I gaze upon my maternal grandfather, Harry Christie, who made his journey just as I was finishing this book, as the vibrant and reliable sun emitting rays of bright orange light that warm my face on the earth that feels so changed now that he is gone. I close my eyes on a sunny spring day and feel his love that was always so steady, so sturdy, even when there was distance between us. Look, now, at how the flowers love you so. You warm their petals and the birds begin to sing. Look, now, at how the waters rejoice in your shimmer. Look, now, at my face and how it softens in the sunlight when I think of how much I love you. He now becomes the sun, in tender relief after his earthbound existence, to be held by the love he could not always receive but that was always there, in absolution. And as the sun shines, it finds itself held by infinity. My grandmother meets my grandfather in the great beyond—the infinite expanse of her being met with the everlasting rays of the glorious sun. On a night where I feel like my heart might actually break open, I hear my grandmother whisper my name and I know I am held by them both at this moment.

  I gaze upon the relatives I have known in my waking life who were taken from the earth too soon. I see my late auntie Norma in the great beyond as the ever-watchful moon. She rests in the holy embrace of dibiki-giizis, and they both watch over me with adoration. She always loved so deeply and with such radical kindness, her face wrinkling up into a goofy grin that was an anchor for our persistence across generations. I see my late uncle Steve in the great beyond as a blue constellation that emanates peace. He was my father’s other half. They survived residential school by laughing deep into their bellies together. I see my late cousin Darren shining away in the farthest corner of the great beyond, a bright and sturdy star. I see him as a distant star because his light is so bright—only the strongest of spirits could endure what he did. I gaze upon my first dog, and soulmate, Sky, in the great beyond as the shimmer of stardust that punctuates the galaxies containing all our beautiful ancestors. He was my saviour, my best friend, and the one who helped me survive. When I named my daughter Sky, I knew that the great beyond shimmered with vibrancy.

  My self-location starts in the great beyond and extends far beyond my human relations. Niibi—our first mother, the conductor of all creation—flows like a rushing river throughout the place before body. Through her, we look directly into the stars. Through her, we are taught that our bodies are a reflection of the beautiful and expansive universe, and that we have everything we need inside our bodies. Mukwa—bear—speaks to us so clearly and appears on my thighs in ink and blood to commit me to a future where my children can live free on their homelands. Ozaawaabiik—copper, keeper of our relatives and conduit to different worlds—shines brightly in rock and in galaxy, an embodiment of the dimensionality of Anishinaabe existence.

  In the place beyond body, we are held by so many. Our knowledge comes from so many.

  In the lodge, my body vibrates with the hum of creation, and with each laboured breath, I exhale all that I am, and my body follows. I cough out a tree frog who disappears into the rocks, and I feel my ancestors braiding my hair, tethering me to all that I will be. I am the smoke now. A bear’s muffled grunting. The sound of a black hole.

  In the great beyond, I am fully dissolved into smoke. My form is now contained within the threads of communion that traverse this world and into the next. I am everything and nothing and everything in between. Still the heart of who I have always been; beyond my body, I am a soft but firm imprint visible to the cosmic gaze. Beside me, and within me, I feel the wind from a thunderbird’s wing rippling stardust and water, the warmth from a bear who has joined me, and the presence of many whom words simply cannot hold. I am past and future, gazing upon my ancestors while tending to my descendants, all while wrapped within the love and care of creation unfolding.

  But now, it is time to travel to the edge of time. The smoke I am a part of moves like a slow, winding river across the cosmic planes to make its way to the place before birth, thickening at the precipice of a world beyond.

  We gather at the place before birth with our ancestors and spirit kin when we are ready to descend back into body. Our ancestors materialize out of the smoke to bear witness to another cycle. Our spirits come to enact their responsibilities to weave worlds together. As we assume form, we begin to feel our bodies being woven from the fabric of our homelands and the familiar chatter of our ancestors beside us. All my beautiful ancestors are surrounding me now, flickering between their celestial and earthly forms.

  At the edge of time, the precipice of body, the place before birth, I gaze down at my life and consent to it. I feel myself thicken out of the smoke, many voices around me now, and the threads that hold me begin to weave into material form. I am sitting with them now—the sounds of beads rattling, ancient voices, primordial rumblings. All my loving ancestors, all the spirits who care for Anishinaabeg, all of creation, have congregated at the place before birth, joined by the holy spider to weave spirit to earth. With wrinkled faces of cosmic joy and unending hope, they all start to weave me into body as I begin to descend out of the stars.

  Chapter 2

  To be born in this world

  Settler colonial compartmentalization

  In the womb, our body is sustained by a complex mass of vessel and vein, weaving our flesh within the body of our parent and to the great beyond. In the womb, our soft bodies take shape with tendrils of web extending to the place before birth. Taught by the spider, we flicker between this world and the others, using our webs to traverse time and space. During this time, the spider works tirelessly to build a sturdy web so that we may be bound to the great beyond as children. When it is our time to be born, the spider smiles and dissolves into stardust. The web remains.

