this is just some writing i am dumping here for open learning as I start to figure out angles for the podcast. feel free to chip in but note none of this is tightly held, is probably error prone and likely to change and morph

Unpack the synchronisties which lead to being in the car at that particular moment

• little ill after first week of kindy
• happen to have rented a car over that period
• happen to have moved back to narrm / melbourne months earlier than anticipated
• happen to have been here for NAIDOC week
• happen to be in a car
• happen to be listening to the radio
• happen to be there on the day that this radio programme is on
• happen to be on for the 20 mins that Laniyuk is speaking

Laniyuk helped me break a Wrong Assumption

source:www

Laniyuk is a Larrakia, Kungarrakan and Gurindji poet, living in #melbourne / #naarm . She was recently awarded with the First Nations Writer’s Residency in the 2017 Noted Festival, and Overlands' Writers’ Residency in 2018. She is a contributor to the book, Colouring the Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans Perspectives.

In the spirit of the theme of #NAIDOC Week, "Because of her, We can", she talks about the strong and important women in her life, and the power of the arts in healing and imagining better futures.

http://www.3cr.org.au/spoken-word/episode-201807120900/spoken-word-laniyuk

Prelude

In truenames are unintuitive I am riffing on the the idea that the notion of something precious which is difficult/impossible to recover once lost and that that something is also a doorway through to other capacities and capabilities is an unintuitive one. A piece of poetry yesterday completely ruptured my frame of thinking about this and I am trying to piece back the shards to see if this is actually true.

source:web

We are used to recoverability. Bank cards, identity documents, passwords. Mummy, daddy, state-bureaucrat, mrs. banker - here are the forms and hop skip jump can you wing a replacement through these hoops for me, thank you sir, yes masssir. pop goes the letter box, yay the replacement, oh what's this - oh an overdraft bill, bummer.

The nearest that we have are material belongings. We lose those coins in our purses and they are gone to the back of couches of eternity or the drains of time. But even this doesn't really work - perhaps individually - but the central bank, the central reserve, the mint can always print more on demand. Banks continue to be able to make errant entries into spreadsheets unthethered. No real loss there at a systemic level.

Perhaps there are some analogies to be drawn from places such as secret societies such as the masonic lodge. You have a ring, a handshake and a password. What if you were beaten, the ring taken and you lose some of your memories and forget the handshakes and the passwords. I wonder if this scenario is covered in the masonic handbook... I am guessing that there would be a social net of recovery. Peers would vouch for this person perhaps. So this analogy doesn't seem to work.

Remember your Name

https://hooktube.com/watch?v=7g4QGhMzkQ4

Remember your Name
Remember your Skin
Remember your Tribal Land
Sweet Child of mine
cos your going away

dont know why it has to be this way
we tried our best to hide
sweet child of mine
tried to hide you away
dont know where you're going to
dont know what your going to have to do
don't know if you'll live or die
but before you go

Remember your Name
Remember your Skin
Remember your Tribal Land
Sweet Child of mine
cos your going away

song

Skin Names and the attempted erasure of violent colonisation

As I mentioned at the head of this meander I found myself listening to Laniyuk through a series of intricate synchronisties.

In the show she shares a poem/story about her Grand Mother's Mother being taken away by the state and before she was taken, her mother made sure that she knew her skin name, she would have been taken when she was around three or younger. But she must have sat there and repeated over and over to remember your name, remember your name, remember your name - this is your name, this is your skin name, this is your skin name. Years later when she grew up she was able to return to that space with only her skin name she was able to track down her family and find her family. Auntie June wrote that song, to honor that story. Important story to honor as it was due to those efforts that the family line was able to stay within their culture.

having her daughter stolen from her by the State. All she is able to impart to her daughter is her Skin Name. She repeats it over and over and over. The daughter is taken away, to grow up in adoption or care

As part of the NAIDOC week programming, the spoken word

Listening to Skin Names there in something there in the erasures.

