wife Julia said, in their marriage vows, “I surrender myself to who you really are.” Because as hard as it can be, you have to be willing to do that, to truly accept, to surrender your hang-ups and fears to that true acceptance.

I am willing, but I will need the support of teachers and friends to know how to do that at all times. I guess that’s why we get married in communities of loved ones.

For that support, for this advice.

I am counting on your help, community.

Thank you for all you’ve already done.

And Oscar, I can’t wait. I am so excited.

I’ve been meaning to write, needing to think out some ideas thoroughly the way only writing can help me do, needing to share and dialogue. But I don’t know how to make time to write when…

• buying a house
• planning a wedding
• dealing with a torn something in my shoulder and an obdurate and dishonest insurance company
• planning somewhat regular presentations or speeches
• until recently studying for my MSW licensure

So I will make a list instead! (Always a more fun and less intimidating undertaking.)

List of things I want to write about (and/or talk to y’all about in person):

1.)  A research conference in Germany about Latin America, identity, and intersectionality, paid me to use one of my photos for their poster and conference materials! Super excited. And I have Flickr to thank.

2.)  How house buying seems to bring out the classist in us. (e.g. When you invest in a home, you want to think about resale value, and resale value depends on your neighbors, so if your neighbors have trashed-out cars in their yards…you get where this is going, right? We find ourselves in a position we never imagined ourselves in, with ideas we had scorned before now here in our palms…It’s an important thing for me to see, to better understand how disparities widen.)

3.)  Did you know that some guy named Satoshi Kanazawa who seemed to have miraculously landed himself a professorship at the University of London (lord knows how, since the man seems to have no concept of scientific rigor or even basic tenets of science) wrote an article that Psychology Today was dumb enough to publish on their Scientific Fundamentalis Blog the other day. The title of the article? “Why are Black Women Less Physically Attractive than Other Women?“ Hm. I thought we had put an end to eugenics being accepted in the scientific world. I…could go on here, at length, but the point was a list, not an essay, so I will direct you to one of many blogs about the “study”: http://www.theroot.com/buzz/black-women-are-less-attractive-oh-really

4.)  I want to talk about this concept that keeps coming up in my work examining health disparities in sexual and domestic violence, and keeps coming up in pop culture: this idea that some people, and most often, some women, are more “rapeable” than others. That is, in various eras of history (and today) social norms are created, often as a consequence of colonialism or slavery, that make people view forced or coerced sex against certain groups of women as more natural or inevitable or even justified. Therefore, victimization rates are higher and prosecution and conviction rates lower when someone rapes a woman from one of these groups.  Some of the things that have brought this up lately:

• The scene in the (1950’s?) musical “South Pacific” where the Lieutenant, who previously had his eyes on the Southern white woman but had kept his respectful distance, is  presented to the very young Polynesian teenage girl. They immediately have sex on the ground. He claims this is love. And all the other men go over to the island to have sex with the Islander women as well. All this sex with the “Natives” is seen as comical and light and romantic. Meanwhile, the courtship of the Southern white woman by the Frenchman is proceeding in an entirely different manner.

• When I was in Dillingham for a Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault training, I met a wonderful Yup’ik man working as a Behavioral Health Aide Practitioner in one of the surrounding villages. He told us stories about military training officers he met in college who would ask him, “Oh, is it true what they say about Native women, that you can give them a bottle of vodka and they’ll do the whole barracks?” He told us how his son in the Marines heard over and over again that soldiers were lucky to be stationed in Alaska because of what they can do with those Native women…And they seem to act on that encouragement. Both this Behavioral Health Aide Practicioner and Shirley Moses, the director of the Alaska Native Women’s Coalition, spoke to the incredible number of rapes and pregnancies, many of them drug and alcohol-related, caused by men from the barracks in Fairbanks. I imagine this dynamic exists from our military here in Anchorage too.  And not just the military, either. My friend Dena, who is Yup’ik and grew up in Bethel, was always sternly warned by her dad not to hang out with pilots because he had heard so much racist and sexist talk from them about Native women. We need good data on this issue and don’t have it yet.

