Ariel's Land Story: A Sneak Peek into some Patreon-exclusive content
This is an excerpt of a post that I (Ariel) made today on our Patreon. It's members-only content, but I thought I'd give our blog followers a bit of an idea of the kind of content we post there. The full post is here.
"I'm taking inspiration here from the Climate Justice Radio podcast, where I first heard land stories. This narrative strategy really resonated with me; we're all from somewhere, and it's my strongly-held belief that our personalities are the sum of the stories that we tell ourselves (and are told - and have been told throughout our lives by others), and it's important to sit with and interrogate that. In order to ask "where am I" (more accurately, who am I) it's important to have a sense of where one came from, because then you are more clearly able to see where you are going (the example I've read is of a map: you first have to find the YOU ARE HERE sign, and the next step is to figure out how to read the map by applying it to your past travels/experiences, and THEN you can go ahead and read it properly to see where you're going. Or so goes the theory).*
I digress. My name is Ariel Petra Kroon, and I'm a third-generation Dutch settler in southern Ontario, currently on lands that were the traditional territory of the Neutral, Haudenosaunee, and Anishnaabe peoples.
Both sets of my grandparents came over to Canada from the Netherlands after World War Two. My maternal grandmother's parents were from Fryslân and were ... well, not abjectly poor, but still needed a Canadian sponsor (who they later found out was fiscally abusing them) and lived in a converted shed/barn for a while on the farm that my "big Pake" (great-grandfather) was hired to help out on.....
*I'm cribbing this from classic CanLit; Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, all those voices from the 1940s-60s"
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