QUEENS UNIVERSITY, KINGSTON, ONTARIO, CANADA

Dancing with Audre Lorde: Positive Obsession, Knowledge, and Some Explosions Inspired by
Cathie Dunsford’s The Journey Home Te Haerenga Kainga

Katherine McKittrick, Queen’s University

In 2003, when the Department of Women’s Studies at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Canada, asked me to teach an upper year seminar course titled ‘Aboriginal Women,’ I anxiously said ‘yes.’  I was anxious for a few reasons:  I worried (and continue to worry), about the number of university courses that seriously take up our colonial past — and how this past, which is deeply entwined with (in)visible First Nations lives, continues to inform our present. To give a few examples of my worry… the Indian Act, is what some Canadian aboriginal scholars refer to as the implementation of racial apartheid in Canada.  The Indian Act is, at least to me, one of the most important federal legislations Canada has produced. There are two reasons I say this.  First, because the Indian Act is an unknown legislation for many Canadians; in many of my women’s studies classes, including ‘Aboriginal Women,’ several students have mentioned that they had never heard of the Indian Act before, that they were not taught about the Indian Act in high school, that it was not discussed in their homes, and that they have never heard of it being referred to in the news. So, the Indian Act, for many, does not exist in their historical memory or contemporary understanding of Canada. That this information is unknown and unknowable, that the Indian Act is excluded from some people’s everyday understandings of nation, is, to me, evidence of a successfully violent colonial process.  This forgetting is disturbing and unacceptable — which is why I feel the Act is one of the more important federal legislations Canada has produced.

Second, and related, the Indian Act is important because, despite the (wilful) forgetting and the exclusion of this legislation from our educational curriculum, it haunts our nation.  The Act is important because it was a racial tool, a violent legislation that made Canada possible — in all sorts of ways.  We need to know about the Indian Act because it is legalized racism; we need to know about the Indian Act because it institutionalized racial hierarchies — and continues to do so; we need to know about the Indian Act because it was the document that sanctioned reserves and residential schools:  sites of sexual abuse, beatings, poverty, contaminated water.  The Indian Act formalized racial segregation; it destroyed already existing habitation patterns; it installed colonial patriarchy within aboriginal communities; it administered dehumanization and genocide.  The Indian Act is important because it was, and is, one of the most extreme forms of racism produced during the colonial era and it is still being lived now, in the present — and it is wilfully forgettable.

More worry…the violent and brutal murders of Pamela George and Helen Betty Osborne are two murders that, we must remember, do not stand alone but rather explicitly disclose and unravel a historically present narrative that is inflected with hundreds of missing and/or assumed dead First Nations women in Canada, dehumanization, genocide, violence, death, suicide and the ongoing indigenous resistance to these colonial practices.  In Canada these histories and contemporary issues also go missing from our national narratives.  And I anxiously wondered:  If I do not teach the course, will it be ousted from the curriculum?  Where will that narrative of a nation/Canada built on death and disappearances go if this course is untaught, if aboriginal women are not central to how we understand and teach about women, gender struggles, and feminism? What are my commitments to indigenous studies in Canada and elsewhere (and what are my strategies to investing all of my courses with an ongoing indigenous presence)? What is at stake, then, in not teaching this course…and what do I know?

Additionally my work, as mentioned below, is anchored by a clandestine degree in black studies which, while touching on the creolized possibilities of black-indigenous connections, it does not adequately attend to the ongoing intellectual history of First Nations, Native Americans, and aboriginal communities in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific…So, what, who, and where do I know?  How has colonialism hidden indigenous histories and contemporary struggles from my/our worldview and simultaneously cast these communities as unworthy of critical inquiry?  Where do I know from?

