"...echoes of the things that came before"
This week we float in some ancestral soup cooked in connections above and beyond as we side quests our way through embodied kin, food as offering, and t̶h̶e̶ magic (in) the gathering.
This is part one of a two part piece. Following chapters will include illuminating scenes from all seasons of Reservation Dogs and True Detective: Night Country. Major spoilers ahead.
(i) it’s not about the fish: sitting with the feelings
In Season 3 Episode 6 (Frankfurter Sandwich) of Reservation Dogs1, we follow Cheese and his Elder Uncles, Big, Bucky and Brownie go on a little camping trip. Their mission was to bring Cheese out of some funk of not wanting to be around his close friends, preferring to isolate himself at home, playing zombie killing games in his room. Cheese, as the series suggests has no immediate blood kin and details of his parents whereabouts are (i’m guessing) purposefully left out. Here, we learn, as in several episodes of the series, that it is the duty of these Elders to look out for him.
Cheese: So you just throw it out, reel it in, and eat it? This is riveting.
Brownie: That’s not what it’s about. You’ve got to change that colonised mindset nephew. You know, it’s not about the fish. You got to turn that internal pressure gauge off. Got your mind going so fast. Look at that dirt on the ground. Go on touch it. Pick it up. Take a good look at it. Smell it. There’s nothing like that anywhere else in the world. It exists only here. And you’re a big part of that right now. Take a big breath. The air you are taking in is all the medicine and the chemicals from all these trees going right into your lungs. That’s healing.
Brownie: Now quiet. Listen really good. [birds singing, leaves rustling]
Cheese: What I am listening for
Brownie: Listen… [Lets out a fart and laughs]
Cheese: Gross!
Uncle: That’s it. That’s what it’s all about see. It’s about us being out here in nature together.
As they kindle the fire, prep their fish and wait for it to cook, Bucky asks Cheese what’s been bugging him. Cheese reveals his fear of being abandoned by his friends and that they might move on without him. Bucky, who is a strong believer of string theory tells Cheese “We’re all connected on a molecular level. Even if you’re not seeing them, the quantum thread cannot be disentangled.” Cheese looks on utterly confused. Bucky tries again and says “The soul contract cannot be untethered. These are the bonds you don’t want to break.” It is suggested through this and in the subsequent scenes, that the Uncles do not know how to get through to Cheese.
After preparing and eating their catch, the Uncles sit quietly on their camping chairs with full bellies.
Cheese: So what now?
Big: This. This is what we do in the woods. You’re just not used to it.
Cheese: You guys don’t play charades or guessing games?
Big: [Amused expression]
Cheese then suggests something he had participated in during his short stay at a boys home when his bio-uncle was arrested for possession of drugs. Cheese picks up a stick and offers a sharing circle. He sets a casual tone, share his name and pronouns and declares that he thinks he is a pretty happy person, “generally speaking” although the expression on his face suggests otherwise. Big who is the last to share changes the tone altogether:
Big: I’m big..Oh i don’t know..Shit. Well I’ve guess I’ve realised that I’ve been bottling up a lot of pain. [starts crying] You know as men, you know we are taught not to recognise those feelings and Um lost a friend. Two of em. But I knew in my heart, I was trying to help. I was trying to be a good man. You know what, I was just avoiding it you know? And that guilt, fuck it started eating me up in that way. I realised we all make mistakes and it’s ok. [Heavy sobs]
Cheese: Let it out.
Big: All right.
Cheese: Just let it all out.
Voila, a breakthrough. It’s only after this shift that we learn that all of them has lost a friend, even Bucky who earlier has shared about the importance of not breaking bonds. Unlike most series that explores the complexities of intergenerational trauma, Reservation Dogs level up by touching on something, imo, much more difficult; intergenerational healing. It requires more than just the conventional wisdom of age. It requires trust that a renewed approach, suggested by someone much younger could offer up the same impact AND that the same impact can be had for the lived experiences of someone older. In the end, we are all capable of looking out for each other, no matter the age and we are all trying to find ways to get to each other.
Maybe, as Brownie had suggested in the earlier scene, it is only when we are temporarily away, in these old as time places that we can “listen really good”, its in these spaces that hierarchies dissolve and what is left behind allows for us to sit with our feelings and let it all out. Go try it sometime, pack some food, bring a friend and go off route for a few hours and be surprised but what may surface from the deep.
(ii) Gather large, gather small: On food and other offerings
For as long as I remember, there is a deep connection in my family and as a Malay person, in preparing food and eating together. Growing up, we’d gather and cook for doa selamat (thanksgiving), kenduri (feast), tahlil (offering prayers for a recently deceased family member followed by food) and during weddings, before catering became accessible and affordable, immediate family members would usually rewang, staying up all night to prepare the food that would be served the following day.
