Commencement Speech, or, What Would Auntie Say?

 

Commencement Speech / Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

 / U of Oregon / 

2024

Deborah A. Miranda

THE SACRED KNOWLEDGE OF ANCESTORS

OR,

WHAT WOULD AUNTIE SAY?

Thank you for inviting me to share this day with you.

Before I say anything else, congratulations. Congratulations on completing not just the big things, like all the required coursework and labs and papers, but congratulations on persevering through a pandemic and its never-ending aftermath, financial challenges, and all the quotidian details of simply having a life in the 2020s. This is not a celebration of one event; this is a celebration of innumerable small triumphs, a celebration of maneuvering detours, a celebration of that awe-ful word, PIVOT. 

Congratulations to your professors, your mentors, your advisors, too, and all those whose guidance and effort contributed to this moment. Days like today call for a hefty serving of gratitude for blessings, as well; don’t discount angels, fairy godparents, or sheer luck. I earned my Ph.D at the age of 40; I knew I did not accomplish it ALL on my own.

Now, I have a confession: this is my first ever Commencement Speech. And the fact that it’s for WGSS is the icing on the cake, right? But, as soon as I accepted the invitation, I was stricken with paralysis. What could I possibly say that would be even remotely useful to a group of young WGSS scholars graduating in the dumpster fire that is 2024? How could I address your hopes, your pain, your anger at inheriting such a mess? Should I just say, “goodbye, good luck, have a good time saving the world, write when you solve climate change, racism and world hunger”?

Somehow that didn’t feel like enough. 

I needed guidance myself. So I thought, “Okay. I’m going to channel my inner Auntie.”  W W A S: What Would Auntie Say? Maybe, something like this:

As an Indigenous woman, I can tell you that we Indigenous peoples have already faced the end of the world; the fires of colonization, missionization, and assimilation attempted to burn us alive. Our apocalypse arrived complete with epidemics, a bad economy, an impossible real estate situation, and climate change. And let me tell you, the result was generations of grief and anger.

Some of us survived, however, and have been busy reinventing ourselves ever since. Because here’s the thing: we did not lose our ancestors, who continued and continue to live within us, within our DNA, and our memories. These ancestors give us our connection to identity, to homeland, and to story. Strangely enough, Indigenous peoples all over the world are experiencing a kind of renewal of Indigenous knowledges, art, literatures, music, medicines and leadership even as the world around us seems to be going down in flames. This is not a coincidence. Claiming and owning our roots as living, breathing relatives of this planet, beings who must establish and maintain a relationship with this planet in order to flourish is, in fact, the definition of indigeneity, reciprocity, survivance and thrivance.

In this way of thinking, we are all indigenous to this planet. We all have responsibilities to this planet, and to our relatives, both human and non-human. We are the planet, the land, walking around in a particular and temporary manifestation of flesh and blood. When we remember that, honor that, and act on that knowledge, we are working on a world and a way of being in this world that is based on ancestral relationship rather than accumulation of power.

But when I say that we carry our ancestors within us, ancestors whose experiences and knowledges support us, I do not mean only those ancestors connected to us by genetic materials. 

Joy Harjo, three-time US Poet Laureate and member of the Muskogee Nation of Oklahoma,  talks about her realization that she has “poetry ancestors” who influence her work, carry her in times of difficulty, and who continue to mentor her whether or not their physical bodies are still present. She writes, 

… That thought was a door that made a fresh path of understanding. Each of us carries human ancestors within us. The DNA spiral is ancestral stories and songs. Even the stones, plants, elements, and creatures have ancestors. [Likewise,] each poem has ancestors, and maybe even an origin story.

Harjo is speaking of other poets who came before her, whose work she turns to for inspiration, for education, and for solace. The poems left behind form an archive that she can call upon for her own work, and from which she draws not just strength, but very real information and strategy.