And of course, this anxiety is hand-in-hand with the hauntings of late-Second Wave feminism and the debate over voice — a sometimes oppressive but important exercise in exploring what Donna Haraway called ‘situated knowledge,’ but a debate that has also been skewed, not only forgetful of Haraway’s original ideas, but also reifying identity politics outside the collective identity politics demanded by women such as the Combahee River Collective; this is to say that the collective ‘we’ of identity that politicized and connected communities, and their common ‘voice,’ has been transformed into a limiting category of ‘experience’ that is necessarily underwritten by a ‘me-ness’ which values individual selfhood (and therefore what might be called my-self-rights) over collective human rights and global-community justice.  The ghosts tirelessly demand:  Who has the right to speak, teach, and discuss indigenous issues?  Can this (my) body and this (my) intellectual history attend to a colonial experience that I am connected to, implicated in, aware of, committed to understanding, but not ancestrally bound to?  Am I appropriating someone, something?  I am appropriating someone — I just know it. (There are also tears:  aboriginal Canadians owned black slaves and were enslaved; black Canadians ‘took our land’ without thinking through ‘how colonial’ they were being; it is not my fault, it might be my (white) ancestor’s fault — but it is not my fault; there is no ‘Indian Princess’ equivalent for black women:  there is no pure-virgin-black-woman — she is always already the nadir-nigger woman, embodying Pecola’s demise, lowest of the low; Eva (Canada) is not possible classroom discussion).  What, who, where do I know and how do I know? 

Throughout my graduate work in Women’s Studies, at York University in Toronto, Canada, I worked to ‘discipline’ myself in academic areas that were outside, but might complement, the overarching core themes of the MA and PhD Programme (women and work, women and culture, women and history, feminist theory) — themes and courses that were, inadvertently and not, informed through a commitment to whiteness and white femininity.  Here, of course, white skin, as omnipresent, invisible, and powerful, defines feminism/‘emancipation’ according to racialized hierarchy — which means that nonwhite women are cast as unable to strategize or practice liberation on their own terms and seemingly look toward the white feminine body as purveyor of feminist knowledge and as something to be strived for. 

As these waves of privilege, power and knowledge worked their way into graduate classes, administrative meetings and social gatherings, I began to teach myself and read about different worldviews.  In terms of my interests, this broadly meant black studies, an area fetishistically integrated into Women’s Studies, through excerpting the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins — and sometimes, although not often, through passing references to Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand.  In a sense, then, I worked hard (as did many of my colleagues) to learn a counter-canon outside but complementary to women’s studies and feminist studies. We might say, then, that graduate studies in an interdisciplinary field like Women’s Studies builds on and legitimizes and adds flesh to the idea of ‘real’ white heterosexual femininity as it unwaveringly and magically embodies liberty and utters the seemingly only ‘real’ tenets of feminist knowledge (with all other bodies being less-than or outside liberty and ‘real’ feminism).  Here we might equate ‘real’ with ‘human’ or ‘more than human.’  Regardless, the study of ‘real’ women/woman sometimes requires a clandestine or underground second (ungranted) graduate degree in what might be broadly understood as ‘subaltern studies’; this gathering of furtive knowledge is often independently sought out, studied, researched, and explored by students interested in what has inexplicably come to be referred to as ‘difference’ (read:  marked-nonwhite-race-ethnicity).  But, ideally, clandestine studies are not hermetically sealed, fostering, on the sly, a world apart from ‘real women’ and Man-as-the-only-version-of-the-full-human.  We/I do not do this work to create a private academic territory — scattered, in my case with ‘blacks only’ or ‘black women only’ signs:  this has never been my world, even though all this whiteness can blind.  Instead, clandestine studies fosters a deeper understanding of a world that is already creolized and mashed-up:  relational rights rather than my-self-rights. 
All of this has to do as much with linking justice to teaching, and thinking very broadly about race, racism and political struggle, as it has to do with refusing our given social systems wherein Man and his human others inhabit and live seemingly separate lives.  This is to say our lives should be conceptualized as painfully connected to one another, rather than separated and separable.  While what has been called ‘coloniality’s persistance’ has and continues to operate according to a system that profits from spatial divisions — put crudely, there are spaces for us and spaces for them, and we tend to strive towards those spaces for us — the politics of race also tells us that divisions and alienations are an impossibility.  This is to say, spaces for us are always inflected with them, the others, not only because these divisions constitute one another, but perhaps more importantly, because the question of segregation would not be possible without different ethnic groups encountering, touching, and knowing about one another.  This is what Diana Brydon calls global intimacies:  a politics that resists colonial, liberal and neo-liberal frames for constructing human responsibility and turns to global entanglements as a way to ‘potentially create a new vision of community…a community in which a shared threat…[to our world and humanness, our ecocidal and genocidal world] can create a new form of belonging’
In terms of teaching across racial and ethnic categories and histories, this is simply repeating — appropriating (so I will not provide a footnote but you know where this comes from, right?) — what Audre Lorde said so long ago:  of course she (activist, writer, critic, intellectual giant) could teach the works of William Shakespeare (although she was never asked) she lived in a wholly racialized world, she had a critical understanding of King Lear, she ‘gets it.’  Black skin does not stand in the way of teaching, knowing, reading, unravelling the politics of Miranda, or Macbeth, or Humbert Humbert, or Duddy Kravitz, right?  And:  what of teaching knowing, reading, unravelling the politics of Teacake or Dot or Bigger Thomas or Dana?  Or…Cowrie? 