• Wonderful forms of media: Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ powerful film “No! The Rape Documentary”; a radio interview with her, Marc Anthony Neal and others in which they talk about the way forced sex with Black women in the South was not considered rape—not only during slave years but well after them–; and Andrea Smith (Native American anti-violence activist and academic)’s book Conquest, in which she speaks of the US colonization of American Indian land and the way Indian women have, like their land and treaties, been seen as inherantly violable, an attitude reflected in the disproportionate rates of victimization of Native women and children).

5.)  How I get frustrated when I hear social scientists or social critics talk about health problems such as obesity, violence, lung cancer, etc. as being caused primarily or overwhelmingly by only one thing or the other.  Even after we get through the nonsense of those folks who claim that all disease—including social disease–is largely genetic, there seem to be divided camps within those who look at environmental factors. There are those who say it’s an individual’s experience of trauma, (for which there IS overwhelming evidence) and those who point to the larger societal messaging about food, body, smoking, gender, etc. and strucutral barriers, such as lack of safe exercise space or fresh veggies in urban centers, etc.–there’s also a lot of evidence for this.  I encounter people so often who concentrate or offer only one side of this, skipping by the other factors with an almost dismissive mention, if anything. My response is that, uh, it all matters. And not only does one causal factor add on to another, but they intersect in really powerful ways that I’d love to see explored more. I’d love to see more research on, for example, how experiences of trauma shapes one’s reactions to racist and sexist messaging in the media and fast food and alcohol advertising.  Can’t we combine these critical analyses and get somewhere deeper?

6.)  Unresponsive and disconnected institutions and people within the institutions that are supposed to help people but don’t buy into the basic tenet of asking and involving the people they are supposed to serve.  (I’m dealing with this from a particular Federal Government body right now at work. They seem to be very out of touch and non-participatory, very top-down.  This is not effective, especially when working with indigenous peoples who have very good reason to mistrust agencies of the Federal Government.)

So if you want to talk about one of these things or argue about one of these things, please, when you run into me, just start. These are conversations I want to have. Or write me (though I can’t promise I’ll be quick in responding, what with moving and the wedding coming up in a month and a half).

Partly from guilt but primarily from curiosity, I can’t travel without needing to learn about the places I go and learn from them. And since my learning is never as solid when it’s only bumping around in my head without being organized onto paper (or the blogosphere, as it were), I have felt some of that guilt creep in. I spent months this fall in Colombia with Oscar, living with his grandparents and getting to know his country and family, and I have not yet organized my thoughts into writing longer than my photo captions on Flickr. It is time to do so, but in the simplest format I can, in order to make the task less intimidating for myself: So here’s a list!

***But before reading it, I should tell you that I don’t think I or my culture or family or country or state or city are above the things I observed in Colombia. Many of the phenomena I observed there are similar to things that happen back home, and I try to relate them as much as possible. I also don’t think I am an expert, by any means. Some things I learned, but most things provoked questions about what’s left to learn***

Things I learned in Colombia (in no particular order):

1.) How to cook creatively with available ingredients

The challenge of not having a refrigerator and the blessing of having a large garden, tended to lovingly by Oscar’s abuelitos, pushed us to be more creative and resourceful than usual about what to cook (or me anyway; I think on the road Oscar acquired the ability to cook with whatever was available, no matter what). Therefore, many meals involved soups made from whatever we had to use before it went bad + whatever there was plenty of in the garden + what we could pick up at the corner store or farmer’s market and, on one occasion, the rabbit that Oscar and I hunted and skinned (it was delicious).

A few highlights:

• The coconut fish soup pictured above, made with fresh coconut that Oscar broke apart and dissembled & plenty of hot red chilies (ají, as they call them in Colombia) from the garden
• Cuminy spicy soup with acelga (a green leafy vegetable similar to bok choy) from the garden that we cooked with beef bone, cubios and chuguas
• Breakfasts of arepas de choclo (like fluffy sweet corn pancakes) with fresh farmer’s cheese, eggs, fried plantains and mangos

2.) To be careful when calling people on their racism

This isn’t the first time I’ve learned this lesson, but I certainly had an enlightening experience in Colombia of how not to go about it. The consequences weren’t dire, but it certainly gave me an opportunity to reflect on how self-control is key to effective social change.

