freedom from myself and from the land

on wednesday the 13th, i woke up at 9:00 so i could be at the bruce peel special collections in rutherford library south by 10:00. a couple of us from my NS 211 class met there so we could take a look at the javitch collection, which has a lot of information pertinent to native studies. we looked at a copy of treaty 6, and some old prints of photographs. after that, i stopped in SUB for a bagel, and then went to pembina for cree at noon. i LRT'd to bay station, because my CSL class was meeting at the edmonton chamber of volunteer organizations that afternoon to hear some guest speakers. i heard some crazy statistics, including one bit of research following 15 homeless people in calgary for a period of 18 months, which found that each of these people used approximately $200,000 worth of social services in that time. ho-leh! i left class a little bit early so i could LRT back across the river for an appointment with my naturopath at 4:00. we are trying to figure out what is causing my millions of allergies, and he thinks it is food, so he has proposed that i either do a cleanse, and then gradually add in more foods and see if i react to them, or do a blood test. the blood test is just a finger prick, but it costs $250. the food experimentation will cost about the same because i will have to eat very particular foods. ugh. i talked to my mom about it later that night, and she said she'd pay for half of whatever i decided to do, but only on the condition that if they found anything that i was allergic to, i'd have to commit to stop eating it. i dread that the tests will tell me i am allergic to sugar or potatoes or meat, and i don't think i can live without those things. so here comes a brand-new season of debilitating allergies! afterwards, i met becky and jessie at steeps, but we all only stayed for about an hour. becky had to go to her moccasin-making class, jessie and layne went to cree class at the native friendship centre downtown, and i went home to study.

on thursday i went to NS 211 at 9:30, where we had a really great class discussion on indigenous education. it was easily the best class of that course this year. afterwards, i skipped NS 390 and cree so that i could study for the two midterms i had later that day. i wrote my ecological anthropology midterm at 3:30, and i'm quite sure i failed. that's especially frustrating for me, because i think i have a pretty good basic understanding of the ties between culture and nature, but the prof for that class blows through all the information very quickly, and then asks really ridiculous questions about the information that she has hardly given us time to process. plus, all we are really learning about in that class are the 5 subsistence strategies (foraging, extensive agriculture, nomadic pastoralism, intensive agriculture, and industrial agriculture). boo. i finished my exam at 5:00 and, feeling pretty bummed because i had done so terribly, rushed to good earth cafe to pick up a roast beef panini and an orange poppyseed muffin to eat while i crammed for my contemporary aboriginal art midterm. i wrote that exam at 6:00, and i think i did considerably better on it than on the earlier exam. afterwards, as we handed in our exams, we showed our instructor the collages we had each made, which were worth 10% of our final grade. my instructor loved mine, and asked if i were an artist. i told her no, i wasn't, but that i made a lot of crafts. as i was walking down the hallway after class, a girl ran up to me and asked if she could see my collage, because she had seen it when i was at the front of the room and wanted to see it up close. all that made me feel really good about myself, so i bussed down to steeps to show jessie my collage and to tell her about my instructor's reaction. then i walked to safeway to buy some orange juice and multigrain bread, and then i came home and knitted my raven for a while.