Rather than become experts on canons — even clandestine canons — what I am trying to point to is a thinking through of how to undo the practices that are expertly putting us in racial boxes with corresponding (so-called ‘authentic’) creative narratives that supposedly match our bodies.  But I am also trying to keep in place, across the landscape, practices that continue to erase and refuse a critical engagement with blackness:  colonial-white-supremacist-academic-ideologies-and-systems that remain intact; racial hierarchies do not dissipate upon recognition that we live in a wholly-racialized-painfully-interconnected world.  And I am also trying to outline how my flawed expertise — in black studies, gender studies, women’s studies, and (I have yet to mention) cultural geography, interdisciplinary-cultural-studies — simultaneously produces an erroneous-invisible barrier to indigenous studies and opens up a ‘positive obsession’  to, as Octavia Butler wrote, to ‘Read…Read the kind of work you’d like to write.  Read good literature and bad, fiction and fact, read every day and learn from what you read…’  This opening up, reading what you want to know — and what you might not want to know — means, of course, that expressive cultures (what we read, listen to, dance to, talk of, write, sing) might provide a philosophical pathway out of our presently unjust human order.  The opening up marks the sealed categorizations as erroneous, but lived.  This was Fanon’s point, of course — a call to the opening up, of exploring, new humans; exploding what we know:  wretchedly and regrettably, our world is organized as Manichean, but we might (and we can, and sometimes do) open the door to every consciousness, always questioning. 
The erroneous barrier to indigenous cultures exploded, but recognizably historicized indigenous apartheid, through my continued engagement with the work of Lee Maracle, Patricia Monture-Angus, Loretta Todd, Gail Maurice, Kim Anderson, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Andrea Smith, Cathie Dunsford, Quo Li Driskoll (Map of the Americas/High Yella Sonnet/The Leading Causes of Death Among American Indians/Gay Nigger Number One), among others.  But it has been Dunsford (and admittedly her stunning, droll, honest critique of Women’s Studies that initially seduced me) that opened the door to a new kind of political consciousness and insisted that I continue to explode my barriers to elsewhere (and what I know) while also using my clandestine-core-everyday studies (and the positive obsession to read) as a way to understand indigenous struggles.  What of Dunsford?  What do I know and what do I think I know? 
She has danced with Audre Lorde, painted Adrienne Rich’s study in Santa Cruz, she has contributed to documentary filmmaker Monika Treut’s art installations and helped over 100 authors publish their work.  Standing outside of Union Station in Toronto, Cathie with several pieces of luggage, waiting alone for Karin and I to gather a porter — a car slowly drives by and tries to nick one of the fifteen-or-so suitcases:  Cathie Dunsford stares the bandits down, dangerously stands ground, kicks the car, and frightens the potential criminals:  earth warrior with a punk rock attitude.  Torn ligament, only once before in weather that is below zero:  Karin tells me stories of self-sustaining abodes and carrots and the Nestle scheme to impoverish women in poverty; Cath tells me stories of viewing the film The Color Purple with working class black women from Oakland, of community sharing, recycling, supernatural seals, of spending all day reading the poetry of Quo Li:  stories that are unbearable, funny, stories that allow us to all ‘burrow our way back to freedom.’  Refusing to be colonized, proper, having dinner at Chez Piggy with Terrie Easter Sheen, those seated around us asked to be moved:  the laughter, the stories, are too loud — uncolonized undisciplined:  human, all too human. 

Cathie Dunsford’s The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga is a story that unsettles knowledge and knowledge-making. The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga is an important contribution to how we understand indigenous and aboriginal rights, colonialism/genocide, and politics. The novel is interwoven with multiple themes and political narratives: S/M debates, sexual intimacies, body image, violence against women, feminism, pan-indigenous politics, lesbian histories, contemporary lesbian issues, food, pleasure, academia, activism.  These themes are not only presented by Dunsford in accessible, readable, and provocative ways, she peoples the novel with characters and ideas that refuse racial-sexual dehumanization.  That is, Dunsford refuses to couple indigenous lives with axiomatic oppressions. 
