{"id":1199,"date":"2018-11-28T14:34:27","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T22:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/?p=1199"},"modified":"2018-11-29T12:03:40","modified_gmt":"2018-11-29T20:03:40","slug":"taking-wic-to-native-spaces-an-interview-with-natchee-barnd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/2018\/11\/28\/taking-wic-to-native-spaces-an-interview-with-natchee-barnd\/","title":{"rendered":"“We Are Nothing More Than Stories”: An Interview with Natchee Barnd"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>“We Are Nothing More Than Stories”: An Interview with Natchee Barnd<\/h2>\n

By Marisa Yerace, WIC Intern<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Natchee Barnd is an Associate Professor in the School of Language, Culture, and Society. A 2017 WIC Seminar alum, he taught the Ethnic Studies WIC course, Public Discourse and Writing on Race, last Winter term. He also recently published a book, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism, <\/em>last year. In this interview, WIC Intern Marisa Yerace chats with Natchee about his research, his book, teaching a WIC course, and his writing process in general.<\/p>\n

Q: How long have you been at OSU? What is your research specialty?<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m newly-tenured, so it\u2019s like a whole new world now. I\u2019ve been here seven years, I\u2019m a comparative ethnic studies scholar. I also have expertise in indigenous studies and I do cultural geography, race and space, and indigenous geography work, more specifically.<\/p>\n

Q: Let\u2019s talk about your new book! What do you want people to know about it?<\/h3>\n

I would say it\u2019s an interdisciplinary book. It reflects my training (ethnic studies) and my approach to questions or problems.<\/p>\n

I had a question about what indigenous geographies look like, and how do they continue? What sort of practices are used to maintain them? The question wasn\u2019t so much whether they did continue\u2014I knew they did\u2014but more of, \u201cHow do they do this?\u201d What are the ways in which they\u2019ve done this, from sort of infrastructural questions\u2014like streets and street-naming\u2014to artistic versions of that to cultural practices and performance?<\/p>\n

This is all rooted in a notion of geography and space as always in production. It doesn\u2019t just exist out there. We only understand it as we<\/em> exist and engage with it and make sense of it. That, in turn, shapes how we see ourselves\u2014by the way we engage with it and the structures we\u2019ve created. I wanted to see how that works with native communities in the more mundane ways. What about those more nuanced ways we make meaning and sense of the world? When we see a forest, do we just see trees? Do we see them as potential resources? Do we see it as relatives, as part of the stories of our creation? Those are all very different questions which create different kinds of space<\/em>, and then we reflect and create different kinds of identity based on the answers to those.<\/p>\n

Some people say we are nothing more than words. I agree with that. On my syllabi, I say \u201cWe are nothing more than stories.\u201d That\u2019s the way we convey our understanding of the world, is through our words, through our languages. Without that we can\u2019t actually produce or reproduce or sustain. We can\u2019t make sense of the world. We\u2019re just kind of bumbling around with no ability to process anything.<\/p>\n

Q: What was your writing process like for your book?<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s a project that sort of stretched over time, a small piece started in a dissertation, and a lot of that dissertation was written\u2014actually, I think I kind of paralleled this as I wrote the book\u2014at some point I hunkered down and was practicing writing every single day. Literally, every day I had to write, so when I was finishing\u2014I had been working on it for years as an ABD\u2014I had a deadline and I thought, now it\u2019s a 9-5 job. I was writing every day.<\/p>\n

I think all writing instruction or guidance tells you that you need to practice it like anything else. You need to practice that craft every day. Writing, for me, has always been a means of thinking. Like many people, I wrote to think. I edit a lot\u2014I try really hard to not edit as I go. I definitely get into these modes where I\u2019m writing every day as much as I can, in spurts. I allow myself to go where the writing or the thinking\u2019s taking me, and sometimes I go elsewhere and come back. I trust that is always, in some way, going to be beneficial.<\/p>\n

