Relatuhedron: A machine of possibilities

185 Pages·2021·2.987 MB·English

by  Juan Carlos Rodriguez Camacho

Juan Carlos Rodriguez Camacho
Relatuhedron
A machine of possibilities
Relatuhedron
Juan Carlos Rodriguez Camacho
Relatuhedron
A machine of possibilities
Juan Carlos Rodriguez Camacho
University of New Brunswick
Wolastoqey Mi’kmaq Centre
Fredericton, NB, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-87207-6 ISBN 978-3-030-87208-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87208-3
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To sisters and brothers in-learning.
To plant just a small seed of well-being in the
fertile field of Indigenous knowledge.
Acknowledgment: Preliminary Self-Reflection
I would like to respect and to follow the Anishinaabe tradition by “situating myself
in relation to this topic” (McGregor, 2006), introducing myself and describing how
I came to this conversation and what I bring to the table.
I honor my parents. My mother and father offered me their love, care, respect,
and joy for the land, plants, and peoples who live in the mountains and mingle with
nature. I offer this work based on to their teachings as an Indigenous person born in
the Muisca town of Soata (in Muysc-cubun language of the people, language of
Muyscas, means “the place of the harvesting sun”), Indigenous scholar working
With/By Indigenous communities and settler in Canada.
I wish to acknowledge the land, air, water, history, and heritage of First Nations,
Inuit, and Métis great-grandmothers and fathers who lived, worked, dreamed, and
lived on Turtle Island. I have a place in my heart filled with gratitude for their life,
knowledge, efforts, and struggles over thousands of years protecting lands and liv-
ing creatures. As a settler in Turtle Island, I am connected in partnership to contrib-
ute to build better shared societies where Indigenous communities are free of stigma,
discrimination, pain, and oppression. From Indigenous people’s strengths, this
acknowledgment expresses my humble contribution to end harms caused to
Indigenous communities and to build better present and future societies, by support-
ing Indigenous culture and transforming current non-Indigenous institutions and
practices.
I am grateful to all Indigenous and non-Indigenous health researchers who have
shared their knowledge, experience, and perspectives towards defining respectful
frameworks and ethical guidelines for Indigenous health research. Ideas presented
here are expressed as challenges and barriers as well as options and opportunities
with their voices but through my own vision. I acknowledge the diversity and rich-
ness of Indigenous communities respecting their right of self-determination and
avoiding cultural appropriation. My words reflect only my perspective; I don’t
speak for anybody else, and I hope that it opens innovative dialogues around
Indigenous health research. I present my vision as a permanently shared knowledge,
always open to Indigenous persons and communities.
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viii Acknowledgment: Preliminary Self-Reflection
I am humbly grateful to Indigenous Elders, Indigenous leaders, and Indigenous
peoples of the Traditional Wabanaki Territory, Wolastoqey, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquodi,
an unceded and never surrendered traditional lands of Wolastoqiyik, who offered
me the honor of a Sacred Eagle Feather and Sacred Healing Stone.
My heart, mind, and spirit were always recomforted by the teachings and kind-
ness of ceremonies with Elder Alita Suave -  - Nohkom, a Cree word that translates
to “my grandmother”– at Native Child and Family Services of Toronto. Elder Alita
Suave opened my mind to the Tepee’s teachings and asked me to embrace the
responsibility of that knowledge to act accordingly. I have for her my gratitude and
respect, and also for Mr. Ken Richard, a former Director of Native Child and Family
Services for his support to the pilot of the relatuhedron and for Dr. Suzanne Stewart
for her teachings, research, courage and life experiences. I express my gratitude to
all mental health and health experts connected to the SPARK program at the Mental
Health Commission of Canada for their input.
For six families that were touched by cancer, couples living in the lands of
Indigenous Anolaimas, from the family of Panches in North East Side of the Andes,
for their time and opportunity to share afternoons of games, music, and community
support from where this adventure was created, as a process of collecting coffee
beans and processing the coffee from the plant until the cup, this text is a testimony
of their tenacity and attachment to land, family, and love.