We speak of tales of fables of old - these are of of the old oral architectures and not of the erasures of the white frameworks. White is not an ethnicity but a power structure which some have access to and others not to.

links:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-culture-blog/2014/may/23/the-stolen-generations-an-unending-disaster-for-australia

cc: #truename #skin-name

I'm getting into posting the process as it incentives me to come back and sit with things even when I get stuck, and it's messy unpacking...

basic premise is that part of the #white-supremacy framework is the tool of erasure. perhaps part of the struggle to find analogies to truenames is that the system we are embedded within is all about forgetting, about erasure.

perhaps when we look outside of that framework we find some very potent examples of where the important of not forgetting is very well understood. it is a matter of life or death. it is a matter of retaining a connection to your culture and your people.

it is worth point out here the following:

White isn’t an ethnicity. It’s a power structure that only some people have access to.

source:twitter

backlink:

Kinship and Skin Names

white power structures are about granting enTITLEments to some and not others, about granting ACCESS to some and not others. it determines who is human and who is subhuman.

it is a way of approaching the world vastly different from all human life being equal, that system is not about ACCESS as everyone embodies this through being born...

privatekeys are open to anyone with the knowledge - they are potentially not a system to which people are granted ACCESS or not...

last thing worth mentioning is I am not even sure if the above story is mine to use/share - I am wary of appropriation and want to think this through more...

"Forgotten...", how clumsy of us! To forget names in the midst of a centuries long colonization project. White people literally cut the toungues out of Murris heads to stop us from speaking about culture in language. Forgotten fuckoff.

source:twiiter

white conolonial practice of erasure puts a different perspective on this gif

Some other examples which map the notion of truenames from the margins:

• non-male coders not revealing they are not male, they have something they have to hide or there will be bad consequences
  https://twitter.com/dan_mi_sun/status/1020471537126608898

• @angelica on being femme in comics

• 12 Women Writers Who Wrote Under Male Pseudonyms

• sex workers needing to hide their truenames

• workers who are sick and have had their medicines prices jacked up (in some cases by 700%) by vulture companies such as valeant (from dirty money) workers need to hide they are now on such expensive meds from their employers - if they are found out they could be next in line to be laid off and then would be fucked for future employment or insurance...

So even before code schools, the CS grad numbers didn’t tell the whole story. If anything, they overestimated the proportion of women in the industry, since almost all the people entering it via informal paths were not women.
Back before github, in the bad old days when open source contribution meant emailing a patch to a mailing list, I contributed to a number of projects using a carefully neutral handle.
Like many women, I created that handle because when I tried to contribute using my real name, my patches were ignored, downplayed, or nitpicked to death. I never got one actually accepted under my name.
Trouble is, I needed to make sure nobody ever connected real-me to that contributor - because if they did, it would be back to the defending & arguing & gatekeeping & nitpicking. So I couldn’t put that experience on my resume, or discuss it in interviews.
I had some close calls. One memorable interviewer directly accused me of lying when I forgot & mentioned I’d contributed to an Apache module. He happened to work on the same one and, I guess, couldn’t fathom one of the other contributors being me.
As a result, that open source work didn’t give me the cachet it would have given someone operating under their own identity. Eventually, after yet another string of thoughtless sexism on the mailing lists (“because there are no girls here anyway lol”) I quit altogether.
Has this improved recently? I suspect not, given the recent study that said pull requests from women were more likely to be accepted but ONLY if it was wasn’t obvious they were women.
So yeah. There are informal routes in to the industry with relatively low barriers to entry - and there always have been - but they’re really only open to men.
With the rise of code schools, the landscape shifted. Another entryway to the industry appeared, with a lower barriers to entry than a CS degree. Are code school cohorts more gender-balanced than CS degree cohorts? Yes, almost always.
Does that mean the structural issues that meant I couldn’t get patches accepted as a woman just...evaporated? NOPE.
The biggest barrier to entry in software for non-white-men has never been credentials or knowledge or even experience. It’s always been plain old discrimination, and neither Github nor code schools have fixed that part.
So now we have code schools, self-study/open source, AND CS degree programs as entryways to the field. By some counts, code school grads outnumber CS grads, but also have a harder time breaking in. The landscape is way more complicated than it was even 10 years ago.
It makes less and less sense to rely on gender balance in CS degree cohorts to stand in for “entering class” gender balance overall. I mean, it never really made sense. But now it’s just indefensible. We need better data to really understand where we are. [fin]

I'd like to add a little bit of learning to this thread. I asked Laniyuk's advice about whether it's appropriate to e.g. offer to support Tonga by offering tools like scuttlebutt (concerns being that it feels better if there's existing relationships there, and not in a time of crisis, but that the crisis, e.g. cyclone can feel like an opportunity). Anyway, the learning was:

you may be assuming that there isn't already resiliance

There was also a point along the lines that marginalised or vulnerable communities already have (out of necessity) patterns of resiliance. I knew I was asking a naive question but was really grateful for my blind spot there to be brought into sharp focus

@Emmi Bevensee I'm guessing she's @9aHOVuS...