There Always Has Been an Alternate Story

Jürgen Werner Kremer

With the beginnings of European enlightenment traditions, a new mental current started to arise. In the beginning its winds carried the bright light that dispersed church dogmata unable to withstand its revelatory scientific investigations. Yet, as these winds blew across time, the light it carried darkened and phantoms began to inhabit its currents. The winds of enlightenment increasingly became dark winds of delusion. The dance with uncertainty changed from a dance of grounded hope to an obsession with the control of the material world and the insistence on the increasing powers of control as Western science and technology developed together with what today have become neoliberal forms of politics and economy.

The phantoms inhabiting these powerful currents were born from a significant, and seemingly benign, move of consciousness. Their phantasmagorical birth is the culmination of a long process on European lands. The rejection of church dogma and the assertion of free and critical inquiry enabled two interrelated processes: 1) The development of a powerful materialistic and reductionist metaphysics that continues to facilitate so many contemporary benefits by way of its emphasis on empirical data together with the resulting technological boons. 2) Intertwined with it is the vanquishing of an Indigenous pragmatic and spiritual intimacy with other-than and more-than human presences, with the spirit(s) of place, with communities that include animals, plants and more. This separation or dissociation of human consciousness enabled the rise of modernity financed by colonial moves the world over. As a result we have the entanglement of modernity/coloniality (Mignolo, 1995, 2011; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), the two Siamese twins that to this day continue their global destructive impact.

Uncertainty is an inevitable part of life (unpredictable weather, unpredictable harvests, etc.); and uncertainty is also the companion of free will, choice, and imagination—while we have control over our intentions we do not have control over the results. Uncertainty is understood and responded to differently depending on its paradigmatic context. Dancing with uncertainty, in its indigenous sense, is the practice of grounded hope based in ceremonial intimacy with inner and outer worlds. Here uncertainty as part of life is acknowledged in ongoing practices of conversations within an ecologically grounded community. Hope and uncertainty are embedded in daily life. By contrast: with the rise of the Western Enlightenment, hope, a word etymologically of comparatively recent origin in the 13^th century, moved to transcendental realms and uncertainty became increasingly framed as the challenge of progress and control, most recently the struggles to control climate change. There is a qualitative difference whether uncertainty is understood within a paradigm of progress and the search for control or, alternately, a paradigm of balancing and nurturing conversations.

Western minds increasingly dedicated themselves to the seeming safety of one-dimensional rationality (Marcuse, 1964) while peoples present to the visionary or imaginal worlds of intimacy with all relations were dismissed as primitive, backward, and in need of enlightenment, i.e., in need of Western civilization. Forests, mountains, rivers, and earth were now ready for extraction to create profits and wealth for the elite minorities in power. This shift is the culmination of a long and complex history with much older multicultural traces. The “received view of science” takes the observer out of the intimacies with our web of life to create representations, a distancing from the world. The normative dissociation of Westernized minds relegated what is intimately woven into Indigenous minds to the world of phantoms. These elusive appearances on the periphery of consciousness are shunned as fantasies irrelevant to everyday interactions. And so are dreams now largely dismissed as irrational. Plants and animals, whether huckleberry or bear, are no longer relatives to engage with in nurturing conversations and agreements.

While systems emerging from Marxist or socialist traditions are notably different from systems based in the capitalist traditions of Western democracies, both are part of the same story, the story of normative dissociation, the story of separation from visionary and imaginal realms, the story of reductionism or physicalism with its all-pervasive obsessive desire to control and delete uncertainty from everyday life. Both delete stories of nurturing conversations with all community members and establish a social and symbolic order in which this normative dissociation is seen as natural. We could also say that this is a story of the masculinization of the world, the result of a long history of devaluing, discriminating against and persecuting women, together with other relentless attempts to erase feminine aspects of life. The result of this initially seemingly beneficial move of the Western Enlightenment (in terms of theoretical, pragmatic technological advances) has over time created immense suffering the world over whether in the form of genocides, the destruction of Indigenous cultures, our present climate catastrophe, environmental destruction, unsustainable levels of inequality, or identities unmoored from grounding nurturing conversations, and thus inflamed. The Enlightenment paradigm has maneuvered societies un/consciously committed to its metaphysics into a dead-end-street, i.e., the intensifying polycrisis of today.