The backstory is that we had been spending a bit of time with Oscar’s cousin, Juan José and his wife, Dinaluz. They work in advertising/commercial media and were some of the most educated and in some ways, curious and exploratory members of the family. However, we had also noticed that they would make offhand comments about “negros” or “maricas” (the constantly-used, both derogatory and “affectionate” term for gay men in Colombia). One day, after a long and somewhat frustrating day of biking, we spent a few hours in Oscar’s auntie’s house with them and others when I was exhausted and wanted to go home and sleep. His auntie fed us some delicious soup and we were finally preparing to go. Dinaluz, wanting to aplogize for her eating and dashing, said, “Indio comido, indio ido.” It roughly translates to, “Eating like an Indian, leaving like an Indian.” She turned to me after, smiling, and explained to me that this is an expression in Colombia and it means you are being very rude for eating quickly and going away. The fact that Indian/indigenous/Native was being associated with rudeness and lack of manners had not escaped me.

Now, in that split second in my head, I—righteously angry, empathetic, overly-sociological me—am going through my mental Rolodex of incidents of anti-indigenous racism I had seen or heard in Colombia, in México, in the continental US and Alaska and all of the ways in which anti-indigenous racism has been transformed into children’s songs and expressions or the “Cigarillos Piel Rojo” (“Redskin Cigarettes”) or “Land of Lakes Butter” logos and my role as a white ally in changing this and before I know it, I blurt out—sleepy, exhausted, frustrated, impulsive me—“Pero ésto es racisto.”

In that split second in my head, I should have asked myself for a time extension so I could have thought of a better way to get at this point, perhaps through asking questions and helping Dina to get there herself. But I didn’t, and I imagine that this made her put up some defenses. Her first defense was that it wasn’t about feather-on-the-head and [hand moving over mouth making stereotypical “indio” sound] indios; it was just about rude people. When I asked her why the word “indio” was used for rude, and then explained that I grew up hearing similar expressions such as “Indian giving” or “Indian cuts” or the “Ten Little Indians” songs, she conceded that the expression had something to do with indigenous people. But  I had not succeeded in making her enthusiastic about discussing white/mestizo privilege. Nor did it endear me to the new family.

We had a very different experience with Oscar’s auntie and cousins in Palmira, a small city in the state of Valle–maybe in part because I was on better behavior, maybe because they have been exposed to different people and experiences.  After we bought delicious boiled squash-like fruit from an AfroColombian woman on the street, Oscar’s cousin, Hadie, told us about the importance of this fruit to the largely AfroColombian and indigenous populations in the Pacific states who suffer high rates of poverty and even starvation. She spoke about racial disparities in a way that was reflective and critical, and spoke of wanting her niece to have an open mind about Black Colombians. Clearly, in Colombia just as in Alaska, despite the ubiquity of racist ideas or comments (and in Alaska, believe me, racism’s ubiquity shows when people spit out “drunk Native” like a slur, and if you’ve been around long enough it’s hard to avoid hearing this slur), people can come to think critically about it. Hadie did. Colombian human rights organizations do. So my task is to figure out what role can I play as an ally (and in this case, as an outsider First Worlder) to ask the right questions and provide the right information, to help people at least step back and look critically. I don’t know what that involves, exactly, but I know it involves patience, impulse control, and a few more seconds to think.

3.) What it’s like to have grandparents again.

Although it made me miss the elders in my life that I’ve lost, it was so beautiful to spend time with Oscar’s abuelitos (grandparents) and tías abuelas (great aunts). They have so much energy and knowledge and giant, generous, loving hearts.

