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In preparation for an article about Kent Monkman's online installation Casualties of Modernity, I am researching—with great care and slowness—Two-Spirit people and related topics. In addition to the relevant literature on Two-Spirit art and literature, I'm branching off into Indigenous pedagogy. Coming at this topic from my Western, White, Heterosexual, Cis-gendered, Male, Able-Bodied, Christian-raised (primarily Jesuit) point of view requires me to re-think even the most basic concepts and words that I use to think about Monkman's art. As such, I have turned to books on Indigenous pedagogy in order to understand how words like "think," "understand," "know," "truth," and how phrases like, "help each other" and "teach each other" operate for Nehinuw (or Cree) people.
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Wound/Wound
(wind/wind)
The one: (n.) from Old English wund, “hurt injury, ulcer,” leads to (v.); “Figurative use, of feelings, etc., from c.1200.” From Ayto’s research: “…may go back to the same IE root that produced Welsh gwanu, ‘stab.’” [“Stab,” incidentally: “noun, wound produced by stabbing…mid 15th-Century”; meaning “a try,” first recorded 1895-American, “stab in the back” 1881, and “verb, late 14th-Century, ‘thrust with a pointed weapon,’ Scottish.”]
The other: to wrap around. From Ayto: “originally meant ‘go in a particular direction’” and leads eventually to “wander.” [Note about this below.] Past participle of “wind,” which leads to another bold homonymy:
Wind/Wind: Air in a state of blowing and the act of wrapping around. The flautus that condition speech may wrap around us.
Poem comes from this:
The wound wound round
like a staircase winding
winding the one aching to ascend.
Note on “wander”: Wind—wrapping around—meant “to go in a particular direction,” and yet “wander,” its heir, means to go in no particular direction. Perhaps we all should wander more aimlessly through language in order to figure out the precise direction in which we’d like to wind our words.
Sources:
Etymonline: http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=wound
John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins
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Installation number two of an old dream journal I found:
No date (2005?)
Hospital.
3 patients had a strange disease that required a purple mixture/compound to be spread on their backs.
It could only be spread with the tongue.
It felt like community service felt.
The compound was bright purple.
I was also preparing to go to St. Joseph's college in Europe somewhere.
Hospital patient was a girl my age.
After the treatment, we placed her evenly upon the body of another patient.
No date (2005?)
A group of people find themselves together for an unknown reason — felt like Clue! — they figure out that something is not right with Time. I was the ringleader.
No date (2005?)
In a grassy courtyard. Spring day. Talking about post-doctoral work with unidentified woman. Very sunny. I could feel the weather, and I was talking about it, too.
No date (2006?)
I had a real-time conversation with my mother about money. Very intense. No fun. Then, completely unrelated, I dreamt of a group of late-20s people who lived by the sea in bland apartments. They all knew each other and it was very much like a movie or a t.v. drama.
No date (2006?)
3 dismembered heads in a cooler. Large apt. The heads came from a grizzly accident. Military-like principal. James McMenamin is V.P. Christian, Val, Blythe.
No date (2006?)
Story about the battle for the compass of time. 2 primitive societies and 2 animal societies wage war. The evil guys won. Flash forward: The evil has become mythologized within a city. Magic factions will fight once more for freedom.