I was really excited when I received my instructions from Kimia, I love savoury food, peppers have never been my favourites, but I had a good feeling about peppers dolma style, I have only had a little bit of experience with Persian food, but a friends father taught me how to make rice with parsely and mint, mmm yummy, and I have a Kurtish friend from northern Iran, and her cooking is always delicious, and she taught me how to make grape leaf dolmas this past spring. So I was pretty sure I was going to love what Kimia sent. My favourite part of the instructions was when she wrote about her Azari heritage and summers visiting grandparents and the gathering in the kitchen to make the dish – the hectic and mishaps were definitely a part of my experience – which hopefully you will be able to see from my non-verbal feedback. And yes, Kimia, the kitten was nearby almost the whole time!!!
I’ve got all the ingredients, I’m ready to go, but it’s getting kinda late…
Sorry bubs it’s getting late, I don’t think I have the energy to make it for dinner tonight, lets put in a frozen pizza, I’ll make it for lunch tomorrow.
Okay so this part was really beautiful, and I was not able to convey in my nonverbal presentation, but the mint I used came from my backyard, but originally I brought that mint back with me from Ontario, it is from my grannies summer garden at the loghouse/schoolhouse. The recipe was from Kimia’s grandma, and the first ingredient was from my granny! So far so good. I also learned how to wash my rice up all nice, and put on the Persian Mix Kimia sent to cut a rug while I prepared the dish.
minty freshness, uncle phil freshness
oh shit
Still doing good, I got the onions, and the spice, and the meat, and the herbs… it smells so good!! But wait! Oh! I think I made my first mistake!! Eeeeeu. rewind. So proud that I washed it all nice, and got the onions going, I forgot to cook the rice! Eeek!
back on track, Nomi approves
The rice is cooked, I switched over to the Anzari mix, which I dig, the sun is out, the door is open, the air is fresh and Nomi is supervising!!! I am starting to get a bit hungry though… don’t worry Bubs, I’m almost there!
Peppers prepped, Nomi still approves.
Okay so a series of missteps, I also forgot to add the tomato paste to the rice mix, and ran into some pot sized discrepancies, so I can get all four peppers into one pot, but its tight, and then i read that I need a lid, that pot doesn’t have a lid, i usually use a plate, but it drips a lot… so I use the other pot, but its too big, I need one or two more peppers to fill it out, So I grab a couple spoons and wedge them in so the peppers don’t fall over.
instructions received – ingredients ready
Hahah, and then I read, cook for 2 hrs, or until the water is all gone. Spoiler alert – in the bigger pot after 4 hours, the water still hadn’t evaporated very much!! Sorry bubs, I’ll make us sandwiches us some sandwiches.
instructions received – ingredients ready
So good, definitely worth the wait! Now it’s getting quite late again, and I still have to make my presentation for class tomorrow morning!!! Hey Nomi! People food isn’t for you!!!
It turns out that Pepper Dolma makes a great breakfast!!
Kimia’s recipe was delicious! And even though we hadn’t spoken, it felt as if we knew each other very intimately. After the action was over we took the opportunity to chat over zoom, there was an ease to it, but also a bit of awkwardness, we had shared so much with each other. Once you arrive in Vancouver Kimia, we will have to get together to prepare some dolma. It would be a lot more fun, with more of us in the kitchen together! Thank you for sharing with me. I have more peppers and plan to make it again soon!
Every year I make plum jam, the past two years the plum tree has been getting sicker and sicker, it doesn’t make enough to jam anymore. I didn’t get to eat a single plum off the tree this year. Driving back from Trail we stopped in Keremeos cause I saw a sign: “Peaches 20lb for $10”. They were the ugly peaches, still tasted great, but looked funny so wouldn’t sell well at the store (this is a weird phenomena), but they would taste great as canned peaches. I went through the process of canning them, documenting the process thinking it might be my Terre project, but they weren’t the plums from the tree in my backyard. I had never canned peached before, it didn’t feel like this was it… however, Bill got excited to eat the yummy peaches, and I thought they might taste good with oatmeal for breakfast the next day, Bill gave me a big thumbs up! Oatmeal, now that is a special meal, especially the way I make it. I think I had found my terre.