I did the same with the book, I spent a lot of time every day\u2014just carving out a little bit of time, whenever I had a little bit of spare time. Sometimes I had a word count, just trying to get to 300 words. I think it was more word count than time, \u2018cause you can say you\u2019re going to write for three hours but if you only write 300 words you\u2019re not very productive. I thought, if I aim for a small amount, and it went from there\u2014it was great, it felt more productive. I think the psychology is really important, you have to feel like you\u2019re making moves, it\u2019s so easy to stop yourself or make excuses, or undercut your writing, and as a faculty person there are so many things that take you away from your writing. You have to carve it out. My process was always about trying to protect that time, and then letting it flow as loosely as I possibly could.<\/p>\n

My schedule was different every single week, but I would try to block it for a morning time\u2014I\u2019m a morning writer, I\u2019m a morning person and morning thinker. Somehow, if I could both work out and<\/em> write at the same time, like really early in the morning, that would be amazing, but for some reason I can\u2019t figure out how to do that. I feel like exercise and writing are the same in my mind: you have to make the choice to get that done in the beginning, before other things sort of overtake your day.<\/p>\n

Q: Do you still try to write every day?<\/h3>\n

I try\u2026 I have other things I\u2019m working on and those kind of keep me going.<\/p>\n

Q: What other kinds of writing do you do?<\/h3>\n

I write for different audiences. I do stories for speculative nonfiction stuff. I have a course that\u2019s a methods class which is an archival research and writing course that then also delivers, as a spoken tour, an actual tour of the community. I\u2019ve written a few pieces for those with my students.<\/p>\n

I was writing a conference presentation, which I write for oral delivery, but I\u2019m finding my written and my oral styles are actually coming closer together. I tend not to actually change a lot, depending on what the argument was at different points. In my book, I started off with narrative beginnings, and then I go into a more formal and academic analyses and discussion. I usually start with a story and then I use that as an illustration or encapsulation of the analysis they\u2019ll see later.<\/p>\n

Q: Do you find that there are specific Native American genres in writing, or specific aspects of Native American genres?<\/h3>\n

Yes. Story is always a sort of major writing and telling mechanism\u2014speaking, conveyance, communication mechanism. I think everyone tells stories, but in this case, there\u2019s a difference between stories that are explicitly understood as stories and stories that are more than stories.<\/p>\n

This is in my brain right now. I have a Native American Activism and Assimilation class, and throughout the term every week they are assigned\u2014in addition to the usual scholarly pieces and poems here and there\u2014they are assigned stories from graphic novels based on either trickster stories or native sci-fi-slash-fictional stories, and I give them to them for a couple reasons: one, because there\u2019s a lot of information in them, and two, they\u2019re enjoyable and accessible and easy-to-read. I think people will think of them like fables, like sort of Aesop\u2019s fables or something like that. This is something I kind of realized this term more than I have before\u2014they were just kind of looking at the moralistic outcomes, like what is the lesson? And those were definitely part of the stories, but what they would miss was actual traditional knowledge also embedded in them.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say I would have a story that\u2019s eight-to-ten graphic novel pages. That\u2019s just a little bit of dialogue, but also a lot of imagery. There are little indicators. They describe a location or they mention something about an animal doing something with another animal. If you\u2019re looking at just the moral of the story, there\u2019s a lot of information\u2014biological, geological, geographic, botanical, zoological\u2014all these pieces of information are actually being conveyed. If that story then gets meshed-up with some other stories in the network of stories, then that story is going to be read differently.<\/p>\n