The women in this story are not bound to a colonial narrative that thrives on stereotypes and violence; they are not always already subjugated, passive, and waiting to be violated.  Nor, are they written up as having an authentic pristine past, nature-knowledges that are linked to pre-contact utopian geographies.  Instead, the indigenous characters in this novel — in particular the protagonist Cowrie but also some of those who work, think with, and love her — are positioned as intelligent, desirable, and complex subjects who are continually negotiating the present politics that shape indigenous lives:  sex and love are earthy, underwritten by the natural environment (volcanoes, waterfalls, sweet grass, plants) which is in turn enmeshed with other practices and narratives (internet stories/blogs, the Jewish holocaust, hints of the limits of Canadian multiculturalism, filmmaking, activism, cooking).  Dunsford makes it impossible for us to imagine indigenous lives as segregated and primordial:  the Indian princess and squaw have no place here — they are not controlling the text, they do not inhabit Cowrie’s world, they are not…
There are several instances in the The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga when one character, or Cowrie herself, discusses boundaries — and how real and metaphoric boundaries are not a viable way for us to conceptualize Cowrie’s life.  The character of Cowrie embodies a resistance to boundaries:  she can pass (sometimes), she loves food and eating (a feminine faux pas in some/many regions), she was adopted (she was brought up Maori, but her biological ancestry is Hawai’ian, a confirmation and refusal of bloodline primacy); she is a jetsetter, traveling between New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, and the USA (non-corporate flights with many home-destinations); she is a lesbian writer, activist and a critical colonial subject.  Based on what we know about our present world, the workings of racial-sexual categorization, and the colonial project, Cowrie is, herself, an impossibility. That Cowrie is an ‘impossibility’ — a large lesbian aboriginal feminist intellectual — is why this book is so important:  Dunsford humanizes, and thus makes possible, those who are not supposed to exist within our present human order.  That is, she brings into being a history, stories and lives that are not only erased due to colonialism and violent racisms, but are hidden by heteronormativity within and outside aboriginal communities.  This necessarily provides a new context through which we might think about and understand aboriginal women’s lives.  The exploded boundaries, what we think we know, leads us outside ourselves. 
I want to suggest, then, that the political and pedagogical work of The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga (the text) parallels what Cowrie (the protagonist) demands throughout the novel:  how do we conceptualize and think about indigenous women’s creativity within a context of its own?  This does not mean violence and colonialism disappear, or that we are no longer implicated in practices of racism, homophobia, and sexism that continue to shape aboriginal lives.  But this new context insists that contemporary aboriginal subjects are always breaking boundaries.  A few examples:  Dunsford will not let us feel like our discussions can be neatly tied up because we study difference, or indigenism; she does not suggest that colonialism and sexism are easy to understand — and that our academic understanding of colonialism and aboriginal lives unhinges us from the anti-racist work that still needs to be done.  There is always something more going on, something deeper than pointing out stereotypes and naming racism.  This is particularly clear in Dunsford’s critique of feminism, academia, and woman-centred knowledges:  she discloses the possibilities and limitations of feminism, inserts an indigenous world view as opening up (rather than shutting down) multi-ethnic dialogues, celebrates indigenous femininity (not as a tirade against whiteness), and refuses identity politics while clearly mapping out indigenous/feminist political strategies.  The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga thus attends to the particularity of selfhood and location as they necessarily expand our collective understanding of the world.
It is the development and practice of the talk story in The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga that reveals the complex political work of indigenous storytelling through demonstrating how selfhood can unfold and initiate a more expansive and collective worldview.  The act and practice of sharing stories, memories, and myths binds together lesbian sexuality, violence against women, global travels, activism, the politics of women’s studies, the limits of feminist theory, the troubled university institution, the delicious food, erotics, pan-indigenism, land claims.  Talk stories are cross-cultural dialogues that insist that mythmaking — in song, in plays, in sharing stories, in exchanging ideas — is a shared political practice that provides the ‘maps for an inner life, for redefining the grammar of the mind, for adjusting the climate of the soul.’
