March 28 2024

I really don’t know how to be a support person to Indigenous people, or how to fix 500 years of colonization and genocide. But I give a fuck and want things to change so I try to do what I can.

Today I provoked a blow-out with my Japanese dance teacher by asking that we do a Land Acknowledgement at her upcoming event that she was asking me to volunteer at. She said “NO WAY!” and had some pretty ignorant things to say about Indigenous people like “they kill their babies” (by rolling over on to them while they're sleeping) and “they’re junkies and drunks”, they “get a lot of advantages that other people don’t” and Canadians “give them money because they feel guilty.” She was quite upset and pointing her finger at me and talking over me, and said that she would “never” change her mind.

I said a few things in response to counter what she was saying and I kept my cool, and then I packed up my things and left the class. The last thing she said was “nice to know you” as I walked out. It was pretty intense as I’ve taken dance classes from her for a few years, and the relationship ended like that.

I just feel horrible that Indigenous people have to deal with this kind of shit all of the time. Yet I also have to acknowledge that I was also very ignorant when I was younger. And I honestly wasn’t expecting that kind of a response from her. I thought that she would be open to it as she seemed like an open-minded person, but there was a lot of rigidity and anger coming out of her. She’s lived on these lands for a long time and she said that her partner (who's White) grew up in Saskatchewan, so I’m guessing that most of her ignorances came from him and his family.

This isn’t the first relationship I’ve had dissolve over speaking up about these kinds of things. The first time something like this came up was in Australia and I was a part of a really cool artist’s market that took place every week down a graffiti’d laneway and had live music, food and vendors packed in wall to wall. I was a big part of the community and made one of my best friends there.

Tandem to that I was starting to learn about the highly oppressive and fucked up Intervention program and ended up making a couple of friends in the local Aboriginal community. I knew an Aboriginal beat poet and I was trying to get him involved in the market; and another friend who was a visual artist. The main guy who was organizing the market said that they would “consider” having my poet friend come out but that they didn’t want him talking about anything “political” because everybody already knew all about the Stolen Generation and “didn’t need to hear about it all again”. He told me that it was all in the past and his family was from Greece anyway. He also asked me if I’d been to Alice Springs or to any of the remote communities and said that I should go up there and see for myself so I could “understand better”. We were talking on the phone and he said that we could talk about it more in person sometime, but when I followed up he never responded to me. I wasn’t being aggressive or pushy at all. I innocently thought that they would be totally open to and welcoming the involvement of some unique and awesome Aboriginal people.

I didn’t end up vending again, though I went to the last market to say goodbye to some of the people who I was friends with. When I was walking through the laneway I noticed that several artists had made images of Aboriginal people and were selling them. It felt really gross to me.

**

It wasn’t an easy letter to write, but I reached to my dance teacher via email and sent her some educational resources. If she doesn’t get back to me or show that she’s willing to learn and grow, then I’ll leave her an honest Google review and reach out the broader community to hold her accountable for her hurtful and untrue statements.

**

UPDATE: I send her a very compassionate message but never heard back. I reached out to the woman who owns the studio and she said that she was “shocked” by the statements made but that she had no influence over what other teachers did in their classes and that she was unwilling to enforce any kind of policy about “safe spaces” or anything like that. She told me that she wasn't a “social justice warrior” and that her own classes were free from discrimination without having to make and kind of policy around it. Her focus seemed to be on divorcing herself from responsibility, maintaining that the classrooms “were to remain politically neutral” and she said that in 20 years of dancing they’ve never had any kind of “Land Acknowledgement”. She also said that she wouldn’t be willing to go on my word alone, would not be willing to speak to the teacher personally about the matter, and she suggested that I reach out to some of the other students in the class (there were only 3 others present that day, one of them was a minor and the other person was very new; I did reach out to the other long term student but never heard back from her).

Interestingly she told me that she did have some tension with my dance teacher at one point because there are specific protocols around how dancers enter the performance hall and she wanted her to abide by that and maintain more professionalism. It’s unfortunate that she is unwilling to enforce some kind of professionalism around expressing full on hate speech in a classroom!

The conversation felt a bit like ones I have with politicians who kind of give you the run around and deflect from some brutal injustice by bringing attention to some thing else and act like they care but are unwilling to take any action or make real changes.

**

Am I a “social justice warrior”? Am I a “wokist”? And I “virtue signalling”? If that’s how people perceive me to be, I’m okay with that, even though I've never considered myself a leftist, and I really don’t like Marxism/ Leninist/Communist neo-Liberal politics at all. I just want a livable planet for the generations to come and for everyone to have equal rights and equal access to land, food, water, medicine and the basics of life. If that makes me a pariah, I’m okay with that.

Also, I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable practicing belly dance. It made sense to dance at Greek fest last years cause I do have some Greek ancestry, but overall most of what we’re doing in the classroom feels like appropriation without much education and appreciation of the lived experiences of Arabic women, where all the styles of dance we’re dong originated.

And it seems fucked up to be dressing up like Arabs when our government is routinely involved in bombing the fuck out of so many Arabic nations and crippling their social systems, making it very difficult for women there to enjoy dancing.