The one we talked about in class, for example, was a story about a racoon who sees a rock that kind of looks like a person, pushes it down, and after running under it, getting squished. There was this moral lesson around the treatment of elders and mischievous behavior, but what was being missed was the anatomy of the raccoon, why it looks the way it does. The story ends up talking about the shape of the racoon and why it moves the way it does and the body form. The rock itself was a very distinctive rock, so if you\u2019re from a particular area, you\u2019re locating the story to a very specific place in the world. It\u2019s not an abstracted, generated story about just<\/em> a rock that could be anywhere\u2014no, it\u2019s a very specific rock in a very specific place, so if you\u2019re from there, you\u2019ll know what that is. Then that story is attached to that place, and there are other elements of the landscape.<\/p>\n

Actual knowledge that\u2019s embedded in that may seem like context or decoration. I think those are really important in native stories\u2014they are not abstracted. Usually they are very specific about place and relationships. Maybe there\u2019s a relationship between two animals that hunt together, and Western science has always told us that they\u2019re both predators\u2014why would they cooperate? Then, in recent years, they find out, Oh, they actually do that. I think that\u2019s something unique about those stories. They aren\u2019t always writing, per se, but now they\u2019re in writing form a lot.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s opening up students\u2019 awareness of what\u2019s there and what they may not be able to access and being okay with that. I\u2019ve told them, sometimes you can\u2019t access this, you don\u2019t know all the things, but you should be able to see the possibility<\/em> that this is connected to something more<\/em> and realize these stories are not just fictionalized accounts and the reason they have the detail. In a novel, you have detail to try to craft a reality or what seems like a reasonable, tangible, kinesthetic experience. In this case, details are not created for that effect\u2014they\u2019re conveying certain information and knowledge that\u2019s been passed along from direct experience,\u00a0basically through a scientific process\u2014engagement, learning, observation\u2014so it\u2019s in the form of a story, but that doesn\u2019t mean it doesn\u2019t hold that knowledge.<\/p>\n

For students, it\u2019s a matter of recognizing you\u2019re just reading this in a really simplistic way, but what if these are all real things (which, I argue, they are)? The value of the story becomes so much more intensified if you\u2019re losing those stories. In order to sustain a culture, it becomes harder if all of that knowledge is embedded in those stories. One story is not going to be enough: you need all those stories. I think that\u2019s where I tend to leave them.<\/p>\n

Q: What was the topic of your Winter WIC course? How did you design it?<\/h3>\n

The WIC course I taught last winter is called Public Discourse and Writing on Race. A lot of times what I try to do is connect an external motivator to courses, so in this case the timing was such that Oregon had just passed a requirement for K-12 to teach ethnic studies in the curriculum. There\u2019s a task force that is working through that curriculum, trying to lay out what those curriculum guidelines will be, so I asked my students to target high school, and to write to this task force or to teachers to explain to them why discourse around race in particular was a really important thing for them to consider while constructing these classes.<\/p>\n

It was a persuasive set of essays. They had to use the material and draft this over the term and pitch it to these educators and their administrators\u2014who will<\/em> be thinking about how we implement this in 2020, so this was a real thing. I had one of the task force members Skype in and talk to them about what they\u2019re doing so the students saw that this was something that can go outside of the classroom. It\u2019s not just me as an audience, it\u2019s different teachers.<\/p>\n

It shaped their writing: how do you pitch this to someone who, maybe, is nervous about doing this, they don\u2019t know how to incorporate this, they don\u2019t understand this element of discourse, how a racial discourse works in a way that is not just \u201cLet\u2019s add another story besides Martin Luther King, Jr.?\u201d How do we think about the larger discourse, which is not just adding stories or adding historical events, but thinking about how we understand race through discourse as a whole? It\u2019s something that\u2019s more fundamental.<\/p>\n

So that was their charge. I find that when there\u2019s something really concrete, they do really, really<\/em> well with it, having to craft a voice, figuring out what to expect, what their audience will know and they don\u2019t know, how to provide examples to help them make their argument\u2014and they had to think about what that person would be concerned with. Part of that was because Ethnic Studies doesn\u2019t have a single sort of audience. Some disciplines they have a single audience, or a fairly narrow set of audiences. Ethnic studies can apply to any audience, so it\u2019s a matter of in which capacity you want to write. You\u2019re dealing with the fact that most folks think they understand race and racism, but they do not very well, so you have to undo some of those commonsense understandings which are not really right.<\/p>\n

