The grizzly bear


As mothers are wont to do, mine has shared the news of this blog far and wide to friends and acquaintances.  An old colleague of mom's, an Indigenous woman named Mary, responded by sharing a poem that she felt to be a good metaphor for colonization:

The grizzly bear is huge and wild.  

He has devoured the infant child. 

The infant child is unaware that it has been swallowed by a bear.  

I sat with this for a long time and it has woven its way in and out of my thinking for a week. In her correspondence, Mary also wondered if the child could ever be reconstituted.  So, if they were rescued from the bear's belly and restored to the world of humans, could the child be put back together again despite the effects of bite marks and digestive fluid?  Would they ever see the world in the same way before they were eaten up?  Would it differ if the child had been inside the bear for just a few minutes?  What about a year, or ten years, or even nearly forty nine?  

Although it saddens me, I don't think the child could be reconstituted, not fully.  

I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with an Indigenous friend who was struggling in her workplace and needed to decompress.  I listened intently: listened, listened, listened.  When my friend seemed to be done sharing, I took a big breath, and my first impulse was to fix.  My limbic, automatic, and colonial response was a profound desire to swoop in and take control.  Luckily, I noticed it.  I held my tongue in the moment.  I waited for a natural lull in the conversation to admit to my friend what had happened in my brain just then.  And she--graciously, because she certainly didn't have to--took the time to unpack that response with me.  

The point is, I'm not sure I can ever stop that kind of immediate response from happening.  I think I have been so thoroughly consumed by the "huge and wild" colonial project that I may never be able to completely re-program myself and decolonize my brain.  However, I can work to do the best I can.  I can work to ensure that my kids are not consumed by the bear (or maybe my grandkids - it might be a bit too late for my almost-adult children already).  They should not think that living inside the beast is a normal state of affairs.  The view is better outside.   


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