4.) How much I love the combination of yellow and turquoise, & the complexity of development

I was drawn to these Aqueducto workers initially because of their turquoise-colored jumpsuits and the beautiful yellow rainboots and hats they wear. I was also fascinated by what they represented about the Bogotá government’s efforts to make the city more efficient and beautiful and to provide jobs. In some ways, the investments made by the government are great for the people (potable water, expanded & modern public transportation, bike lanes everywhere). But in some cases, development investments seem to favor the wealthy and shut out the vast majority of Colombians who work exceedingly long hours and make, on average, only four or so hundred dollars a month. Development of malls, cineplexes, and fancy restaurants may provide jobs, but they also seem to increase consumption without a proportionate increase in salaries for most workers. (Two notable exceptions are the local, pricey franchises Bogota Beer Company and Crepes & Waffles, who employ low-income female heads-of-household and pay them quite well.) Although produce was inexpensive, many things were not, especially imported items. I am suspicious of mainstream capitalist measures of development, such as consumption, when increased consumption may mean more debt. To better understand the Colombia that I observed from my own experiences, I’d love to look at measures of income disparities for Colombia; that seems to be a key issue in Bogotá and even more so between urban and rural areas.

5.) How to get by with very little and take very short showers

It’d be nice for us First Worlders to get a refresher on this every once in a while from developing countries, because we sure do consume a lot of resources (myself included). People are ingenious there. For example, Oscar’s abuelitos had incredible rainwater catchment systems.

6.) That there’s a connection in Colombia, as in other places, between sexual & domestic violence, political violence, and poverty

Oscar’s cousin, Gina, who manages a rose production facility, sat across our small kitchen table over a cup of tea and told us about the low-income women who work in her rose factory—their frequent pregnancies by different men, their black eyes, their days of work missed because of abuse at home, their defense of the men in their lives, and the government aid they receive. Trying to look past the filter of her judgment, I could see in these women’s stories certain familiar patterns of internalized oppression, poverty and violence.

An article in La Semana, a weekly magazine published by the major Bogotá newspaper, described an alarming recent study. This study found that the majority of Colombian residents and the majority of public servants (police officers, judges, public health officials, etc.) blame victims of domestic and sexual violence. Large percentages of them believe that men can’t control themselves when angry, that women are at fault for inciting their husbands to anger or sexual provocation, etc.

Billboards over the main highway through Bogotá show a woman whose face blooms with bruises and cuts, the text reading something about how domestic violence is never okay. This is a relatively new campaign, trying to pick up steam and support in a country that has largely ignored the issue, but a country in which brave women and men feminists like those we met at a reproductive rights rally are organizing to create change.

It would be hard work, I think, combatting intimate violence in a country that has suffered violence of every type (often in ways that implicate the First World). Colombia is a country that endured colonization by the Spaniards, centuries of slavery, prolonged civil war and political violence, and training in human rights abuses by the US-run School of the Americas. Colombia is the country with the most displaced people in the world, where millions leave their homes because of guerilla and paramilitary violence (violence fueled by the First Word drug consumption). Therefore, I believe that the violence of guns and drugs and kidnapping that pushes people into homelessness and poverty also creates a culture of violence that places people at risk for abuse. Gina’s accounts of women speak not only to engrained psychosocial patterns of abuse, but also to the vulnerability to violence experienced by women and children living in poverty and in war zones, an issue seen throughout the world. In Colombia, the violence of poverty, of housing insecurity and unsafe working conditions, of houses in the poor communities that keep getting crushed in mudslides, and of militarism, is linked in complex ways that feminists are always trying to unravel to the violence of rape and battering.

We know in general that in war zones and prisons as well as in areas with lots of gang activity and police violence, there is more rape. We know that in military families, the rates of domestic violence are five times higher than in non-military families because you can’t train someone that it’s okay to kill people (including those  “collateral damage” civilians) but then assume it’ll be easy for them to be peaceful with their families.  We know that in times of job loss, domestic violence increases, and so we can imagine that the mass displacement and job loss experienced by over 2 million Colombians because of the violence has not contributed to family well-being.