In this case it was very specific, it was helpful to have educators and administrators who would be funding those classes, to point to those folks and think about how you need to talk to them opposed to the general public. Some students were thinking about their<\/em> high school teacher–\u201cOh! I have this one teacher who this would really resonate with.\u201d I need to circle back to see how they did with that.<\/p>\n

Q: How would your course change when you change the external motivator?<\/h3>\n

I always shape courses specifically to the kind of tasks they deal with, or I would change the materials, but there are certain ones I think I gravitate towards because they make sense to me. I would definitely adjust things based on what I thought my goal was.<\/p>\n

Q: How do you incorporate informal writing into the WIC course?<\/h3>\n

Informal writing matches my practice of just wanting to let myself write without the editing voice as much as possible. When you have informal writing, people need to be aware it\u2019s okay to just write\u2014don\u2019t edit, don\u2019t worry about spelling, get those ideas out, get moving. I think students tend to want to be efficient, get it done once, get it done right, validate themselves, they did it right, got it done the first time\u2014and I have to remind them, \u201cThat will never<\/em> happen, you will never get the perfect thing down.\u201d I tell them I want them to fail, and fail as early as they can, and I say \u201cfailure\u201d loosely\u2014they hate that though. They don\u2019t like process-oriented as much as they like outcome-oriented. It\u2019s hard to sell that.<\/p>\n

In [my WIC] class, and I need to do more of this, I had them project, like pre-flection of what they expect to see, what sort of questions they need to be thinking about, before getting into a reading, as a sort of guidance. I have these great pieces I\u2019ll give to students, but they won\u2019t always know what to do with it or why I\u2019m assigning it. It\u2019s not necessarily that I\u2019m looking for a main point, it\u2019s thinking about certain things to look for.<\/p>\n

I had them writing each time we met\u2014sort of pre-thinking, post-thinking, as a way to generate thinking on the spot, getting used to the idea, all those things. We were going to read this\u00a0piece that was a critique around tourism culture and the power dynamics that were at play, specifically in the Caribbean. I asked them to think\u2014before they read, before they knew anything about what the piece was about\u2014to imagine they were going to the Caribbean on a trip. Why are they going there, what are they doing, what do they see? Just sort of thinking through the normative visions of what it means to go to the Caribbean. A lot of the thoughts were about vacation stuff: the ocean, sunshine, they were having fun. And then they get this piece that has a pretty dark turn to it\u2014while folks are here as tourists, here\u2019s the other side of what\u2019s happening in this community, how people are locked in by economic disparity, by race, by the history of this particular island. It sort of really flips that and makes people rethink how they imagine themselves in relation to the Caribbean. But they wouldn\u2019t have thought about it quite as strongly as if they hadn\u2019t envisioned it, it would\u2019ve been easy to pretend as if\u2014but I already had the evidence of what they\u2019d been thinking, and they have to reconcile that.<\/p>\n

With things that are pre-reading, they usually have some ideas and thoughts that they can utilize. Sometimes it\u2019s just questions. It\u2019s just a way to really up the amount of processing they do. And they have something to write about later! \u201cI thought this, and now\u2014\u201d How do you feel embarrassed? Not that my goal was to embarrass them\u2026 in that case it kind of was.<\/p>\n

Q: What are your primary goals for writing assignments in your WIC course?<\/h3>\n