I truly believe this is a practice of my ancestors. The ways of Tahlil for example, in mourning the dead after 44 days of passing, is not practiced in Arab nations or other Muslim communities. The act of coming together to read prayers, which is followed by a feast, is very much a syncretised version of the kenduri, a Javanese tradition which has become commonplace for Malay Muslims of the region. Many of us today however prefer the catering option and preparing food together is no longer the large social function it used to be.
Now as an adult, this practice have manifested to cooking with friends, inviting them over to our home for food or being a guest of such non-festive feasting at someone else’s home. This is for me the purest practice of queer love as the heteronormative nuclear household is subverted by having chosen/blood kin over to cook, dine and clean up after. Here there is no mother in the kitchen, no father that comes home, no children setting the table. Here we take turns, to cook and bring extra food from home, bake desserts, do the dishes before we potate on some soft thing, a couch, a rug, some large cushions, comfortable in our fullness, and having no specific intention other than our desire to gather and be around one another. Here we declare let us feed each other with our love.
**
In True Detective: Night Country2, the act of gathering, around food or otherwise, some large or small event, becomes a strategy of resistance. Episode three begins seven years prior to the events that have unfolded in the first two episodes. Navarro, an Iñupiaq Dominican trooper bangs loudly on the door of a house. She is tasked to arrest Annie Kowtok, an activist for trespassing and destruction of property at the Silver Sky mining factory. A piercing scream can be heard before Annie opens the door and informs Navarro that a woman is already 10cm dilated and about to give birth.
Annie K: “Shoot me but I need to get that baby out of her.”
Navarro: “This a clinic?”
Annie K:“A birthing centre, last one in the region. Do you want to arrest me for that to?
The pregnant woman who was sitting in a birthing tub surrounded by women looks up and angrily asks “What the fuck is she doing here” indicating to Navarro. Annie quickly looks at Navarro and includes her in by saying, “She’s helping…Bring hot water…” Navarro fills the tub and carefully joins the women in cheering on the birth of the baby. One of them held Navarro’s hand encouragingly. The baby was born without a heartbeat and although the women were alarmed, they kept their chill for the sake of the distraught mother. Stillbirths are common in their small town due to the levels of pollution coming from the mines.
After managing to revive the baby, the women share their relief through wordless glances. Annie turns to Navarro and says, “You can arrest me now,”.
In the middle part of the episode, we return to the present. This time, it is a protest against the mine that are causing stillborns and contaminating the water in Ennis. A quick scene shows people handing out plates of food. Chants of We were here before can be heard. Denvers’s step-daughter, Leah, an Iñupiaq raised singlehandedly by Denvers who is white and a cop, saunters in by accident and decided to join the protest. One of the protestors clocks her. “She’s my stepmom.” Leah replies defensively and the protestor quickly assures her that “anybody who cares is welcome here”.
At the same time, we find Denvers and Navarro at a hair salon. Navarro is interrogating a woman on Annie Kowtok’s involvement with one of the scientists and her murder just a few years prior. Denvers waits outside. The woman’s young daughter interrupts the interrogation, somehow upset or reacting to her mother’s anxieties. Denvers steps in, comments on the unicorns on the little girl’s clothes and bring her to the kitchen. Denvers asks if there’s mac and cheese and momentarily distracts her by preparing it together as the interrogation continues in the other room. The gathering here is the smallest of the lot but the affect is the strongest.
The episode ends in a reversal of its beginning. Denvers visited an Iñupiaq mother who recently lost her child. Similarly, a quick shot of women gathering and passing plates of food, sitting together, humming and throat singing to comfort the mother. Denvers enter the room and exchange a knowing look with the mournful mother. Denvers too had lost her son. These scenes echo one another, hesitancy, wordless gesture, outside and then inside. There’s food too, in the background or central to the scene, in birth, life and death.
**
In season two of Reservation Dogs, fourth episode titled Mabel, we see this too. A gathering of people, over food. This time around Elora is readying the death of her grandmother Mabel. The scene opens similarly to that True Detective’s episode, with a gathering of people. The elder medicine man Old Fixico lights a fire and perform the ceremony for Mabel’s death journey. The scene cuts to hands kneading fry bread, stirring of corn soup, a spring onion omelette sizzling in the pan. We follow Elora out of the room and she is greeted warmly by her friends and family, all coming to gather at her home. They all bring some offering of food, words, kindness and comfort.