peaches, cream & oatmeal
After action 1, I was still thinking about my discomfort with borders, my canadian national identity, and this feeling of disconnect from my families history, ancestry, and connection to place. For the oatmeal I knew I could take a very historical path, and maybe even connect with my heritage in some way, I went to the bookshelf, and next to the book I intended to pull out was Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Unlike last week I didn’t do a reading, but it did spark a memory of one of the stories she had written about, that seemed relevant to what I was feeling. She spoke of camping with her father, and how every morning he would pour the first bit of coffee off as an offering to the the mountain they were camping next to. She percieved this as an important ritual. When she asked him about it later in life, he laughed. He was showing gratitude to the mountain, but it wasn’t an elaborate ritual, the grounds always floated to the top, he poured them off onto the ground before filling the mugs, and along the way started to give a cheeky little prayer to the mountain. It was a ritual that had emerged, it was a blend of humour, grounds, and gratitude. For me as someone who is untethered from my past, this way of approaching the action made more sense. How do you ground yourself when you have been untethered. Sometimes you have to start from where you are. Unbinding the book solidified this frame of mind for me. The book was a going away present from work, it was beautiful, but also, it was a symbol of cultural appropriation and commodification, I thought it was weird parting gift especially because we had had some big conversations about systemic racism in those last few weeks. It was sitting next to the other books on the shelf, so I took it down, looked at the lacing, and started to undo it. I didn’t cut the string, but patiently undid the knot, and began to unlace it. It felt good. I didn’t have to accept the gift as it was, I could deconstruct it and turn it into something else. So this was my starting place for building a set of instructions for Kimia. Knowing that I am disconnected but that I can still build meaning and gratitude into my life and that connection can be emergent.
undoing to start doing
Finally making
I had a lot of fun constructing this for Kimia! part analog part digital, it reminded me a bit of stop-motion animation, the way it came together. The ritual and experience of it centered around time of day, feelings of comfort and warmth, and preparing oneself for a day of action and activity. Click on the link below to see the booklet instructions. One thing I noticed while I was making the oatmeal diagrams, I used fabric to represent the oats, in action 1, it was the linen that connected me to ancestors and place. Here the oats are again place specific – they grow well in cold wet climates. I wasn’t sure if Kimia would be able to find them in Iran, but I learned that Barley was indigenous to Iran, and still grown there, and that nutritionally it was actually better for you than oatmeal, and could be cooked into a porridge the same way, but that it didn’t grow as well in the colder, shorter, wetter growing seasons in Canada and Scotland.
meeting Garima under orange conditions, as the smoke begins to roll across the border to the mountains.
Garima and I met over zoom, the orange sky behind her in Seattle would come and meet me when I returned to Vancouver later that week. In our first conversation we tried to get to know each other a bit and place ourselves. I was quite excited because it seemed like we had very complementary interests and were looking in similar directions for our work. However we were in contrast with how we placed ourselves and felt ourselves moving through the world. This contrast stayed with me, and it will probably be something i return to again and again, and was maybe amplified because I wasn’t at home in my own space, but was away visiting family for this first conversation.
Back in my undergrad I took a course with Rita Wong, it was a design course, on water, taught by Rita who is a writer and a poet. It is the course that has stuck with me the most, and will likely guide some of the work I do on my thesis. In the course we introduced ourselves not with our professions, but by the body of water we grew up with. It was a beautiful way to start shifting perspectives, so that’s how i introduced myself to Garima. Only, I was immediately struck with a feeling of displacement. I was visiting my father in common law in Trail BC, and I didn’t know much about the Columbia River we were next to, I tried also introducing by way of Fraser River/Howe Sound/Burrard Inlet, and realized to that I didn’t really know except by looking at a map. I then thought about my childhood water, the Thames River in London Ontario, but really it was my summers up on the Bruce Peninsula of Georgian Bay, with my granny, cousins, aunts and uncles, that felt most like home. I could hear the sound of the waves, the drive down the dirt rd in the back of the farm van, with no seats or seat belts, to head to uncle Jim’s rock for a swim in the clear cold water. the underground aquifers and streams that would leak out to the rocks to fill your water bottle with, except for the years when the cows and farming contaminated the water, and we would have to boil it first. Garima described the water from her childhood in India, it was a water that she felt bad for, “that poor river.” It was dry and dirty, not being cared for. Canadians have a myth of abundance around water – and so we do not take very good care of water here either. It makes me think of the responsibilities we have to the the gifts of nature, and how often we fall short.