They\u2019re the goals that were laid out for us in some ways. I think a lot of the students came away from this knowing who you write to matters\u2014your audience. It\u2019s helpful to understand there are different ways of writing, different modes of writing. I have them do that exercise of thinking about, \u201cWhat are the different kinds of things you write? What are the kinds of things professional you could write? What are the different kinds of audiences that are out there?\u201d With Ethnic Studies, because it doesn\u2019t have a specific kind of audience\u2014it\u2019s not a science audience, it\u2019s not a policy audience, it could be any and all of those things\u2014being clear about what that audience is, at first, and then crafting writing to match is critical.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the idea of revision. It seems to be a novelty to students. Everything I\u2019ve written in my book, I\u2019ve probably edited, like, a hundred or two hundred times. I have draft after draft after draft of those things. The idea that revision is making it better, is making your thinking better, is obviously important to WIC, so that\u2019s one of my purposes.<\/p>\n

Then, for me to see which ways their writing is applicable to current, real things. I think those are my goals for them.<\/p>\n

Q: How did the WIC faculty seminar help you teach your WIC course?<\/h3>\n

I was doing it [the seminar] right before I was doing the class. I was a lot more thoughtful about how to make it most productive for students\u2014how to actually develop their writing and thinking. I was a lot more encouraged to use the kind of creative prompts I normally like to use.<\/p>\n

I like to be a little more flexible, and that can be frustrating to students, and I think in this case I had to have that stuff prepared, with a purpose and why I was going to do those things. I think, if nothing else, it gave me a space to kind of plan out that class a little more thoroughly. I don\u2019t always like to plan that detailed, but I think those were some of the best things about it.<\/p>\n

We used a lot of techniques from the seminar\u2014write and pass, process memos. I was just talking about process memos the other day in (my non-WIC) class. It\u2019s a kind of way for me to get a sense of what they think they need help with, and it\u2019s a way to minimize the labor. It can be an all-encompassing thing if you\u2019re doing a Writing Intensive and unlimited feedback. It\u2019s a way to narrow down what they think they\u2019re having trouble with, or that they really want attention to, and then I can maybe do one more thing in addition to that, so they have three things to deal with rather than 55. It really refines your thinking and your labor, which is crucial!<\/p>\n

Q: Has your WIC training affected your teaching outside of the WIC course?<\/h3>\n

Yes! I mean, I say yes, and here I am this term thinking \u201cAah! I should\u2019ve used more of those strategies!\u201d<\/p>\n

I definitely am still using some of the assessment time-saving techniques of not pointing out every little thing, and thinking, What are the three important things? I guided my TA to do the same, and I think those are important strategies because this is a class of forty, so I can\u2019t spend the attention that I could on a WIC class. I think that works better, not just for me, but also for students. They feel it\u2019s more accessible, more successful\u2014they can actually meet those goals.<\/p>\n

I remember using a lot more of [the WIC techniques] even the term after, \u2018cause they\u2019re so successful, they\u2019re so helpful as engagement tools.<\/p>\n

Q: What advice do you have for other people teaching or designing WIC courses?<\/h3>\n

I think if you take the seminar it\u2019s helpful. It gives you a good frame for getting out of the idea that, no matter what the discipline is, the writing and the writing intense model is somehow\u00a0external to the content, and that it\u2019s one more thing you have to do, rather than using<\/em> it as the tool by which to do the thing you want to do. That was a good thing for me to be reminded of, the thinking through writing. I can\u2019t ask them to perform this final writing without having given them the chance to practice that, and have those revision processes, and understand what writing is and use it as a way to move along thinking. It\u2019s a simple reframing, and it\u2019s common sense, on some level. You have your content and you\u2019re like, Oh, I have to make them write multiple things, and this is actually a really great way to get them to think through this material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“We Are Nothing More Than Stories”: An Interview with Natchee Barnd By Marisa Yerace, WIC Intern Natchee Barnd is an Associate Professor in the School of Language, Culture, and Society. A 2017 WIC Seminar alum, he taught the Ethnic Studies WIC course, Public Discourse and Writing on Race, last Winter term. He also recently published… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9261,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6LSEz-jl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1199"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1218,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions\/1218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}