Here we catch a glimpse of gender roles. The ones in the kitchen are the aunties and the girls, as the men wait for their food to be served. Much like True Detective, aside from the scenes at the protest, all of that labour of providing comfort, (and preparing food) falls on the women. In a later part of the episode, an auntie steps in to teach one of the girls how to knead a fry bread. It would seem that the men set camp and fish whilst the women remain in the kitchen. No one seem to question their allocated responsibilities. Well at least not directly. The same auntie remarked as two of them looked on to the girls performing the same roles they did when they were younger, “Just liked we used to do.” The other auntie replied, “Well some of us are still doing it”. But are these gender roles too some part of my “colonised mindset”?
Anyhoos the food is served and they gather to eat. This scene tugged my insides because it feels so familiar and close to me. I’d dare to say, probably the same familiarity for most of us. An ancestral echo: people sitting side by side in a bustle of fleeting conversations, balancing a full plate of food on one hand, a feast, no matter large or small, nourishes the gathering.
In episode 9 Offerings, a deliberate mention of food marks the biggest reveal. This episode plays a big part in Reservation Dogs but more on that soon. Here, one of the characters Hokti is incarcerated and Willie Jack comes to visit seeking advice.
Hokti: You know when you ask someone for advice you should bring a gift. Tobacco, sweetgrass, cedar, anything works. Food’s best. People are a lot more open when they have food.
(iii) Family for a day: On Makin’ Makan
Almost at the end of the island, in a secluded chalet in Changi, a bunch of folks, including myself got together in the morning. There was much to do, and with only two convection cookers on hand, there was not much leeway in terms of time. K had stored the basil leaves in the freezer overnight so that it came out fresh but instead it 3/4 of the bunches had wilted. There was not enough peelers, or knives and everything seem to be going wrong.
We set out a prep station on the only available dining table with instructions. Someone asked what is tumeric, is it this one or this, as she held up ginger in her right hand and galangal in her left. Neither, someone replied. It’s the orangey one. We taped a handwritten recipe of the ingredients needed and a makeshift factory line of sorts.
As I prep the mackerel by the sink, I feel the soft elbow of P and her looking over my shoulder. I hate doing this the most I sighed. I looked at the basin full of mackerels stacked on top of each other, enough to feed fifty people. P offered to do it, being a chef outside of all this. I show you a shortcut, she said delighted. In the middle of the cleaning, we shared small anecdotes between us with ease. This was the first time I’ve met P but somehow as our bodies bend slightly over the briny flesh of fish and the climbing afternoon heat, I’ve felt we’ve done this several times before in other lifetimes.
As the morning slowly fade to the afternoon, things were looking up a little. The cooking area faced away from the factory line table but each time I turn around, a new configuration of people were seated, trying to figure out how to peel the skin of ginger with a spoon, how to speed-julienne the herbs or just hanging out. Having no one in charge, everybody took charge within their own skills and capacities. Someone was giving instruction and someone else was carrying it out and then switch and switch again..
Maybe it was because everyone was hungry somewhat. When K and I conceptualised this participatory cooking activation, our contribution to the organising duo A Weekend Affair’s wants to “disentangle from colonial capitalism”, we never imagined an unfolding of this scale. Not even close. In our minds were some selected volunteers who had signed up prior to the day to help with the preparations. And because of the many list of things to be done, we had not considered assigning roles to these volunteers. What materialise was this beautiful flow. In and out, in and out.
When I could not get the paste right, Y had suggested that probably sugar was missing and dish out a few tablespoon into the mix. In normal circumstances I would be horrified at this intrusion but in that moment I was relieved. I do not to carry it all by myself, I thought, someone wants to share the load with me, to figure it out together. As K readied the glutinous rice, LZ had volunteered to cut it into perfect squares and when I demonstrated how to fold the mackerel with the julienne herbs and greens into the banana leaves, N and F took over. In and out, in and out. Simultaneously other things were happening in the room and I had signed up to help P with her performance. Things will be fine, I told myself and left.
When I came back, the only thing left to do were grilling of the fish and sweet potatoes, and plating of the food. We served the food K and I and I went out to finished up barbecuing the rest of the food. P appeared with a plate she had readied for me, and told me to take a break. As bellies fill up and everyone moved on to the next parts of the event, a bunch of us stayed on in the kitchen cleaning up the pots and pans. Here, another factory line materialised. One of them, bless his heart, spend quite a bit cleaning up the spicy grime and came away with chilli hot hands and a big wide smile.
I think about that day a lot. It was central to my understanding what chosen kin truly mean. In a room full of (hungry) strangers, everyone stepped up (or down) and trusted each other completely. I never experienced this kind of non-transactional trust relations before that day. We name this participatory activation makin’ makan (making food with a play on making kin) with no intention of this unravelling. I met some of the folks who had helped only that one time, yet everyone felt like family for a day. I wonder if the magic can be replicated elsewhere with different folks at a different place and time, but I realised that in practice we’ve been doing it within our own kitchens, with our kin large or small, for many lifetimes of the past that echoed, at that moment and in the here and now.