As scholars of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, we have ancestors, too – important people who came before us, created new paths of understanding, put their minds and bodies on the line for equality and justice. Ancestors who left important knowledges behind for us to use, carry on, and develop. I know who some of my ancestors are – Gloria Anzaldúa. Ray Young Bear.  Audre Lorde. Paula Gunn Allen. Raewyn Connell. James Luna. Kimberlé Crenshaw. N. Scott Momaday. bell hooks. Haunani-Kay Trask. Cherríe Moraga. The interdisciplinarity of such ancestors is breathtaking, isn’t it? Poets, theorists, researchers, activists, artists, educators. 

I want to share with you some of the specific teachings from these ancestors that I’ve carried on my journey.

Perhaps the most important teaching concerns the uses of anger. Most of us identify anger as violence. And we fear it – both the anger of others toward us and the anger we feel towards others and ourselves. It wasn’t until I read Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger” that I was able to reclaim anger not as a weapon that damages, frightens or alienates, but as a tool in the journey toward justice.

Lorde writes: “Focused with precision [anger] can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change… unexpressed anger lies within [us] like an undetonated device. But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision of our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification…”  This was a radically new concept for me! In this vision, anger is a kind of power, and like any other power, it can be used with positive or negative intent. When we choose to use anger to express ourselves, anger serves us as a strategic tool for truth-telling, establishing relationship, creating community. When we attend to what someone else’s anger seeks to communicate, anger again serves us by getting our attention, clarifying the stakes, setting boundaries. Lorde emphasizes that “Anger is loaded with information and energy…” Anger, then, comes to us as a complicated and often unpredictable teacher. In her poem, “Who Said it was Simple,” Lorde notes, “There are so many roots to the tree of anger / that sometimes the branches shatter / before they bear.” She’s right: using anger, understanding its power, is not easy. But if we do not fear the chaos – if we can steel ourselves to embrace the chaos that often erupts from expressed anger – it can become a valuable form of communication.

It is probably not coincidental that Coyote, the trickster of many Western tribes (including my own), is known for unpredictability, for committing chaos in the name of creation, innovation, and survival. Coyote likes to rattle the status quo, break taboos and boundaries, and generally piss people off. But Coyote is also one of the beings who helped create the world, teaches us how to think outside the boxes that limit us, and reminds us that learning to embrace transformation is THE key survival skill. Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author and civil rights activist, says, “Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.” 

One of the hardest parts of using anger in service of our goals is learning to pay attention when our anger (or someone else’s) gets too close to that line between usefulness and hatred. I have thought about this a lot lately. Lorde carefully explicates where that line is: anger wants to build something better, while hatred seeks only to destroy. She writes that while the object of hatred “is death and destruction, Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”  

 “Anger is a grief of distortions between peers” – look at what Lorde does there! “Peers.” Peers are individuals on equal footing. Peers are in relationship with one another. Peers want to communicate with one another, share goals, share values. If we listen to our peers even when the information they share is disturbing and disruptive, we learn from it what is needed to move into consensus, to move ahead with our work, rather than becoming deadlocked. 

In the same vein, poet June Jordan is an ancestor whose teachings deepen my ability to practice compassion – for myself, for my community, even for those who stand between us and our goals. “We are not all that is possible,” Jordan writes, “None of us has ever really experienced justice. None of us has known enough tenderness.” Here again, the precision, the vulnerability, the clarity of language cuts through defensiveness or shame we might feel about experiencing injustice, needing tenderness, and allows us to see the humanity in others. In fact, the way that Jordan positions those words, “justice” and “tenderness” together is stunning. I had never thought about justice as a form of tenderness, or vice versa, but once I read it, I felt it in my gut. Justice is tenderness; tenderness is justice. And that condition of being tender is something that, in the daily struggle, can feel like a liability. To be tender, to express tenderness, seems like the opposite of what justice requires! Somehow, in my mind, justice required a sword and shield, a defensive stance, being on guard against violation. Yet vulnerability, too, is a kind of empowerment.