Dunsford insists that story and storytelling are counter-narratives that do more work than ‘talking back.’  This is to say that the stories Dunsford invites us to tell, read, and hear — our own stories and the stories of others — have moments and shreds of commonality and quarrel that reveal already existing debates and conversations through which we might foster our future visions of social justice and struggle.  Indeed, modernity and colonialism did and continue to do violent work on us all, harvesting the god-trick that white and nonwhite are oppositional, that here and there are disconnected, that Man and his human others have nothing in common, that two-sexed gender binaries are finished business, that oral stories are unknowing, and that myths are the supernatural spinning of tales that have nothing to do with the ground beneath our feet.  Within our present system of socio-spatial regulation, where death looms (the Pacific is exemplary, Dunsford told me during one talk story:  the region is a nuclear battleground, soaked with toxic vapours, inhabited by peoples sick and transformed by the deadly chemicals, precisely because the place and space are constructed as the geographic underside of ‘real’ human geographies)  political possibilities appear to be grimly attached to repetitive cycles of racist-sexist subjugation.  But Dunsford thinks modernity differently.  Mythologies are not unknowing, nor are they oppositional, or rendered supernaturally irrelevant; New Zealand and Pacific cultures are not on the margins, nor are they reclaimed as centres; lesbian and queer identities are not ‘alternative’ identities; Maori women and men are not trapped on the underside.
While these assumptions have allowed many to articulate their own liberty and freedom in relation to who they are not — the unfree, the colonized — through story, and story sharing, we might glimpse outside, or even get outside, the confinements of European modernities, and envision what an expanded conception of an ecological, geological, environmental planet can give us as humans who live in a wholly racialized world; then might we work toward inhabiting this world as an interrelated, co-identified species.  For Dunsford, this involves a politics of thinking and writing that is bound up in hearing, singing, and sharing stories so that we might bring into focus all of our connective mythologies as they have always been produced in the middle of our historically present landscape, but also made possible through and across indigenous struggles.
This is an inspiring and urgent political vision.  One that recognizes that stories of global indigenous communities continue to live genocide, violence and colonialism and re-envision justice in ways that disturb our present conception of the world — this is a justice that does not profit from the displacement of difference, that does not seek out racial authenticities, but rather asks us to attend to our painful and intimate encounters to foster stories that heal. 
What follows are five different responses to Cathie Dunford’s The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga.  The texts are inspired by talk story and indigenous expressive cultures and were submitted by students who read the novel in 2007 for my classes at Queen’s University, Kingston.  Each of the pieces, directly and indirectly, point to the tensions and possibilities that were raised when we, as a class, told each other tales, family myths and jokes, ghost stories, love stories, dreams, and unbearable memories during the Spring of 2007.  Rather than comment on — or attempt to replicate and memorialize — the ‘talk story’ exercise we engaged in, my thoughts (above and below) and the thoughts of Sarah, Ashley, Darcel, Melissa and Trevin are attempts to put into words, write down, think about, and read across, moments-shards of what was read, uttered, listened to, and shared after practicing the talk story inspired by Dunsford in The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga.  The first essay, by Sarah Sahagian, “Possibilities for Indigenous Feminism in Cathie Dunsford’s The Journey Home,” explores the ways in which aboriginal women’s politics can lead to a broader, more ethical approach, to collective action and feminism.  Specifically, Sahagian outlines how everyday conversation, listening, stories, and sharing challenge existing (white) feminist epistemologies.  In integrating the politics of talk story, she grounds her discussion in the possibility of imagining our political work through commonalities and differences.  Indeed, the commonalities/differences politics she brings into focus pushes further than ‘integrative’ feminism — because she presents, from the outset, how indigenous and other subaltern lives (rather than white feminist lives) have initiated the importance of sharing stories — and hearing stories.  This is to say that sharing stories begins from the struggle against colonialism, and moves outward to gather other (non-aboriginal) stories and narratives. 