After all, it’s not about the fish, it’s about being here together.
POSTSCRIPT: I end this piece with these brilliant excerpts on thinking beyond the nuclear family from Radical Intimacy by Sophie K. Rosa. (The book is amazing btw):
The family, too, functions as – to quote the psychoanalyst David Cooper – ‘an ideological conditioning device’. The family trains people to perform roles – wife, husband, son, daughter – as befits capitalism, and teaches them the ideologies, including of race, gender and sexuality, upon which the system depends….
O’Brien argues that the nuclear family form became a manner by which white people – apart from the poorest and most marginalised like sex workers and queers – set themselves apart from, and cast themselves as superior to, colonised subjects. When Western nations invaded countries in the Global South, enforcing imperialist rule, the institution of marriage and the nuclear family were forced upon colonised people, often replacing more expansive, communal and less patriarchal forms of kinship3.
The troubling history of the nuclear family form, of course, does not change the fact that most of us are born into something like it today. Indeed, whilst we may understand its origins in domination and violence, the fact is that many of us depend upon a version of the family as we know it for our survival, and possibly aspire to have ‘one of our own someday’ (even, or perhaps especially, if our original ‘own’ was traumatising). [But]…Family’ doesn’t keep its promises. Whilst purporting to be a bastion of safety and care, the family as we know it is society’s primary breeding ground for the oppression of women and children, gendered violence45, queerphobia and transphobia.
And on family abolitionism movement:
These are not the goals of family abolitionism; family abolition does not want to kill your husband or make you hate your parents. Instead, it asks for the flourishing of all the things that the nuclear family promises but does not deliver: cradling kinship for everyone, characterised by loving commitment, safety, care and camaraderie. Looking at the evidence, family abolition is conscious that the family as we know it is failing us, and that we need to create new ways to look after each other, beyond blood.
As Gleeson writes: ‘We call for abolishing the family not as a means of disregarding the tireless efforts made by proletarians to preserve the well-being of their relatives, but in awareness that these personal struggles alone will never serve to emancipate us as a class. Effective political action towards a better world requires us to build meaningful constellations of non-biological kinship, too. As Silvia Federici has said: ‘The denuclearisation of the family is the path to the construction of communities of resistance.’
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains that the radical resurgent Indigenous struggle against ‘dispossession and settler colonialism and the violence
of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness that maintains them’ requires family: ‘not the nuclear family that has been normalized in settler society, but big, beautiful, diverse, extended multiracial families of relatives and friends that care very deeply for each other’.63 Such ‘families’ demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between intimate life and political action. Indeed, when non-nuclear kinship has been so beleaguered by Empire, as independent scholar carla bergman and the organiser and writer Nick Montgomery argue, it is not a destination, but a political struggle in and of itself.
That’s all for now my loves and do look out for part two coming soon. Hydrate, ressociate and stay in love.
Reservation Dogs run for three seasons and revolves around four indigenous teenagers, Elora, Bear, Cheese and Willie Jack, living in Muscogee Nation, a small reservation town in rural Oklahoma. The story begins with the sudden death of their closest friend and follows them through their loss, as they process their grief across three generations, the elders, the aunties/uncles and themselves towards unpacking traumas through intergenerational healing.
True Detective: Night Country begins in a fictional small Alaskan town, Ennis during its long winter night in which the sun does not rise. Scientists at the Tsalal research station are found dead, naked and frozen in the ice. Sheriff Danvers and Trooper Navarro (Reis) are tasked to solve the mystery but what lies deeper is the struggle of the Iñupiaq peoples as they fight for the removal of the mining station that’s polluting their land and waters and killing their children.
Indigenous people, explains Kim TallBear, have endured ‘colonial violence against our kin systems’, including the ‘kidnapping of children of previous generations from Indigenous families who were impoverished by colonialism, and deemed unfit for not attaining the middle-class, nuclear family structures of white colonialist
Government statistics show that of all the women murdered in the year ending March 2020, almost half rent or former partner or another male family member.13 This compares to 7 per cent of men killed at home, and 2 per cent by a current or former partner. Referencing the murderousness of the nuclear family for women is but one – extreme – measure of its frequent failure to live up to its ‘soft, pastel’ ideal.
The nuclear family is also where many children are emotionally, physically and sexually abused. It is the social unit in which queer and trans children face their first invalidations, bullying, denials of healthcare and often total rejection. It is where many disabled people have their first experiences of isolation, dearth of care, and ableist abuse.