Welcome to "Recently"
Writings on radical education, youth development, memory, decolonization, poetry, and working on ally work.
Welcome! Thank you for being here. To my mind, the most critical need-to-knows for you are:
-I am a cis, white woman, with no non-white ancestry to speak of. I haven’t sent a cheek swab of DNA to 23 & Me, but I’m pretty sure I know what they’d tell me. Tl;dr I’m a settler living on stolen land.
-I have been a scholar of Indigenous ways of knowing and decolonial education, and a professional in anti-racist and decolonial education, since 2011.
- I am an American citizen and a product of American public school systems, with a Canadian masters of education.
-I am currently living in Toronto, which is situated on the heritage lands of many Indigenous groups, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. I conducted previous university study of Indigenous knowledge and history on the lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples.
I am producing “Recently,” first and foremost, for white people’s eyes, because I am, first and foremost, a white people. This is my first foray into non-poetic content creation (for my poetry stuff, please go here!). But I figured that, given the depth of my background in anti-racist/decolonial education, and my love of writing, it was time to put it all to use. Much of what I am doing with “Recently” is in an effort to deploy my personal skillsets and background as means of reaching other white people and involving them in the larger work of dismantling systems of oppression in the U.S. and beyond.
BUT! You should also be prepared for the presence of other types of pieces released with “Recently,” tending towards the more personal vs political. You will see reflective essays or long-form poems some weeks, and heavily researched items about systemic oppression, history, education, etc. during others. These rotations will allow me to share snapshots of my experiences as an educator, as a woman, and as a human in general, in relation to the work I do now. (I guess this is also a little self-serving, too, but this IS the internet after all.)
A note: occasionally, you will see reference to groups beyond white; early essays in this publication address, respectively “non-Indigenous Americans” and “non-Black Americans.” In these cases, my hope is to draw attention to ally work, or change making, to be done in support of specific marginalized groups.
Another note: you will often see me refer to doing “ally work,” but not identifying myself or other white peers as “an ally.” I don’t think that I am— I think that it’s my responsibility to do work that supports the empowerment of marginalized groups, but I don’t believe that I get to identify myself as an ally.
Final note: above all, my intent with “Recently” is to use what I have learned and experienced as fodder for readable writing. My hope is that readers will be reflect, learn, or grow a little bit as they go through the content in this publication. The more that we know about these systemic issues, the more effective our ally work can be.
Feel free to forward my stuff to the relative you complain about every holiday season, and then arrive at table with some pertinent talking points.
Best,
AKC