Garima noted that while water was a place of comfort and liberation, and metaphor of freedom for many white Canadian’s she has an opposing relationship with it. Water made her uncomfortable, she didn’t grow up swimming, it was a place of discomfort for her, though she had started to increase her exposure and had a taste of the feeling of competence and pleasure, and that was something she wanted to explore more… Garima took a different approach to the introductions, her inclination was to think a bit more chronologically, but also from a bordered perspective. Her life had been about moving from India, to the US, to Canada, and so her perspective was from shifting identities and being on the edges of things, liminal spaces, and also that thinking that way was always at the forefront because of her skin colour, identity and her experience immigrating to different countries. I realized that this made me feel very uncomfortable, unsettled, because I know I am not a welcomed guest here in what is now called Vancouver, or where I grew up in London Ontario, and in the future as Bill and I plan to move to the Kootenays, where he grew up. I was confronted with my colonial-settler identity, and also felt so disconnected from the places where my ancestors were from – I have little connection with Middelharnis where my Oma and Opa immigrated from in the 1957, I have no connection to my Grandfathers family, only that Nana Muchan was a hard women and they came over from somewhere outside Glasgow, and my Granny’s family who I feel most connected to, well they settled here before Canada was Canada, in the Ottawa Valley, and the original 200 year old farmhouse was still occupied by a cousin until very recently. Through her I am one of the early colonizers coming from England, Ireland and Scotland (the Fraser Clan).
From our first meeting we were left with these contradictions, water has its own agency it rises and falls and crosses borders, but also politicized and controlled, damned and used, managed or uncared for, but utilized, it could make a person comfortable or uncomfortable, it could be empowering to have mastery navigating water, but is terrifying when water takes the agency away from you. Then the boarders which are socially constructed but real, they can be invisible, or made apparent, those with power can navigate them with ease and invisibility, those with less privilege must live their lives through the boundaries and limitations of boarders, and yet boarders are permiable, people move through them, animals, winds, waters, smoke, and fires seem unbound by them. The smoke from the US wildfires was drifting North, and the waters from where I was situated were flowing south towards the fires and the ocean. How long would it take for the water I swam in to reach Garima?
water fire mountains, photos by Bill John Batt, where the Salmo meets the Pend Oreille.
Bill and I took one more trip out to the campsite, to go fishing, and swimming. He caught two small mouth bass, I slathered them with butter, salt, pepper and lemon, popped them in the fire, and we had a good dinner. I swam across the river and back, avoiding motorboats and staying aware of the current. It was the first time where we had left our home since March, other than a trip to the grocery store every two weeks, and I could see the stress and pressure melt from Bill’s body. He’s a patient man, he makes a good fisherman, but he holds a lot in. I could also feel the stress melting away especially when I moved my body through the water. A good reset I hope, because we were about to return to the city, and who knew how this masters program was going to go. There were things I was noticing around me. There were a lot of other people out trying to get in a last bit of summer camping, some people trying to get away from the Covid, some people acting like it never happened. We were where the Salmo River meets the Pend Oreille, and well Trail is a smelting town for a reason, there is gold and all sorts of minerals in these mountains, mining shafts abandoned as open pits. We were also situated between three hydro dams. Which unlike tides on the coast don’t follow a schedule. The water rose and lowered without much of a schedule. This affected the temperature of the water, the cleanliness of the surface, the places where the fish hung out. I kept wondering what were the ramifications of damming up the river? It made me think of a book we read in RIta’s class, E’au Canada, and I realized I had some more learning to do. When I got home I started making these water colours (I know, so obvious), but I also pulled a few books off my shelf. I ended up reading a book Rita had co-edited called Downstream – Reimaging Water. What I took away was how Rita and her co-editer Dorothy Christian spoke about meeting, building a relationship and deciding to work together. How Rita was able to work in allyship, and yet still called for there to be more authorship and publications from fully indigenous perspectives. I also noted that they met when listening to Lee Maracle speak. When I arrived in Vancouver, I realized I knew nothing about the indigenous history of the west coast, nor felt comfortable with the plants, animals and terrain/geography, and oceans were bizarre to me. Lee Maracle’s I am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism, was the first book I read to try to situate myself. I was starting to see patterns, and I know we are supposed to be making, but there were readings, stories and authors that kept calling for my attention from the bookshelf. It was nice to be home again.
