In “Grounding Conversations, Part 1: Situating Ourselves,” Dev describes themselves as a storyteller, a witness and archive that exists simultaneously in the past, present and future. Addressing criticisms of land acknowledgements, Dev explores their relationship with home and place, returning to the land and tracing the landscape of colonialism and how it led to the city they know and how they came to be there.
In “Grounding Conversations, Part 1: Situating Ourselves,” Dev describes themselves as a storyteller, a witness and archive that exists simultaneously in the past, present and future. Addressing criticisms of land acknowledgements, Dev explores their relationship with home and place, returning to the land and tracing the landscape of colonialism and how it led to the city they know and how they came to be there.
Dev Ramsawakh:
This is Grounding Conversations with Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI. This six-part segment series will lay the groundwork for the conversations that'll be happening on our broadcast during Luminato 2023 and provide a background on the frameworks with which our audio experiences attempt to engage. Many performance shows and arts festivals begin their programming with your typical land acknowledgement. However, many indigenous peoples have criticized the practice for relegating their relationship with the land to the past, which does more to alleviate settler guilt and discomfort than to demonstrate real solidarity and progressive action.
In my relationship to Radio LUMI, I want to acknowledge these criticisms as a way to use my platform responsibly. I don't want to just acknowledge the trauma indigenous peoples from all over have had inflicted on them, but to address how our society collectively is hurt by the mechanics of colonialism. I want to try to offer a demonstration of ways to actively engage with decolonial concepts and a practice to move forward on an interconnected journey towards collective liberation. In Grounding Conversations, I reveal myself as a time traveler, as I embark on a journey that weaves in and out of the past, presents and futures that are rooted in the festival's programming and our city's arts culture, tying them to the themes that the host here at Radio LUMI will be addressing from their own perspectives.
This journey will be created using excerpts from my body of work to address the ongoing impacts of colonialism on our collective society and the underlying principles of disability justice that the San Francisco-based Disabled Artists Collective Sins Invalid imbued into the term when they coined it in 2005 in order to teach us how to resist our interlocking systems of oppression. It's now time to embark on the first part of our journey, Situating Ourselves.
My name is Dev. You can call me many things, transgender, disabled, gender-fluid, Indo-Caribbean, descendant of immigrants, a perpetual trauma survivor, an artist, an activist. I personally prefer storyteller and archivist myself. It's a role I find myself in whether or not I'm paid for it. In a way, this also makes me a time traveler, though perhaps wanderer might be more accurate for my mobius temporal journeys or maybe it's just that I experience time differently. To me, it's not something that can be understood in a chronological or linear manner. From works like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and a number of precolonial cultural philosophies, I've come to understand time as something that exists all at once.
When I tell stories, I'm not just telling stories of the past. My stories don't exist in any one time or another. My stories trace the roots of our present to the past, but what defines my work is that it is always seeded with visions of the future. But all stories must begin somewhere. Where should I begin? That all depends on what this story is really about. Whether it's about me, Toronto, or the overlapping narratives from Luminato 2023 shows like Aalaapi, Treemonisha, Dragon's Tale or Little Amal, all of them can be traced back to stories of the land. We all have a relationship to this land. For some of us, it's our home where we work, where our families and communities are. For most of us, it determines how we live our daily lives, such as how its intimate relationship with the sky creates the climate and whether we continuously adapt to.
And for many people's tied to the city, it's colonization irrevocably changed their homes, their languages, their cultures and their relationships with, well, just about everything. When I'm working for my Downtown Toronto apartment, I can't forget that I don't just live in a plaster and concrete box held in the sky by disguised metal cages that exists as part of some modern urban civilization. I live on a transformed terrain connected to an even bigger organic landscape that had been cared for tens of thousands of years by many thriving indigenous communities, a landscape that was once thrumming and alive with human and nonhuman activities that couldn't and wasn't meant to be distinguished from each other.