However, it was clear from the article in La Semana and from victim-blaming discourses we heard from people we met and in the media, that it’s not only the poor and displaced, or the military/guerilla/paramilitary who abuse and suffer abuse. As in the US, violence against women and other forms of intimate violence are perpetrated and justified and excused away at all levels of socioeconomic status. This is because it is linked with patriarchal social structures, gender ideologies, militarism, and many other overarching cutural phenomena. This is true in all of the places that have high rates of sexual and domestic violence, such as the US. (By the way, not everywhere has high rates; in fact, there are some traditional societies in which sexual violence is almost unheard of, and most developed countries have  lower rates than the US.)

In Colombia in particular, I couldn’t help but wonder how much everyone’s attitudes and viewpoints were influenced by the years of political violence they’ve suffered, including massacres only a few decades ago (the ones Botero paints so hauntingly).  Oscar and I found that strangers in Bogotá were often standoffish and rude, which, as an Alaskan, upset me. But we wondered if, in addition to just being a big city, the terrifying political violence and corruption Bogotá faced not so many decades ago could have been affecting them. I wonder if it’s affecting them in their intimate relationships. I wonder if there is un-accounted-for trauma and historical grief, aggravated by ongoing violence and poverty, and propped up by machismo, the powerful church, and cultural norms to not talk about it.

I wish I understood all of the mechanisms by which poverty, colonial and political violence, and patriarchy influence sexual and domestic violence and how that works in Colombia, in the rest of the world, and in Alaska especially, but clearly I don’t. These are just observations from Colombia strung together with the research I’ve been pouring through lately for my job studying intimate partner and sexual violence affecting Alaska Native people. What I think I learned from seeing some of the attitudes and conditions surrounding violence in Colombia is that intimate violence is intricately and painfully linked together with larger, more institutional forms of violence.

If you have some insight into this, please please share it with me.

6.) I learned a lot about myself, my wonderful husband-to-be, and about communication as a couple. But that’s another story…

p.s. Some books I’ve found recently that explore some of the topics in the last section really well:

Shout Out! Women of Color Respond to Violence, edited by Maria Ochoa and Barbara K. Ige

Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender and Culture, edited by Natalie Sokoloff with Christina Pratt

And I could give you a long bibliography of other readings and films and websites on sexual and domestic violence if you’re interested.

I am in Anchorage, Alaska, having just returned from a beautiful month spent with Oscar in Bogotá and other parts of Colombia, and am already hard at work on my mom’s campaign. My hard-working, honest, smart, compassionate mama, Barbara Norton, is running for State House, and I am caught up in the swing of the campaign. I want very much to write and reflect on Colombia, but it may have to wait until after Election Day.

In the meanwhile, I can tell some stories through pictures. Here are a few of my favorite Colombia photos I’ve taken. If you click on them, it will direct you to Flickr where captions tell the stories.

I spent part of Labor Day weekend picking high bush blueberries with my dogs in the mossy rainforests of Whittier as the skies poured down over us. I brought the Holga with me, knowing that it wouldn’t get destroyed in the perpetually wet weather of this ocean town and hoping that it could capture some of its haunted quality. I didn’t expect to find LOVE there in front of the camera, and was happily surprised to do so.

We find love in strange places and it brings us to even stranger places. I found love in a photo store in the city of Anchorage, Alaska, where Oscar and I both spent our adolescence, and now this love is taking me to meet him in the city of his birth, Bogotá, Colombia, in just over a week. Love will bring me to South America for many months, and it’s what will bring us back. That is, our relationship with one another, our shared engagement with the Mt. View community through Photovoice, and my fierce adoration of Alaska opened Oscar more fully to the idea of Alaska being the home to which he would return after his journey, the home where we will bury our roots the deepest. His heart having been rusty for a while, he had not expected to find love here in Alaska, and was happily surprised to do so.

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Note: I will return for the 2 weeks running up to the election to get out the vote before going back to Bogotá again, and we will return together in January. Follow his now-completed travels through Latin America & links to his photos: www.quehubo.info/oki