C.G. Jung (1951/1959) didn’t mince his words when describing the state of the modern world, its “rationalistic and political psychosis that is the affliction of our day“ (p. 84, §140). Delusions are part of the psychotic spectrum and it was Einstein (1950) who identified the experience of separateness of humans from the universe as “optical delusion of … consciousness” and as cause of our ongoing malaise and lack of peace of mind. My term for the delusion of separateness is normative dissociation, i.e., the disruption of relationality, the splitting from interconnections that are able to naturally feed and ground our sense of identity, that help us face inevitable uncertainties, that generate grounded hope through ceremonial and storied intimacy with inner and outer worlds. Since the Renaissance the European traditions have been in a process of amplifying the power of dissociation by separating from interrelationships, from the relationality of nurturing webs, from intimate conversations with the world the self is embedded in, from ecology, from ephemeral and visionary spiritual dimensions, from more fluid practices of gender identity, from commitments to community that include more than the human animal. This is a splitting from the intimacy with rivers, mountains, plants, animals, and other beings as relatives, a dissociation from dreams that have the capacity to reach beyond our everyday waking self. Empathy, care, love, understanding, responsibility, mutuality are part of this paradigm that, inevitably, is not conflict free, but in well-functioning communities its participants attend to conflicts through restorative justice practices like ubuntu or ho’oponopono, the spirit of healing and reconciliation.

Here is an example of a contemporary description of such process of relational intimacy and grounded hope by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2027, pp. 8 & 23):

Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig (“the place where we all live and work together”, JWK) is an ecology of intimacy. It is an ecology of relationships in the absence of coercion, hierarchy, or authoritarian power. Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig is connectivity based on the sanctity of the land, the love we have for our families, our language, our way of life. It is relationships based on deep reciprocity, respect, noninterference, self-determination, and freedom. (…) This procedure or practice of living, theory and practice intertwined, is generated through relations with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg land, land that is constructed and defined by our intimate spiritual, emotional, and physical relationship with it. The procedure is our grounded normativity. Living is a creative act, with self-determined making or producing at its core. … Our intelligence system is a series of interconnected and overlapping algorithms—stories, ceremonies, and the land itself are procedures for solving the problems of life.

‘Dancing with uncertainty’ refers to a practice of living in which relationality is central. The algorithms of the Native natural/cultural world facilitate a sense of grounded hope.

In the European traditions the normal, everyday self of Indigenous provenance became the well-boundaried, closed-off self of Western modernity carrying the self-inflicted trauma of the violation of relationality (Cushman, 1995). The self that was embedded in an intimate process of relating transformed into a dissociative process; it split off from its nurturing connections. Communal relatives now are rejected and you can almost hear “it’s for your own good”. What was power-with in a web of mutual obligations and nurturance, now became narcissistically focused on the development and increase of personal power and profit, shoe-shining the ego with an empty center and with a voracious appetite for consumerism to fill this gaping hole. This is an addictive paradigm in which extraordinary technological achievements are no longer part of a story of balancing and mutuality.

By contrast, the normal sense of self of Indigenous provenance, by all appearances across traditions, is defined through its processes of relationality. Its ego, its will, its motivation, etc. are osmotically nurtured and contained in a process of intimacy within its local web of life it is a part of, the land lived on. This ego is a humble ego, tempered by humor, playfulness, and ongoing obligations to nurturing relationships. Uncertainty is an inevitable part of these relationships—whether as unpredictability of weather, hunt, and harvest or unpredictability of the results of implementations of decisions—yet, the algorithms of story and ritual offer an ongoing practice maintaining grounded hope in the midst of this uncertainty.

