Living, breathing, Aboriginals

So I’ve been secretly plotting to apply for this program out of the country, and I’m trying to figure out how to get the dough to go instead of counting on Lotto 6-49. Anyway, I’ve been researching grants and scholarships online, especially related to all the minority status I get which white people always cheerfully tell me to cash in on. Whatever, it’s like they think my life has been full of free money for being a halfbreed queer crazy pervert. I wish. I mean, that’s such an easy job, pfft! Just hide and make videos, alone, in the dark, in the deep dark. Oh, where was I? Oh yeah, grants.

Anyway, I will not name the organization, but one of them stipulates you must have a “living connection to the Aboriginal community.” Okay, WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN? Does that mean you’re an upstanding member of your tribe? Like doing good Aboriginal deeds? Like I’ve got all my Aboriginal patches. Or does it mean you actually spend your time among living Aboriginal people? Do you have to spend a specific amount of time with your Aboriginal friends and family? Do you have fifty percent cut off if most of your friends are biracial? Does it make a difference if the woman who taught you bannock was your Scots grandmother?

And this ‘living’ word, that troubles me. Because what does it mean to have a dead connection? Like the horrible moment your girlfriend hangs up on you, and in the buzz of the dead line, you realize you’ve lost her forever. Like you’re standing there with the reciever, bewildered and wondering “What happened to my culture? Why did she leave me? I said all the right things, I brought her flowers.” Well whatever.

I mean, I guess I have a living connection to the aboriginal community. I’m living, AND I’m aboriginal! Ha!

What about people who have a dead connection to the aboriginal community? Is that like they hang around with the Aboriginal Undead?

Very weird.

Race, le sigh. It’s completely evolving and people still can’t get beyond a binary theory of it. I don’t know where race is going, but it leaves a lot of us with these complicated meanings in our bodies. Like strings stretching from us around the world, holding us to all the places our ancestors walked.