Woliwon, Miigwetch, Ipqua (Muysccubun language), Thank You, Merci.
Reference
McGregor, D. (2006). Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Ideas; the Arts and
Science Review. Vol 3. No 1, Spring. Faculty of Arts and Science, University of
Toronto.
Presentation: A Shared Journey of Knowledge
This is an individual and community healing-knowing journey of the search for
places where Indigenous people can share their needs and concerns about healing
and health processes, inviting non-Indigenous health researchers, policy makers,
public servants, and government/nongovernment agencies to plan and respond with
required support to build and sustain well-being for Indigenous peoples.
It is presented as a social, knowledge, and relational machine where I-you-we
can practice the connection with the self and others in an immense source of learn-
ings that challenge our static perceptions of reality, as normal ways to be, and sup-
port the journey of transformation and discovery of infinite possibilities of
relationality. By challenging what is artificially normalized, the relatuhedron invites
us to discover levels of simplex to complex ways to live in difference and diversity
while sharing the ethics of coexistence: “you are therefore I” in the words of Elder
Albert Marshall (Personal communication, 2021).
The unity in diversity implies a conversation between several poles of dichoto-
mies that are a continuum of humanity, ways to be in self and community: challeng-
ing “complicated” systems of Western scientific perspectives and society to respond
to Indigenous worldviews in “the good ways.” The journey of writing and sharing
this book will take me over the lessons of the mangrove tree not as a metaphor but
as a guide, intention and permanent critical revision of my work. The mangrove-
learning in this book is practiced and presented as a strong tree that lives in between
salty and sweet waters while protecting rich ecosystems under its roots. As a constant
practice of reflection throughout the process of re-discovering myself and learning
by living Indigenous richness and knowledge of ceremony and culture, individuals
and communities. This pathway places myself under many levels and hidden layers
of society, and human-culture-nature interdependence, exploring how the greatest
achievements in transforming systems and the-self, responding to the Indigenous
Calls To Action made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in
2015, implies to review representations and practices of unfairly distributed power-
knowledge and social and historical structural stereotypes assuming that authorita-
tive expertise and knowledge synthesis is not a “magic solution” to resolve problems
for Indigenous peoples that have being do this since immemorial times by
ix
x Presentation: A Shared Journey of Knowledge
themselves. Instead, my intention here is to open a relational way: a dialogue on
epistemological, axiological-ontological, ethical, methodological, and historical
socio-economic-cultural and practical social challenges of assuming scientific
health knowledge With/By Indigenous communities. I am sharing this experience, a
fragmented and non-a uthoritative experience from that place. I will explore impli-
cations on well-being and health research and practices based on complexities of
relational frameworks: a pedagomiology.
Instead of an assimilation or translation of knowledge strategy, and keeping both
ends differences as extremes in a line, I will explore a place where both Indigenous
and non-Indigenous perspectives would be sitting around the tasks of improving
health conditions imposed on Indigenous peoples and supporting healthier
Indigenous communities that, in sum, will benefit all other minorities and discrimi-
nated-ignored majorities. This place, a new place I call relatuhedron, for now, is a
multilevel perspective that mirrors both sides’ differences and commonalities of the
togetherness of health and all complexities of social change. It is a place where
healing-knowing is supported, and relationality and dynamic complex systems
open the doors to access the richness of both system knowledges by respecting and
honoring Indigenous knowledges. A Two-Eyed Seeing Perspective from an admired
Mi’kmaq teacher, Elder Albert Marshall. Etuaptmumk is a guiding principle based
on the teachings of the late spiritual leader, healer, and chief, Charles Labrador of
Acadia First Nation, and brought forth in 2004 by Elders Albert and Murdena
Marshall from the Eskasoni community, in Unama’ki (Bartlett et al., 2012; Iwama
et al., 2009; Marsh et al., 2015).
