Starting in April I wrote about my initial thoughts on tensions and balance and building an Indigenous frameworks collection.  This past week I had several conversations prompted by a collaboration with Chastity Davis-Alphonse and Bridget George, an Anishinaabe author and illustrator from Kettle and Stony Point First Nation.  I wrote about it in my Personal Reconciliation Journal.

My aha moment was that my tendency to explain things in polarities comes from my deep Colonial training.  An Indigenous world view tends toward balance and holding both perspectives side-by-side (Two-Eyed Seeing and Two Row Wampum).  I knew of these models before, but this week of dialogue helped me sense more deeply their meaning.

This journey to understand tensions and balance started earlier this year during talks I heard by Mark Cabaj and Carlos Gershenshon.  Since then, we have been collaborating on new images for the Collection which will be released in December.  As I was reviewing the text for the new pages I was reminded of this week’s conversations and the fact I have been showing some of the images in courses and workshops I have been giving.  I was asked for a copy of this compilation slide developed with Mark Cabaj, but I need to stick with the release date since too many other things need to happen for the page to go live.

Instead, I thought I would put the image here so people can find it before December.  There will be additional individual images for each of these tensions with some more text to help explain the binaries.

Other new images will be for the Overton Window and the idea that Slower Can be Faster.  Stay tuned.