The watercolours were an obvious choice, but a starting place. Here’s a rundown of why each one came about: 1. They told me there’s gold in these waters, was the first one I did, once we got home Vancouver was hit with the smoke from the forest fires same as Garima had been. We were back in Vancouver, self-isolating because we had traveled during covid, and we couldn’t go to the backyard or open our windows, it was hot and stuffy and the cat was pissed that she couldn’t go outside, and it felt very oppressive after camping by the river. While we were at the river, we drove back using the service access road, which was pretty scary at times, rough, washed out areas, going 20km/hr, with pretty big drop-offs from mountainside to water. better for a four wheeler or a dirtbike than for a minivan. While on that road we could see were three years back the fire had jumped from the US side of the river to the Canadian side, and it looked and felt alien and ominous. Bill took the photos cause I am the more courageous driver, but the image of charcoal trees up the mountainside was burned into my head. 2. I use a splitter to divert the water – was in response to a memory of reading from Eau Canada – there was a Canadian small town in the Kootenays and an Indigenous First Nation living side by side, the town had diverted the water for their municipal use, and the Reserve had no access to fresh water. They had lived for centuries by adapting their activities to the available water, whereas the town diverted the water away from them for their own uses. I went out back to water the garden after being away and wanted to acknowledge I was a part of that redirection of water 3. My cat likes to watch while I paint upon getting home, i realized that even through we had talked about place in terms of water and borders, that it was really people who made a place home for me, in my case Bill and the kitten Nomi, also my sibling who lives 8 blocks away from me, and that when I think of my childhood home, its my granny, cousins, aunts, uncles, leeks, apples, georgain bay, moss, corn fields, snowy highways, that make me feel at home. I was thinking of the farmhouse from my granny’s family, and the school house and loghouse we lived in over the summers together, and of my uncles field full of flax flowers, and the small rectangle of woven flax from the old farmhouse, and my garden in east van, full of flax flowers that the bees adore, and the crop of flax I had harvested the morning we left for Trail, and even the research I had started doing into my dutch heritage, and flax seemed to be a plant, and linen a material that had commonality to all my homes (not my future home, I guess, but Bill and I found a wild asparagus patch in our explorations – so that gave me a feeling that Trail has potential to be a future home and a connection to my previous locations). 4. untitled & unfinished the last one was a sketch of my cat sitting in the window with the orange sky, as orange as the sky in Garima’s photo at the top. it seemed like a good way to close, but also I like that it was unfinished and left undone in the end.
The next meeting with Garima we shared our explorations. I was so excited by the direction hers had taken, supporting her mom to clear out her stuff, getting rid of old paperwork signifiers of boundaries and immigrations, letting go of the past, and the turn from catharsis through burning, to catharsis through submersion. Transforming the forms and documents into a fresh material, not fully extracted from the past, but still something new, and unattached to the past. It was lovely. By now I was thinking deeply about the flax, but also how to present it, the flax was still retting, breaking down through moisture, and I have never done this before so, I had no idea if it was going well, but didn’t think it was ready for the next phase of being processed into linen. I also wanted it to be an open ended visceral experience, audio, Garima tested it out with me as I used my headset to play the flax by interacting with it in its current material state (unfinished, in process). The test went well. I now knew what I was going to do for the 2 min presentation. Unfortunately the next day, the audio didn’t work as expected over bluejeans, and I felt hugely disappointed that I wasn’t able to create a soundscape for people to respond to. I have downloaded the flax recording below, and we will see how and when this first failure gets revisited as we continue to work through these actions. Hmm, oh yeah, and around the same time I started exploring the audio of flax, I also started to play with embroidery, it was something my granny always did, but not something I had ever picked up. I was also interested by one of the dialogue readings where border thinking, was equated to people as cyborgs, monsters and tricksters. My most beloved people are trans, queer, weirdos, 2spirited, so I was thinking of monsters in a loving way. I had also been reading N.K Jemison the Inheritance trilogy – where some of the most interesting characters were a third kind of monstrous godlings. I had also been talking with a friend about racism and systemic racism and how I had been called out for discrimination last March, my friend said something really powerful to me, it doesn’t matter if you did something right or wrong, that person was hurt, when someone is bleeding you don’t stand there asking did I do something right or wrong to cause this injury, you do something to try to stop the bleeding. What was I going to do to address this persons pain? We talked about how white people like to be the good guys, and were uncomfortable with being the bad guy, and that in her experience, being a person of colour, she had gotten used to being a bad guy. So I think I was also playing with the embroidered monsters as a way to place myself as the the bad guy or monster.