The granular nature of modern life we experience, divided into work, street,
home, work cycles, intensively focused on how to achieve and maintain happiness
and health based on Western conceptions of health and societies individually
grounded, empirically founded, scientifically informed, and technologically medi-
ated, is provisionally dismantled in this text from a set of experiences created with
the spirit of working With/By Indigenous communities in Canada and Latin
America. This text is a return of what I-We had learned working and sharing with
Indigenous communities, as brothers and sisters in unity, on transforming barriers
and strengthening possibilities to recover healthier conditions With/By Indigenous
perspectives and knowledges. This is a macro-framework that asks participatns to
move their learning and experience from a cognitive-focus to their feelings and
value system represented by the heart, to connect their discourse with practices and
to place their own trascendental worldviews while doing that.
Both sides of knowledge, academic (theoretical) and community (practical),
interlink by cycles of talking, doing, and talking again. This book presents this way
to walk those dimensions and face barriers and strengths of interventions to improve
and sustain Indigenous health, where research is a critical journey of talking, walk-
ing, knowing, doing, and healing.
It is recognized here that academic and real life are two dimensions intercon-
nected by visible and hidden roots that frequently takes us towards unpredicted
routes by the emergence of new knowledge. In this sense, this text is also a journey
of feeling and thinking where at the end of both sides of the line, knowledge and
experience are integrated into a circle, then a sphere, then as a group of spheres, as
Presentation: A Shared Journey of Knowledge xi
building knowledge processes grounded on discursive and reflexive ways of knowl-
edge and transformative “by-practicing” relations.
When walking those visible or hidden routes between knowledge and action,
independently of the route chosen, we may craft new places. But we might arrive
also to similar places. If we might consider that moving through different routes is
only a choice of efficiency of the use of our resources, and if routes in life are con-
sidered a practical choice between means and goals, then the importance of walking
in life and healing will be only related with how we would walk by minimizing the
effort and maximizing the result of our walks. Making more efforts on goals, means,
and strategies and resolving problems form a problem-solution process approach.
But this text grounds on a different perspective.
I believe that we create a new place of healing in a while we are walking instead
of consider this common place as a simple temporal substation required to achieve
the final goal of the route. I would like to live in a creative and transformative
hybridity perspective where routes are intrinsically connected with our way of walk-
ing, with our direction, with our intentions so places are made as forms where our
lives are mixing as temporal nodes of plenty possibilities of healing, instead of
postponing healing as final destination. If that is shared, then we can transform how
we live by transforming the way we relate on the ways we walk.
I learned this lesson while walking on a flat empty field on Indigenous land in a
while talking-doing thing with Indigenous community members. Free of obstacles
when crossing the field one might choose patterns that are not straight lines as a
natural choice. Our walking patterns are zigzagging routes that adjust to our best
connection with the terrain, traces what is considered for us as the best way to walk,
and allows us to move and arrive. We can see those traces made by others on the
land, crossing overt fields and how they create routes and ways to follow. But instead
of considering those patterns, any kind of pattern “the unique” way, walks offer the
useful advantage of being followed and then, when needed, being transformed.
While walking alone on the snow, I followed my own footprints to guide me to
find the wood I cut for a sweet lodge after offering tobacco as a thank you and
respect for nature. It is easy to me to be lost in the middle of dense bushes without
points of reference, and I don’t want to cut a tree and then not be able to find it and
use it. But when looking back, even following my footprints, my steps were falling
outside and inside the pattern made by myself previously. Exploring and moving
represents here the possibility to see more of my surrounds and transform visible
and hidden owned patterns.
And it is in the process of conversations between us, the walking visible and hid-
den patterns out there and our transformations of the routes, that we might define
our ways of living, doing, feeling, talking, dreaming, writing and how these dimen-
sions of life build our relations. The walking on life may substantially be just that, a
permanent discovery and transformation steps of our relational patterns. And it is
the way we are supported in managing our own historical and personal, socioeco-
nomic, political, cultural, mental-spiritual, and biological restrictions imposed on us
as “our social determinants” and what kind of tools we would use to temporally