Revisioning aging: Indigenous, crip and queer renderings

Changfoot, N., Rice, C., Chivers, S., Olsen Williams, A., Connors, A., Barrett, A., Lalonde, G., & Gordon, M. (2021). Revisioning aging: Indigenous, crip and queer renderings. Journal of Aging Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2021.100930

Abstract

In this article, we re-imagine Anishinaabe,[1] crip and queer futures of aging against and beyond dominant successful aging narratives by drawing on our archive of digital/multimedia videos (short documentaries) produced in conjunction with older/e/Elder[2] persons and the Re•Vision: Centre for Art and Social Justice. These documentaries are directed and come from the lives of those older and e/Elder persons whose aging embodiments intra-sect with their Indigenous, disabled and queer selves. Disrupting hegemonic successful aging narratives, and specifically heteronormative and ableist trajectories of aging, these alternative renderings of aging futures offer rich, affective relationalities and cyclical timescapes of older experience that draw on the past even as they reach into divergent futurities. Anishinaabe, crip and queer aging emerge. While we discern resonances in relationalities and temporalities among and between the Anishinaabe and non-Indigenous stories, we also identify significant differences across accounts, indicating that they cannot be collapsed together. Instead, we argue for holding different life-ways and futures alongside one another, following the 1613 Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee, in which each party promised to respect the other’s ways, and committed to non-interference, as well as to the development and maintenance of relationship.

[1] Anishinaabe refers to a culturally and linguistically-related group of Original Peoples that includes the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, Saulteaux, and Algonquin Peoples. According to the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, Anishinaabe literally means a human as distinct from a non-human being (https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/main-entry/anishinaabe-na). There are also literal translations of Anishinaabe held by Elders and Anishinaabe communities. For example Basil Johnston provides the translation “people created from divine breath” (1990, p. 15).

[2] We use the term “e/Elder” to include both Indigenous Elders and Indigenous and non-Indigenous elders, recognizing that in Anglo-western cultures the term senior, for some people, has pejorative connotations and that in Indigenous cultures, “Elder” is a respected title bestowed not as a result of age but rather as a result of one’s knowledge and actions. Indigenous Elders are recognized knowledge keepers who have earned the respect of their communities and nations through demonstrating wisdom, harmony and balance in their actions and their teachings (Stiegelbauer 1996).