A Healing Performance of Mino-Bimaadiziwin: the Good Life
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THE JOURNEY OF A DIGITAL STORY: A HEALING PERFORMANCE OF MINO-BIMAADIZIWIN: THE GOOD LIFE CARMELLA M. RODRIGUEZ A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Ph.D. in Leadership and Change Program of Antioch University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June, 2015 This is to certify that the Dissertation entitled: THE JOURNEY OF A DIGITAL STORY: A HEALING PERFORMANCE OF MINO-BIMAADIZIWIN: THE GOOD LIFE prepared by Carmella M. Rodriguez is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Leadership and Change Approved by: Carolyn Kenny, Ph.D., Committee Chair date Elizabeth Holloway, Ph.D., Committee Member date Luana Ross, Ph.D., Committee Member date Daniel Hart, M.F.A., Committee Member date Jo-Ann Archibald, Ph.D. External Reader date Copyright 2015 Carmella M. Rodriguez All rights reserved. Acknowledgements Creator, I thank you for guiding me through this beautiful journey, for accepting me as one of your children and for all of creation. Thank you spiritual guides for teaching me about life and keeping me on the right path. Brenda Manuelito, thank you for being my partner and the other half of nDigiDreams. I’m so grateful I met you in a little hog farm in Lyons, Colorado. Thank you for travelling across this beautiful land with me on dirt roads, blue skies, and across so many waterways. Our learning journey together has been incredible and I’m so happy that we are doing something good for “the people.” Thank you to all of the medicine men and women, who helped us raise nDigiDreams, since birth and for the spiritual guidance and prayers for this path. Thank you to the Manuelito family for always holding a loving, spiritual and nurturing space for us, and especially to Carol, who traveled with us to so many reservations always making sure we had coffee and something to eat. Although we were divided since birth Rodriguez and Sweeney family, we will always be related. Thank you Barry family for putting a roof over my head, food on the table and encouraging me to go to school. I have enormous gratitude for our co-researchers: Eva Petoskey, Terri Tavenner, Arlene Kashata, and Linda Woods, and their families who accepted me as one of their sisters, and who taught me so much about Mino-Bimaadiziwn and how to work together as a community through prayers, love, laughter, hugs, and good food. Thank you Keweenaw Bay Indian Community for welcoming us into your home and into your hearts, for your gifts and thanks especially to our nDigiStorytellers and their families: Jerry Lee (Big Brother), Janice, Donnie, Marty, Carrie, Tim, Don, Robert, and R.D. Thank you to the Four Thunders Drum, and singers, who sit around the drum for your songs (prayers) for this journey to turn out beautiful. Your prayers will continue to resonate through the songs living in the stories told by your community. Thank you New Day i Treatment Center for bringing so many people through sobriety. We are nDigiFamily for life now and our work has only just begun. Thank you to all of our loving and kind nDigiFamily and their families that we have met across Indian Country. I hold a lit candle for you that is bright, warm and full of love and that you can call upon anytime. Clara, thank you for your willingness to jump in nDigiChidí at a moments notice to help us with our vision. Thank you funders for sponsoring our workshops. Thank you, Leila, for your friendship and acts of kindness, especially with the editing of this dissertation. Thank you to all our nDigiBrothers and nDigiSisters who shared dinners with us and gave a place to stay as we traveled from coast to coast. Thank you Carolyn Kenny for your outstanding support, intelligence, and love during this educational and life journey. This journey could not have been possible without your knowledgeable and compassionate guidance. I know we probably kept you up late on several occasions and I appreciate your willingness to see us through. Thank you Elizabeth, Dan, Luana and Jo-Anne for your patience and for holding the space for this work to take its own path. Thank you Antioch University for providing us the road to walk on to take our practice to another level of understanding. Thank you Antioch professors and staff for supporting us through this journey. Thank you to all the cohorts that co-existed with us on this journey and especially to cohort ten and the Magnificent Seven, giddy up! Thank you to all my other professors, colleagues, and friends that believed in me and gave me support or advice along the way. I am very grateful for John and Cindy who have never swayed away from our friendship considering I have not been available as much as I would have liked to during this journey. And to Scott L. Thompson, my soul brother, the person, who believed in me since we met. He taught me about technology a long, long time ago. ii Dedication This journey is dedicated to Gary, my Diné brother, and all foster children. I would also like to dedicate this dissertation to my nDigiFamily and all of the nDigiStorytellers that have “walked on” into the spirit world. They have left a lasting impression on me. iii Abstract Indigenous peoples have always shared collective truths and knowledge through oral storytelling. Just as we were born, stories are born too, through our sacred “living breath.” We live in a time where stories travel far, beyond our imaginable dreams, and can have an influence on anyone who hears them. In the present-day, we have an opportunity to combine personal stories with digital technology in order to share one of our greatest gifts with each other–our experience and wisdom. For eight years, Brenda K. Manuelito and I have been traveling across Indian Country helping our Indigenous relatives create nDigiStories for Native survivance, healing, hope, and liberation. Together with our nDigiStorytellers, we are Healing Our Communities One Story at a Time®. This dissertation is a phenomenological study about the “story-sharing” of nDigiStories. It tells the story about the journey of digital stories created from an Indigenized digital storytelling process called nDigiStorytelling with an Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) community in Michigan. I explored a bricolage of methodologies from an “Indigenist” perspective, community-based participatory research, performance ethnography, and relational autoethnography. This study shows how combining an Indigenous approach to technology and media-making with deeply-held beliefs and ceremony can revitalize Indigenous people and strengthen community relationships. The electronic version of this Dissertation is available in open access at AURA, http://aura.antioch.edu/etds/ and OhioLink ETD Center, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd. This dissertation is accompanied by a PDF document that contains links to 45 media files on the nDigiStorySharing YouTube Channel that are referenced in this document. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... i Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. xi List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... xii List of Unpublished Poems by Carmella M. Rodriguez aka C’Rodrigo ..................................... xiv List of Supplemental Files ............................................................................................................ xv Life Force ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 It’s a Good Day To Live! ............................................................................................................ 7 Learning To Listen ...................................................................................................................... 9 Riding the Super-information Highway To Video Bliss .......................................................... 11 Becoming a Digital Storyteller and nDigiSister ....................................................................... 16 Healing our Communities One Story at a Time® .................................................................... 19 The Gaps ................................................................................................................................... 28 Intention .................................................................................................................................... 31 Curiosity .................................................................................................................................... 32 Research Questions ................................................................................................................... 32 Spreading Corn Pollen With nDigiFamily in Michigan ........................................................... 32 Selecting the Research Site ....................................................................................................... 33 Scope and Limitation ...............................................................................................................