  With great pressure and the heavy weight of a new-found physicality, we are born into our bodies and take our first breath. Feeling the tension of our skin holding form, the comforting rhythm of our new breath, the gentle restriction of our movement through gravity, the body binds us to the earth while cradling us within the larger web of creation. When we are babies, the boundaries between our body and our parents’ bodies are blurred, the skin between us melting from the waves of otherworldly love that lapse on its shore. When we are children, the spider still watches over us intently, guarding the sacred web that weaves us to the great beyond as we flicker between many worlds. As we get older, the web dissolves and our feet become firmly planted on the earth. But always, the swirling smoke remains within our bodies and connects us to everything that we are. As we grow older still, we learn to use ceremony and art to visit with that swirling smoke and to continue dancing with the great beyond. Anishinaabe bodies have always been wild like smoke. Even in our earthbound bodies, we insist on spilling over them in reverence for our expansive web of creation.

  From an Anishinaabe understanding, the body is not just the physical vessel. The smoke is thick inside of us, and so our bodies also contain our ancestors, homelands, and the great beyond. Our bodies are the containers of linear time and space, yet our bodies are also the way in which we exit those confines to dance with our ancestors. Our bodies are contained by flesh and blood, bone and marrow, but this containment also holds space for the sacred swirling smoke within us, the dull hum of the universe reverberating with every pump of our heart. At the edge of our skin, our ancestors visit us with stories that will guide us to a more just future. Within our hot blood, the swift currents of our waterways hum to us through its rapids. Our bodies are every single strand of creation we are embedded within, the threads of our existence woven by the loving hands of our ancestors in the great beyond.

  To have a body is to feel tension. The tension of skin stretching over bone and muscle. If the body ruptures, red blood pours out with the voices of ten thousand ancestors who live inside us. To have a body is to feel gentle containment. The breath, an anchor to our individuality. The form, a reminder of our fleeting existence. The bones, carriers of earth. If we rupture, one million stories, everlasting galaxies, past, present, and future, rush out of the body in one flowing river.

  The containment and tensions that maintain our physical bodies on earth are gentle and tender—skin and bone, memory and hair, and the swirling smoke of the universe deep inside it all. We are held within the here and now by our soft and temporary flesh—our bodies, the vessel of our human experience that is delicately fleeting. The finality of time in this life holds only so much power when we know we will return to the place beyond time. The deterioration of body is like being carried down a stream that, bit by bit, will dissolve us back into creation.

  There is great joy in the limitations and specific experiences that come from having a body. We delight in the fleeting spectrum of emotions our bodies afford us—love, grief, loss, connection, and movement mark our bounded and private experience containerized by the body. And although so much of our individual experience feels private, we are simultaneously held by so many. The spider gazes upon us lovingly as we grow old, ready to extend its web so we can climb back up to the stars when it is our time to return to the great beyond.

  However, unlike the gentle containment of our spirits within our physical bodies, Indigenous people must contend with the external containment of our wild and flickering bodies cemented by settler colonial violence and force. When we are born, we do not just land in our beautiful bodies; we also land in a settler colonial world intent on the destruction of Indigenous life. Some of us confront settler colonial violence as soon as we are born, removed from our loving parents’ arms shortly after we’ve taken our first breath. Some of us are eased into the world of rigidity, violence, and control that immerses our bodies, coming to quickly understand our intended destruction as small children.

  The containment of our bodies is no longer tender with the embrace of skin and bone around spirit; it is unnatural and suffocating as the structures of settler colonialism surround us. Here, our bodies become stretched thin like skin over too much bone. Here, our bodies lose their movement and fluidity, like a vibrating orb contained within a rigid box. Here, our bodies carry so much weight that if we falter for just one moment, we risk being flattened completely. From birth, we must contend with the razor-sharp violence of settler colonialism.

  Settler colonialism is ultimately a project of rigidity, violence, and control. Although there are many ways to define settler colonialism, in the most fundamental sense it is the removal of Indigenous bodies from their homelands in order to clear the land for settler occupation and capitalist expansion. I use the term body in this definition not to diminish the personhood of Indigenous peoples but rather to emphasize the Anishinaabe understanding of personhood, which innately includes within our bodies our ancestors, homelands, and all of creation. On Turtle Island, settlers seek to reside in the place that they have invaded, creating an unquestionable impetus for the ongoing removal of Indigenous bodies from their homelands. By necessity, settler colonialism must be structural, sustained in every moment of every day. Here on Turtle Island, Indigenous peoples have persisted for generations through multi-faceted forms of genocide and dispossession. From outright massacres, biowarfare, forced starvation, residential schools, and relocation through the reserve system to the present era of so-called reconciliation and Indigenization forwarded by settler institutions, the many forms of violence required to maintain the colonial relationship proliferate. Although these strategies are more obscured now, Indigenous peoples continue to live through genocide and dispossession while the neo-settler colony of Canada weaponizes a false ethic of apology and change as the newest frontier of our insidious destruction.