This normal sense of the relational self transmogrified during the process of Western Enlightenment into the individualistic, well-boundaried and masterful self (Cushman, 1995). This is, truly, a disfiguring process. It is a process of self-colonization that is the precondition of modernity/coloniality. This process of self-colonization is reflected in a shift in brain processes from the right hemispheric processes of experience, meaning, and integration as master to the left hemisphere as master, focused on representation and manipulation, the world of discrete objects that can be grasped (MacGilchrist, 2009). Now the web of life, the cycle of nurturing and being nurtured, is reduced to a world of objects with all aspects of relationality removed. It is this dissociative move, this objectification of our intimate relations that creates phantoms. These imaginal appearances on the fringes of the world of perceived objects have no place in the modern self other than as meaningless fantasies or pathological hallucinations. Now what is normal is defined by the psychology of individualism.

The separateness Einstein identified was not merely a powerful move that enabled the Western traditions of science and technology. The perspective shifted from a concern with staying in caring balance within the web of life to a focus on progress and the control of uncertainty. Significantly, this was a violent move. You might say there was something clever about this self-empowering distancing: what increasingly became seen as a web of distracting and distorting entanglements with different qualities of reality was now rejected, and with it the familiarity and intimacy with the intracacies of relationality that had been part of the cycle of nurturing and being nurtured—thus giving rise to a self-empowering distancing or dissociation. This clever seeming moving was done for the sake of apparent control through the powerful rationalistic explanations of reality. Concomitant we see an increase in emphasis on ego and egoic control. But this process was like banishing a member of the family: you are no longer one of us, you are other, you are a stranger. This banishment was an erasure of practices and memories of relationality. The Real, so to speak, shrank to the real. Reality became diminished.

Ana Teresa Fernández evokes the erasure of 43 students murdered during protest in Mexico City in 2014 in a stunning video in which a woman paints herself black and gradually disappears on screen. Erasure (2015) makes the viewer feel what it is like to be obscured in history, a violent move, for sure. It is an evocation not only of Mexican history erased, but the erasure of Indigenous histories the world over, histories untold in the dominant European discourse, yet remembered by Natives. And it evokes the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls along the Highway of Tears in British Columbia and elsewhere. And the innumerable Indigenous children killed in residential schools, hidden by the implicit and explicit violence of the dominant discourse.

With the rise of Western Enlightenment we notice the rise of whiteness as consciousness, racist and supremacist in its core. What the Enlightenment covered up are intimate relational connections that now disappear from view, from consciousness. White consciousness becomes identified with a host of issues: civilization, normalcy, (neo)liberal progress, individualism, even emancipation, etc. The creation of whiteness, the rise of normative dissociation, is the creation of phantoms, the violent rejection of familiars in a particular ecology. What was relative, now becomes phantom. The well-boundaried individualistic self is what is considered normal, civilized, and natural.

The violence of normative dissociation is foundational to modernity/coloniality and manifests on different levels. When the tree or the deer or the salmon or the mountain is no longer a relative, then I am freed from responsibility, from mutuality, from intimacy. I can take what I want, I can extract from the land what I want, I can use it to profit, it can be mine. The disruption of relationality gives rise to a particular quality of violence that is distinct from the violence that existed before.

Violence has always been possible and has been present throughout recorded history. The notions of Western civil societies were designed, among other things, to contain unpredictable and irrational violence through its legal frameworks (meaning: violence among humans, not violence against other-than-human beings). Humans have always been capable of social violence and local wars, whether as tribal warfare or inner conflicts leading, for example, to the destruction of entire villages considered out of balance (e.g., Lomatuway’ma et al., 1993; Malotki, 2002). This is a quality of violence distinct from the violence of modernity/coloniality.

