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• 1 2017-10-23T18:12:11-07:00 #92, our oral histories, our oral stories are our truth 7 April 20, 2017 plain 2019-07-30T09:31:24-07:00

  This #100hardtruths was shared with me by my friend and mentor the anthropologist and scholar of indigenous media, Faye Ginsburg, the Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU, Co-Director of the NYU Council for the Study of Disability, and Co-Director of the Center for Religion and Media.
  
  “I encourage readers of #100hardtruths to spend time with the incredible short stop-motion animation films of First Nations artist and storyteller Amanda Strong, an Indigenous Michif/Metis filmmaker and media artist from the unceded Coast Salish territory also known as Vancouver.
  Her most recent work, Four Faces of the Moon, opened at the Toronto International Film Festival, as well as the Landscapes of Truth section at Canada’s imagineNative festival, both in 2016. The piece, like many of the Vancouver artist’s short films, is a hybrid, surreal but profoundly grounded work made with figures and tabletop sets that blend a steampunk and Indigenous aesthetic with First Nations histories and contemporary concerns. Four Faces is a tightly compressed (12 min) and moving account, “peeling back layers of Canadian colonial history,”  based on Strong’s own family, beginning with the knowledge passed down from her grandmother Olivine Tiedema Bousquet, a former senator for the Métis Nation of Ontario.  We see ghostly accountings of the buffalo hunts of the 1880s, and how mass extermination of the animal was ultimately tied to the systemic destruction of the Indigenous communities who depended on it for survival. The story is told with minimal dialogue in the languages of her ancestors (French, Michif, Anishnaabe, Cree), beginning and ending its time-travelling journey in the present day.
  Her 2015 8 minute film made with Bracken Hanuse Corlert, Mia, is a story about environmental destruction affecting Indigenous communities in another part of the world, 2000 miles from from the Standing Rock struggle, telling a west coast version of the challenges to First Nations water protectors, through the story of a girl, Mia (salmon). The  film begins with a haunting urban cityscape. Indigenous street artist Mia roams the streets before she encounters sacred waters and hand drawn salmon; she eventually  joins them, shape-shifting across species.
  Her work Haida Raid 3: Save Our Waters, invites us to join forces with protests against of super tankers moving through Haida Gwaii waters. And there are more, all extraordinary reminders of the many ways to tell important truths. As Strong explains:  “Our oral histories, our oral stories are our truth.”
  
  See More:

  • Spotted Fawn Productions
  • Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin, eds.
  • Indigenous Rising
  • World Indigenous Television Broadcast Network

  To see some poetic responses to this hardtruth:

  Our oral stories, Moving, Our oral stories
• 1 2019-07-30T09:29:32-07:00 Our oral stories 3 Poets of Course gallery 2019-07-30T09:39:57-07:00

  I asked a girl out in high school
  she said no
  because of my disability
  it was winter time
  at the station
  sitting downstairs and waiting for the train
  we were at the same school but we had separate areas
  mine for people with disabilities
  has was for single mothers or people who had dropped out of school.
  I asked her out
  she said no
  I know you are a person with a disability I don't want to go out with a person with a disability
  I asked her why
  I am a calm person and your boyfriend is a jackass
  she said she didn't care
  she felt weird going out with a person with a disability
  I told her, is going to get you
  for your rejection
  it could happen to you, to your kids and you will remember me.
  I left with my friends
  I was pissed
  I was rejected
  I thought this is going to be my life.
  Rejection
  I asked my friend on the train do you have a girlfriend?
  He said yes
  a regular high school girl.
  I ask him
  how you did that?
  He said I lied to her.
  she had already fallen in love with him.
  Me, I am an honest person.
  I don’t like to lie. 
  My story is my truth

  PART II

  my high school asked me to stop training for a job
  I went over to the veterans hospital
  I was a volunteer
  I was training to do a job
  and there I met a high school girl
  she was so gorgeous
  I was so nervous
  I had had rejection before.
  So I was flirting with her most of the time
  not even seriously.
  I didn't think she would be interested.
  So the next day my friend debreeze
  my friend said
  talk to her don't be scared.
  I ask her out and she said yes
  I was in shock
  I was pinching myself
  am I dreaming?
  She say yes?
  To me?
  I take her out to 116th on the east side
  El Barrio
  we got some Spanish food
  we started talking
  she told me she was a regular high school girl.
  she was Chinese.
  a father was black.
  I said you look more Spanish and she laughed.
  I felt happy.
  my first time going out with a woman.
  - Jose Guardiola
  
   

  This poem is a response to hardtruth #92:

  #92, our oral histories, our oral stories are our truth
• 1 2019-07-30T09:31:07-07:00 Moving 2 DOC@BC gallery 2019-07-30T09:34:18-07:00 St. Louis was my sunrise. 
  The horizon and I by ourselves. 

   

  I met my match mid-twirl. 
  For a moment, time stood still in Central Park. 

   

  Puerto Rico, where life's greatest gift was given 
  and taken too soon. 

   

  We built our life in Brooklyn. 
  Now I live alone. 

   

  My existence remains for others. 

   

  By Nina Daro, Mahalia Hughes-Roussel, and Allison Rapp.

  This poem is a response to hardtruth #92:

  #92, our oral histories, our oral stories are our truth
• 1 2019-07-25T21:45:13-07:00 Our oral stories 1 Poets of Course gallery 2019-07-25T21:45:13-07:00 Our oral stories, begins October 5th 2018. I was in front of house which is the dining room at Shake Shack I was in uniform then at 3:15 in the afternoon when Marisol and Kristen began blinking the lights and called us into the kitchen and I did not know what was going on then Kristen announced that I made employee of the month. And I almost cried in front of my team members. I felt very shocked and happy the next day Ronnie came in and was shocked. When I got home around 6:30 in the evening and waited for company to leave I told my mom I made employee of the month my mom almost cried and fainted at the news. 
  - Maria Zulic

  This poem is a response to hardtruth #92:

  #92, our oral histories, our oral stories are our truth