Another ancestor, activist Angela Davis, teaches us that, “without deep, abiding practices of self-care, there can be no radical social transformation… [self-care] means that we’re able to bring our entire selves into the movement. It means that we incorporate into our work as activists ways of acknowledging and, hopefully, also moving beyond trauma.” Exactly. Compassion and tenderness for our own failures, the hurts we have endured, hurts we have caused, are the medicines that allow us to pick ourselves up and continue. Shame, fear and exhaustion are the opposites of tenderness and vulnerability; they keep us isolated from, and outside of, the very communities, the futures, that we desire to support and build. 

Ursula K. Le Guin, poet and award-winning speculative fiction writer, once gave me this gem of self-care. She said that someone else had given it to her during a time of great struggle, so she wrote it out and taped it to her refrigerator to read several times a day. Here it is: “Today I will do the best I can do, with what it is that I have to do it with today.” BOOM. A teaspoon of self-care. Do what you are capable of doing; then, take care of yourself so that when you are ready, you can give again. To say “I will do my best” is a vow to your better self; to remind yourself that you will not work yourself to death is a promise to your community. Burn-out is real. Your body is a crucial tool, needed to manifest equality and justice and compassion in the world. Eat well. Sleep well. Tend to your mental health and your heart the way you would tend a beloved’s well-being. Think about the long haul. Remember, all that is necessary for you to do the long haul.

I carry these ancestors (and many others) with me on my journey. I remember their sacrifices. I revel in their triumphs. And I know that without them, I would not be standing here today. Standing here at the age of almost-63, strangely enough, on the verge of being an ancestor myself.

And that’s another part of this ancestor thing: we don’t just have ancestors. We become ancestors. Joy Harjo reminds us: “… with ancestry, as much as you look back, you are also looking forward to see who is coming up, because a responsibility of each generation, whether it be blood family or poetry family [or WGSS family!], is to carefully tend those appearing, who break through the imagination to speak the next world into place.” 

You gathered here today have just hatched! – and you are already on your way to becoming the ancestors of those coming up behind you. Every day that you are out there doing your work in the world will lead you to become someone’s ancestor, someone’s touchstone, someone’s reminder that the incredible is possible.

Now, that might feel overwhelming. Let me remind you: you are not doing this alone. Look around. You have many companions with you today -- sisters, brothers, kindred – who move forward into these responsibilities beside you. You will find many more already in place wherever it is that you are headed. Look for them. Treasure them. Collaborate with them. Make your own community of solidarity. Research together. Write papers together. Get angry together. Cheer each other on. Educate and remind each other about the tools available. Make meals together. Feed each other, because nourishment begets nourishment in exponential ways.

I know. It can still feel hard. Like our ancestors, you hope to see justice soon, preferably in your lifetime. And may it be so. May it be so. But if the 2020s have taught us nothing else, we know that great accomplishments can be taken away by the fearmongers and power-hungry whose only goal is to maintain a status quo in which their privilege never fades. It’s good to remind yourself that, as folksinger Iris Dement sings, “I don't have all the answers / To the troubles of the day / But neither did all our ancestors / And they persevered anyway… / I’m working on a world that I may never see.” 

And that’s just it. You are part of a lineage, a genealogy, a powerful collective inheritance, that has already given you knowledge and tools – and the times ahead will ask that you use those tools, and reinvent them for our times. Know that this is a collective struggle. As Gloria Steinem said when someone asked who she would “pass the torch to”: “There is no one torch—there are many torches—and I’m using my torch to light other torches.” 

There are many ancestors on this path whose names we will never know. But they, and the work they did, the light they carried, illuminated the way for us just as much, if not more, than those whose names we do know. It is powerful work to be the one loving or tender or compassionate moment in someone’s day. To be the light that passes light on to another. Don’t ever doubt that.

You are the inheritors of brilliant, courageous, loving work. 

In the days, months and years ahead, remember to revisit your WGSS ancestors often, as you would a favorite auntie who never fails to dish out the truth you didn’t know you wanted to hear. WWAS – What Would Auntie Say?

Nimasianexelpasaleki – my heart feels good. Thank you.