  If we could imagine the Indigenous world before settler colonialism, we might gaze upon a relationality that is unfathomable in its expansiveness. If we could imagine creation unscathed by settler colonialism, we might envision a river flowing fiercely with interconnection, flux, and fluidity. This river flows over our homelands, rushing with the ferocity of the pulse of the great beyond and bringing together all the relations of the land and beyond. This river inherently evades rigidity—its expansiveness and connectivity the antithesis to control and hierarchy. Creation terrifies settler colonialism because it transcends the logics and requirements of the settler colonial world effortlessly and without pause. Indeed, it is the power of this river that forms continuous cracks in the concrete walls of colonialism—cracks that sometimes burst, letting the river assume its wild form momentarily; cracks that will one day obliterate these walls completely.

  Settler colonialism imposes itself over top of the flowing stream of creation inherent to Anishinaabe homelands. It must quell the flow of creation that inherently spills over the boundaries and hierarchies that colonialism works so hard to maintain. It also necessitates stagnancy and solidification in order to control the wild, rushing, and transcendent flow of creation that continually births life, love, and relation beyond oppression.

  First, settler colonialism does what it can to diminish the contents of the river itself—committing genocide against not just the bodies of Indigenous peoples but also all of our relations—the fish, bear, tree, manoomin. To control the rushing river, settler colonialism erects dams and blockages to stop the flow of water, with the eventual goal of separating it completely into discrete pools that can no longer reach one another. This represents the central scaffolding of the settler colonial project—harsh lines, boxes, boundaries, and borders—compartmentalizations that attempt to separate and control the multi-faceted components of creation that are always dancing together in complicated motion.

  My dad tells me that we never used to have a word in our language for hello. We didn’t think of ourselves as discrete enough to warrant a greeting that signified the separation of self from another in that way. Rather, it was like we were all particles in a stream—individual in our embodiment but flowing together wildly within the river of creation.

  The central scaffolding of compartmentalization must exist prior to the establishment of the larger structures of oppression that solidify colonial domination—it is the groundwork, foundation, and invisibilized necessity of the colonial project. In order to manufacture power in the first place, the complex web of creation, or the rushing river, must be separated into pieces that are rendered distinct from one another and removed from their relationality. Only when pieces of creation are considered to be separate can they then be prescribed value to generate hierarchy. Compartmentalization of the entirety of Indigenous life, land, and body is the prerequisite to hierarchy and the generation of power, and thus stands as the ontological backbone of the settler colonial project. Containment and rigidity hold the entire system in place. Settler colonialism does everything it can to control the ferocity of movement and interconnection that is inherent to creation.

  On Turtle Island, the physical architecture of settler colonialism has been established to root its scaffolding within earth and body. This architecture reflects the compartmentalization that is the central structuring logic of settler colonialism. The rocks that contain our ancient relatives were blasted with dynamite to carve out harsh and linear railways and roads. Our waterways full of life and spontaneity were blocked with concrete dams, and now the land holds the tears of the river. Farmlands composed of monoculture grids span endlessly across the prairies. Pipelines shoot sharp lines deep into the earth and bleed death. Cities made up of box-shaped skyscrapers punctuate the skylines, and little box-like houses litter the land to keep the nuclear family separated from all else. Our trees are logged in huge clumps, forming compartments across the land hidden from the view of highways and roads. All around us—harsh lines, boxes, and a stifling of the inherent movement of creation.

  But, and always, in a world of rigidity and control, Indigenous bodies still pulse with the sweetness of infinite creation as the smoke swirls within our chests. The undefinability and flux of our bodies poses a fundamental threat to the settler colonial world.

  The wild and flickering body of my great-great-grandfather. At the same time that they laid down roads on the weeping land, blasting rock and flooding our waterways with dams, my great-great-grandfather laid his expansive body to rest on the angular and harsh lines of the railway tracks. His body, separated into pieces by the force of the train, suffered the same fate as our homelands. I imagine, as he was separated, that his body erupted into wisps of stardust and sputtered out a green frog and blooming flowers that sang a beautiful song for his journey under the moonlight. Even in our death, we are many things. Even in our most literal forms of separation, we are everything all at once.

  The physical architecture of settler colonialism separates the land, and all its inherent creation, into bits and pieces. The rushing river is slowed and the land is marked off into discrete boxes that we can see from the sky. The expansive land becomes littered with borders and roads that control the movement of bodies, animals, and beings. The more finite architecture of colonialism—the nuts and bolts—is intricate containerization and compartmentalization that cascades to restrict all facets of our existence. On top of the rigid scaffolding of lines and boxes, the architects must build systems of compartmentalization that are multi-scalar, attempting to hold our shifting and wild bodies in place all the way from our environment to our inner selves.

  The flow of creation must be bounded and static in order to create the building blocks of settler colonialism. The flow of creation must be categorized, defined, compartmentalized, and contained as the prerequisite to power. Hierarchy simply cannot be generated without discrete units to place above or below one another, and hierarchy is the backbone of power. The ontological foundation of settler colonialism, and both its crude and finite architecture, is the compartmentalization of life and the construction of the system of value that informs how those compartments stand alongside, or atop, one another.