The poem by Ashley Maracle, “Drumming/Connects Me to Grandmother Moon,” is complementary to the drumming performance she and her colleagues (Darcel Bullen, Dana Wesley, and Shauna Shiels) presented for Cathie Dunsford and Karin Meissenburg while they were in Kingston, Canada, in April 2007.  The drumming performance was also their final assignment for our course, ‘Aboriginal Women.’ The performance attended to the tensions, and highlighted a working through, of indigenous politics. Beginning with smudging, and following with four aboriginal songs, the performance allowed the musicians to stake a claim to their history in ways that are not so visible in other (academic) settings.  Further, the corporeal and intellectual confidence was a seeable politic:  something new happened — alongside an indigenous and colonial past-present; it also disrupted commonsense knowledges, creating a space for those listening to really hear the political work of aboriginal women drumming and think about what music and expression can bring to bear on an academic setting.  This is to say that the force of the performance, smudging, and the collective action both called into question and affirmed what is possible here and now — both spatially and temporally.  Ashley’s poetic reflection on drumming is a meaningful exploration of selfhood and how she is shaped by the workings of colonialism and indigenous politics.  Her poem highlights a struggle that is a creative response to the everyday:  status, phenotype, show-and-tell, essays, books, rent, pride, stolen sisters, those who refuse to critically engage with this violent past as it marks a different communal space — the refrigerator.  More than this, her poem draws attention to how drumming can (and does) hold in it the possibility of thinking beyond classificatory ways of knowing and encourages connections in a world that profits from disconnects.
Darcel Bullen’s piece, “A Non-Indigenous Journey to Listen:  Reflections on Cathie Dunsford’s Novel The Journey Home,” is a critical response to Dunsford’s novel.  As a black woman, connected to indigenous politics at Queen’s University (as noted above, Darcel participated in the drumming performance and is the only non-identified aboriginal woman among the musicians; she is also involved in anti-racist activism on campus), Darcel’s reading of The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga begins with the tensions fostered in feminist academic studies and classroom politics.  Darcel points to the ways in which Cowrie’s struggles at Berkeley might connect to how other nonwhite intellectual women situate themselves — while simultaneously being policed — in the academy.  It is through Cowrie’s talk story, and the connections that this sharing practice makes among women, that allows Darcel to think through the ways in which discussing the undiscussable might disclose new ways of learning precisely because such knowledge refuses conventional academic criteria.  This is to say that talk story not only disrupts feminist academic politics, it also centralizes narratives that must be connective (even if they are painfully connective) in order to move forward.
The essay by Melissa Bell, “The Role of Talk Story in the Effort to Educate,” links together the politics of talk story, writing, listening, and decolonization.  Her concerns, which hinge on the pedagogical work of written-oral storytelling, bring into focus the ways in which creative narratives might best be understood for their inherent sharing value, rather than their literary clout (i.e. written vs. oral, experience vs. theory).  This is to say Melissa explores different kinds and types of stories in order to think about very different insights into learning.  Her paper thus moves across and through The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga, towards the collective talk stories in the novel, to the ‘Aboriginal Woman’ talk story exercise in class, to her summer with a close friend, to questions of literacy and the importance of reading within the academy.  These are complicated processes and narratives — yet she refuses to erase and privilege particular narratives; instead she allows us to imagine Virginia Woolf alongside Jake alongside Uretsete alongside Langston Hughes as these thinkers are informing our relationship to poverty, race, conflict as well as our own stories and reading practices.  This is an intellectually and politically difficult exercise — and Melissa demonstrates the creative-activist possibilities of the story and storytelling. 
The final essay, “‘Think about whether you’d rather lie down next to a blade of grass’:  An Examination of the Importance of Food and Culture” by Trevin David explores the connections between food, culture, body image, and Cathie Dunsford’s The Journey Home.  Trevin considers the ways in which ‘food as culture’ is inflected by white colonial gender expectations yet, even more importantly, sets the stage for collective politics, resistance, and kinship.  This is revealed in Cowrie’s culinary practices — which are scattered throughout the novel as acts of sharing, pleasure, politics, and resistance.  Trevin also highlights the ways in which the colonial/Western practice of denying food (and valuing thinness) attends to the ontological underpinnings of food preparation, eating, and feasts:  denying food = denying culture = denying self/feasts = indigenous collectivity = intergenerational transmissions.  The essay also touches on interethnic connections eating and food preparation can foster:  in California, Cowrie’s food preparation combines ingredients from numerous sources (and therefore histories) and thus calls into question the ‘purity’ of cultural traditions.  Underscoring the question of ‘food as culture’ is Trevin’s discussion of the feminine body; he considers how The Journey Home celebrates and radicalizes femininity through Cowrie — even though we continue to be haunted by unrealistic (and sickly thin, white, presumably heterosexual) images of beauty.  His argument thus hinges on imagining healthy bodies as portrayed by Cowrie’s interlocking socio-political engagements with food, eating, and desire.