What I know to be the ground, what is now a near geometric grid of roads and parking lots and condominiums was once forests and valleys and plains that blended together seamlessly filled with species of plants and animals that have been wiped from existence. The sounds I hear, the air I breathe, every sensation I experience daily are all modern inventions that have been carved into the earth in order to create the shapes of what I know as the city of Toronto. Nothing that's ever been grown in the city has been left untouched by colonialism. This was something that Justin Many Fingers, a two-spirit Blackfoot artist from Treaty 7 in the Western prairies discussed with me in 2019 as produced with the help of Xtra Magazine on the first episode of my 2020 podcast Cripresentation.
Justin Many Fingers:
As the newcomers came, they came with their asylums, they came with their madhouses, they came with their disabilities and what that was and how they discriminated to their own people and putting them into rooms and locking them away. And there's like very horrific stories of, that and in the culture, we never had that.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I met Justin into Toronto or Treaty 13 when he was visiting for the Cripping the Arts Festival held at Harbourfront Centre. This conversation began leading my journey with disability justice into deeper and more authentic directions.
Justin Many Fingers:
So the whole culture, specifically Blackfoot, when I was looking at the dis-art and the discommunity, it was never a disability. It was just individuals had to do something different.
Dev Ramsawakh:
He urged us to look to the knowledges that colonization tried to erase from our cultural worldviews.
Justin Many Fingers:
You don't have to reinvent what things need to be done within the disabled community, that all of these things already existed, minimum 14,000 years ago. There's a whole history of how we functioned in every single way. The more I delved into it, the more that I understood from the Prairie Sign Language, that was the first form of communication with the indigenous people and the White people and that this then evolved again, taken from the people and turned into American Sign Language. So American Sign Language has that root from the Blackfoot people and probably nobody knows that. What is helping people who are blind or visually impaired and the audio description or describers, well, that was already in the language because everything in the language is describing something in motion that everything was animate and not inanimate, that a rock is animate and you wouldn't say the rock.
You would put that rock into context, right? So you would refer to what you're talking about if that rock rolling down the hill, that's what you call that or the thing that walks on four legs and depending on what kind of animal, the thing that walks on four legs and describing what the antlers look like. If you spoke that at 14,000 years ago, you would be able to understand what is being described and that was in the language.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Now, Justin comes from Treaty 7, more specifically the Kanawa Blackfoot Reserve in what is colonially known as southern Alberta. But I was born, have lived and centered my work in Toronto or Tkaronto. This is also the land where Luminato 2023 is being hosted. For thousands of years, I've been told the land Toronto was on was a meeting place of many indigenous nations like the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunne and the Wendat peoples. There's been a movement to refer to Toronto as the name it was anglicized from, Tkaronto, which comes from the Mohawk language and means, "Where there are trees standing in the water."
While it is progress to honor the languages that colonialism attempted to extinguish, we should be aware that where was originally called Tkaronto is actually closer to what we now call Orillia and Lake Simcoe. But according to what I've been told is being discussed in indigenous communities connected to the city, the multiculturalism Toronto pride itself on can be traced back thousands of years, even beyond the patterns of precolonial migration that allow for cross-cultural exchanges beyond Turtle Island. From what I understand, there's a spiritual energy created from Toronto's geographic position connected to the waterways on other lands adjacent to it that made it a kind of, for lack of a better word, political meeting place, where nations came together to exchange knowledge and resources and collectively resolved conflicts until British and French colonizers came with their own plans for the land and its peoples.
However, these colonizers weren't just making their way to Turtle Island, but all over the globe, which begins the story of my own relationship to the city. Like many colonized communities, my ancestral history is fragmented and disconnected. I know that European powers like the British, Spanish and French weren't just on missions to colonize what we now call North America, but also the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Oceania and Asia, even other parts of Europe. "If it could be found, it needed to be conquered." This culminated in indigenous genocides across multiple continents, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and British imperialism taking root in the subcontinent of India.