It is the increasing presence of normative dissociation that arguably enabled genocidal violence aimed at the erasure of whole populations identified as other or primitive. History changed after the disappearance of Indigenous tribes and their languages holding specific ecological knowledge. History changed after the Shoah. History changed after Gaza. Normative dissociation affords an unencumbered sense of rationalistic necessity of the erasure of the other; it facilitates a scale of violence that is immune to feelings of care or empathy. Violence became more commonly impersonal and bureaucratic (Bauman, 2002). Strategies of erasure were and are executed through colonial moves the world over. And they continue to be executed internally, within countries, to erase groups defined as other, whether through forced assimilation, bureaucratic violence, deportation, or incarceration. The world of what Jung calls the ‘collective shadow’ expanded through external and internal increases in erasure and normative dissociation. With it we find the disappearance of freedom and liberty, their reduction to consumer choices and the click of likes, the self now trained in the habits of entrepreneurial auto-exploitation (Byung-Chul Han, 2017, 2021).

This erasure may simply seem directed at the other, but it is fueled by the haunting phantoms of what the Enlightenment has defined as non-existent or irrelevant, and thus made other. The other gets projected onto peoples who are still engaged in relational intimacy. The disappearance of Indigenous cultures may be seen as unfortunate and regrettable (giving rise to romanticism and nostalgia), while presented as inevitable and seemingly natural in the course of progress. At this point in history the white mind continues to destroy what it needs to ensure its own survival and the survival of Earth. In this profound sense genocidal violence, colonial and otherwise, is suicidal. What appears in the other are the phantoms practitioners of the Enlightenment assume they were able to leave behind in their quest to relinquish uncertainty through technological progress. These phantoms have come to haunt Enlightenment societies as they manifest in a variety of individual, social, and ecological ills. Western self perception is distorted, with phantoms right outside the fortress of the well-boundaried and masterful self (Cushman, 1995), part of the delusion of certainty. The poet Gary Snyder noted in 1970: “the most/Revolutionary consciousness is to be found/Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes:/Animals, trees, water, air, grasses” (published in 1974). He thought that “excess desire, whether for material good or epistemological certainties, was the source of suffering” (Douglas, 2006, p. xiv). The specter of the other looms and the violence against what is other, whether Indigenous or ‘other’ peoples or the environment, is executed to fortify this boundary and to prevent the disruption of its addictive process.

We may be utterly shocked and disconcerted by the increase in social violence, mass murders, shootings, lone wolf murders (with Anders Breivik as exemplar of someone fueled by the phantoms of the Enlightenment). The rise of what might be called disaster nationalism in an increasing number of countries (Seymour, 2024) is not as mysterious as it may appear at first glance. The pervasive deletion of Indigenous nurturing conversations over the last several hundred years has created a powerful reservoir of resentment as inequality and uncertainty have increased. The increase in a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness is fueled by Western progress addiction that tries to outrun its phantoms. The phantoms created during the rise of the winds of the Western Enlightenment fuel the emotional reservoir of fear and resentment, available to political manipulation. Racism, antisemitism, genocides, poverty, child hunger, etc. are maintained by this reservoir of increasing uncertainty, disorientation, and hopelessness. It is a stockpile of deep feelings, oftentimes unconscious, that is at the disposal for manipulation by the elites of a country. Sjón’s (2022) latest novel explores, as he acknowledges in the afterword, how this intense reservoir of intense feelings can be nudged one direction or another, in this case toward Nazism.

Our fundamental challenge is not a question of progress or technological development or new types of powerful interventions to make a difference in our polycrisis. Any adjustments in the story make a difference, of course. Differences in interpretation of a country’s constitution make a difference, of course. Who is elected as president or chancellor or prime minister makes a difference. What the current final word on foundational documents of a society is matters. Who is selected for the supreme court of a country makes a difference. Whether a country has functional unions or not can make a difference. However, all these do not change the foundational story. These are adjustments within a paradigm that has been flawed in its beginnings through its originary violence. This originary violence of rejecting relatives and reconfiguring what remains visible as resources ready for profitable extraction remains untouched by these adjustments. The violence at the root of the story, whether in its capitalist or socialist versions, has no space for visionary sovereignty, for the Indigenous intimacy in place that facilitates enacting freedom of a different quality.

Martin Luther King, popularizing the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s phrase, inspired the belief that the moral arc bends toward justice. The history of modernity/coloniality with its complex meanderings of gains in liberty and decolonization alongside increases in wealth, comfort, and abject poverty; of seeming increases in equality alongside extreme economic inequality and polarization; of rising dictatorships and fundamentalisms; of neoliberalism, autocracies, and the rise of fascism; of gender equality alongside gender discriminations and persecutions; of advances in health care alongside dismal global rates of infant mortality—these complex, contradictory, and utterly disturbing facts subject Martin Luther King’s sentiment to inevitable skepticism and questioning. Given the atrocities of the 20th century and the ongoing rise of fundamentalisms, nationalisms, sectarianisms, and divisive identitarianisms—are we now forced to see the moral arc bending differently?

Until we exit the Enlightenment story and acknowledge the phantoms it has created the hope for justice will continue to fade. For the moral arc actually to bend toward justice we need to exit the current story of normative dissociation, of modernity/coloniality. The moral arc will bend toward justice as soon as we commit to the work of remembrance, the painstaking exploration and presencing of what the original ancestral stories in a specific place mean today. This process of remembrance opens the portal to a renewal which will bring forth what could have been on European lands and the histories it birthed. The moral arc will then bend toward justice in both the colonies and the metropoles.

The winds of delusion that have its origin with the beginnings of the Western Enlightenment, have created a powerful world of phantoms and a reservoir of resentment that may make the dance with uncertainty suicidal, a dance macabre at the expense of millions of people, millions of relatives, and planetary destruction. Yet, the alternate story has always persisted, it has always been there. Transforming the winds of delusion into nurturing conversations with communal and ecological commitments of care and empathy is always possible.

Welcoming the Newcomers—Mistikôsiwak

Stories of first contact outside of the dominant colonial narrative are eye-opening. The following is a description of an encounter with Haudenosaunee along the Saint Lawrence River during the years 1534 and 1535. Cartier, who arrived in North America “with prejudiced expectations, mercantile and colonial agendas, and no common language”, describes how several Indigenous women

advanced freely toward us and rubbed our arms with their hands. Then they joined their hands together and raised them to heaven, exhibiting signs of joy. And so much at ease did they feel in our presence, that at length we bartered with them, hand to hand, for everything they possessed, so that nothing was left to them but their naked bodies, for they offered us everything they owned, which was, all told, of little value. We perceived that they are people who would be easy to convert, who go from place to place maintaining themselves and catching fish in the fishing season for food. (from Phillips & Phillips, 2020, p. 69; originally Biggar, 1924)

Kent Monkman’s Mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) counters such stereotypical descriptions of Native passivity, lack of shrewdness, and naiveté in his exuberant affirmation of Indigenous values of generosity and compassion. The painting Welcoming the Newcomers (the title of one panel of the diptych) is a precise and inclusive evocation of a past and future memory of what has been and what will be. This monumental painting brings the past into the present so that it may become what it might have been. Commissioned for prominent display in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the diptych was shown first in 2019, the 150th year of the Met. Its scale is commensurate with the momentous theme it evokes. One painting is entitled Welcoming the Newcomers, the other Resurgence of the People, collectively titled Mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People).