Prior to colonization, I know that's where my ancestors were from, but their histories have been lost to me. I can't even tell you what language or cultural traditions we once had. That's because the idea of a cohesive India or even a single Hindu religion or culture was constructed during the 18th and 19th centuries by the British, to amalgamate dozens if not hundreds of different cultures, religions and practices into a unified identity that would go on to create the basis of the caste system in order to reproduce familiar colonial hierarchies associated with Whiteness. The creation of that hierarchy would lead to the arrival of my grandparents' ancestors to Guyana and Trinidad through British colonial indentureship.
As the British were forced to abolish the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, they didn't want to meet new expectations of formally enslaved laborers to be paid living wages and they began to ship in cheap labor from India and China by indenturing lower status citizens through criminalization and what one of my aunts once aptly described as trickery.
Ryan Persadie:
But I really want to honor the labor diaspora that we come out of.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Much of my own cultural history, I've had to learn through conversations with other Caribbean scholars like Ryan Persadie, who I spoke with in the fall of 2021 for my podcast, Jumbie: Colonized Monsters.
Ryan Persadie:
That were indentured laborers, right? I think we forget that we descend from sex workers and people who were criminalized and hyper-policed and hyper-surveilled. Like we only come to the regents for laborer.
Speaker 5:
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Persadie:
Right? And through the work of particular types of communities.
Dev Ramsawakh:
But I also learned that my family's choice in coming to Toronto isn't likely a coincidence.
Ryan Persadie:
The Canadian Presbyterian Church was the one that converted all these coolies.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Coolie is a reclaimed racial slur for Indo-Caribbeans to denote a removal from Indian society and class associations with labor.
Ryan Persadie:
Also Scotiabank is like literally all over the Caribbean commodifying space all the time, so is CIBC. So Canada has always had a foot in the door of the Caribbean.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Canadian banks and Canadian churches have all done damage to the various communities that have been displaced in the Caribbean, but as Canada, in particular Toronto, became more prosperous, and as feminism began to bring more White middle-to-upper-class mothers into the workforce, the government funneled in cheap non-White domestic labor from the Caribbean to keep their homes, children and elderly tended to. This is why there is an irrefutable Caribbean foundation to the city's culture, as Caribbean vernacular gets rebranded as Toronto slang and our cuisine, which combines West African and Indo-Chinese culinary traditions with those of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean like the Carib and Taíno peoples gets commodified by White entrepreneurs.
And as Toronto and Canada more broadly benefited from colonization of the Caribbean, they continue that legacy by culturally benefiting from the institutions they built from the resources stolen from the Caribbean.
Ryan Persadie:
So many, so artists come here in New York to record their music and then go back into all over the world. And so I don't see Toronto as separated from the Caribbean.
Dev Ramsawakh:
The more that I try to grasp my own history, the more that I keep learning how entwined it is with the histories of others, like the black and indigenous counterparts to the various communities that I'm a part of. When this land was colonized and settled by Europeans, they did more than occupy it. They planted every system and institution with seeds of the narratives that colonialism is fueled by like cultural constructions of false binary such as primitive/civilized, right/wrong, man/woman, art/science, Black/White, human/thing, true/false. This is why Sins Invalid outline the principles of intersectionality and commitment to cross movement organizing as critical pillars that uphold disability justice.
We can't pretend that systems of oppression exist in isolation of each other and it, in fact, forces us to commit to the liberation of everyone if we want to claim to support any one movement, whether it be dismantling ableism, racism, anti-Blackness or colonialism as a whole. This only begins our journey together, but the weight of the threads I've woven into this tale are heavier than they might appear. I'm exhausted from being weighed down by them. Let me find a place to rest for a moment. We'll come back to pick up these threads another day.
That was part one of the six-part segment series, Grounding Conversations, Situating Ourselves. This segment was produced by Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI as part of Luminato 2023. This segment included audio excerpts from interviews with Justin Many Fingers recorded in 2019 and originally released in 2020 as part of The Cripresentation Podcast made in production with Xtra Magazine and Ryan Persadie, recorded in 2021 and rereleased in 2023 as part of the remastered podcast Jumbie: Colonized Monsters.
The music used in this segment is by G.R. Gritt. Sound Effects were either from freesound.org or fully produced by Dev Ramsawakh.