In the painting Welcoming the Newcomers we see a group of Native people on a rock outcropping rescuing and welcoming a diversity of shipwrecked people from different continents, cultures, ethnicities, genders, and different strands of life. Prominent is the trickster figure Miss Chief Eagle Testickle in their out-of-time high heels, with a tear running down their cheek; they are reaching out to rescue a slave still in chains. The people in the churned up waters are  exhausted and desperate, with a shark circling their capsized boat. The overall sense emanating from the center of the painting is one of welcome, warmth, relaxed sensuality and sexuality, community, and receptivity. The Natives on the rock have a vibrancy that reflects the complexities of life: from a reflective Hayo’wetha on the left; to a newborn; to an open-mouthed woman watching the circling shark with fright; to a warrior getting ready to aim an arrow at the newcomers; to a welcoming embrace between a Native woman and a European settler now safely on the rock; to a diversity of relationships between people. The emotions on the faces of the Natives range from reflectiveness, to fierceness, to sadness, to joy, to pleasure, to shock, to compassion, and more. A stand is taken, a welcome is offered. The emotions on the faces of the new arrivals range from relief to disbelief, to exhaustion, to distrust, to pain, to desperation, amidst the symbols of colonial settlement they carry: a Christian cross, military helmets, the clothing of “civilization”, and one woman seems to be chained to her rosary. Animal and plant life are part of the welcoming community on the rock outcropping with a shade giving flowering tree, a crab, and rats (presumably from the capsized boat). One of the new arrivals carries the insignia of a missionary and the history of Indian wars and genocide in the form of an arrow stuck in his side. Different historical layers are interlaced into the painting, from the trickster’s high heels to a Native arrow wounding one of the arrivals to the transformation of European art pieces into an Indigenous context of past and future.

The painting represents a pluriversal world as we find different Native cultures on the rock outcropping and newcomers from different cultures and from different continents in the waters arriving on the rock. What is shown as natural here is cultural and gender diversity. What is shown as natural here is the attitude of a warm welcome, of care, concern, vigilance, and compassion. It is a flash of memory, as Monkman brings this encounter of the past into the future of today and beyond. If we understand history as flashes of memory, as Walter Benjamin (1974) does (and, as I would contend, Indigenous peoples do) the creation of Welcoming the Newcomers is a flash of memory, an evocation of the entanglement of past and present. What flashes up is as much about the past (and its untold and denied Indigenous histories) as about our Indigenous futures. It points to what might have been. With the creation of this painting the past has remained open to become in the future what it might have been. This timely painting brings “not-yet-conscious knowledge of the past that has the structure of an awakening when retrieved” (Benjamin, 1982, p. 491, fragment K 1, 2 transl. from Benjamin, 1999).

While the history of European painting and sculpture is well-known in the dominant cultural context, Monkman’s inversions of historical material housed at the Met awakens not-yet-conscious knowledge of the past into the present, it brings the phantoms of normative dissociation into focus. His inversions are pointed and precise, hence powerful and transformative, as Phillips & Phillips (2020) have shown. What flashes up is an Indigenous future through the remembrance work of European art history. The Natchez by Eugène Delacroix (1823-24/1835), marked by grief and despondency, is transformed into an image of joy and pride. The Mexican Girl Dying by Thomas Crawford (1846) becomes a sensuous presence with the mortal wound and her inaccurate tribal accoutrements removed. Monkman flashes the past into an Indigenous future by using live models or specific historical Native people rather than generic, stereotypical images of Natives. The Native warrior as noble savage in the style of the Italian Renaissance depicted in a sculpture by Henry Kirke Brown (Choosing of the Arrow, 1849) becomes a fierce warrior seemingly intent on resisting settler invasions. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Hiawatha (1871-72), famously misrepresented in Longfellow’s epic poem, is liberated, with accurate tribal insignia, as Hayo’wetha, the co-founder of the Haudenosaunee confederacy. Hermon Atkins MacNeil’s romanticized sculpture of a Lakota initiation ritual (The Sun Vow, 1899); The Crouching Aphrodite of Doedalsas (Unknown, 1600s-1700s), caught off guard, controlled by male gaze; and Titian’s Venus and Adonis (1550s) all become Native presences. Gustave Courbet’s The Woman in the Waves (1868) is now ensnared in her rosary, or so it seems, and the male gaze is ameliorated by her suffering face and her apparent imprisonment in the dynamics of colonial settlement.

These imagistic flashes of memory are grounded in the subversion of the actual European history of art; this way the memory of Indigenous stories is made visible not only as corrective for the past but as memory for the future of what visionary sovereignty, the right to envision one’s life freely in a particular place, might mean. The precision of the inversion makes its revelations so much more powerful.

This flash of memory created by Monkman is the work of remembrance and, as Butler (2016) notes, “remembrance works against history, undoes its seamless continuity” (p. 102). Memory is like the capture of an event in a still photo, presumably truthful. By contrast, remembrance is the ongoing work of remembering as we round out the complexities of history, trying to resolve the tensions between the reigning stories and stories relegated to collective shadow material. Viewing this and other Monkman paintings invites us to engage in the work of remembrance of Indigenous presence buried under the linearity of Eurocentric depictions of history. The welcome the new arrivals are given helps us (post)moderns of non-Native mind to recognize it as flash of awakening (see also Barad, 2017). It brings the past into the present so that it may finally become what it might have been, a continent held by caretakers of all genders and cultures in their Indigenous minds. No, not a perfect world, for sure, but a world of a qualitatively different paradigm, and that is what matters.

This is the painting’s revolutionary potential of reversals and remembrances, its evocations of an alternate stories that have always been there. In these stories dancing with uncertainty meant and means engaging in nurturing conversations, in rituals and ceremonies that aim for balance, and thus nurture grounded hope. It is the remembrance of an Indigenous science and praxis of presence, the remembrance of visionary sovereignty flashing up in the present dangerous moment of careless and violent overwhelming uncertainty.

Monkman’s painting does not depict a nostalgic memory to be dissected in academic seminars or to be celebrated in romantic fantasies; instead it awakens as the “red pill” of coming-to presence, the potentially un/settling truths triggered by the red pill as seen in the movie The Matrix. Its imagery brings the phantoms of normative dissociation as disturbance into the center of contented ignorance the blue pill induces. Phantoms are welcomed as presences that have always been there, hidden behind the veils of normative dissociation. Instead of framing the painting, somewhat dismissively, as provocation, we need to acknowledge it as a material intervention in the making of time and history. It has interrupted the linearity of the story in which Indigenous mind is a memory of a distant and now useless past.

Similarly, the work (the inquiry, the research, and the ritual practices) of recovery of indigenous mind (for those of us who are out of our Indigenous minds), the work of the remembrance of visionary sovereignty, the engagement with decolonial practices—all of these are material interventions in the making of time and history; they are not merely a process in mind or consciousness, or a mere fantasy or fantastical image. Flashes of remembrance are never merely psychological. The assertion of sovereignty of Indigenous cultures and the recovery of indigenous mind for those disconnected, ritually re/constitutes our mind/matter intra-actions. Consciousness and matter—mind and matter—are intimately entangled (Barad, 2007). It is the work of manifesting the pluriversality of native quantum cosmovisions, everybody’s indigenous sovereign capacity to envision and co-create their world. It is the affirmation of Native liberty and visionary sovereignty, the claim to the option of engaging with uncertainty in a process of grounded hope based in Indigenous science and ceremonial work of balancing. No, this is not a rejection of the accomplishments of the Western sciences, instead it is their subsumption on the basis of relationality. The algorithms of stories, ceremony, and place provide the guiding coordinates.

The flashing up of images of indigenous nurturing conversations and their ritual presence, asserts the visionary sovereignty Indigenous peoples have always claimed for themselves: to live in their local ecologies in a balancing process. And the flashing up of images like Welcoming the Newcomers gives those of European mind the chance to break the progression of normative dissociation and to fight the history of self-colonization and modernity/coloniality. The trauma of normative dissociation at the root of modernity/coloniality is part of the creation of empty time and linear causality—but remove the dissociation and you remove linear understandings of history and now indigenous constellations flash up and can be remembered. What was phantom now becomes an intimate participant in the intricate balancing network of stories, inquiries, ceremonies, and place. Indigenous presence allows the manifestation of healing and balancing. The past flashes into the present to become what it might have been. Asserting and claiming the stories that have always been there and that continue to be there manifests the grounded hope of decolonial dances with uncertainty.

Feather dancing on the wind

Alighting on the rock of remembrance

Play of obligation

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