This past August, I found out I was accepted into the Executive Program in News Leadership and Innovation at The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY). I also received a full tuition scholarship, without which I likely would not have been able to attend. The year-long program mostly takes place online, but there are three mandatory in-person weeklong intensives in New York City. 

So, I packed way too many outfits and shoes and headed to Manhattan in early September. It was the first time I was going to spend any time there — apart from a show my band Vancougar played at The Cake Shop back in 2008 — so I was apprehensive. Mostly, I wanted to know if I would get to spend time with any other Indigenous people while I was there.

After all, what’s been briefly known as NYC is the homelands of the Lenape people (Lenapehoking), and the city has one of the largest urban Indigenous populations in the “United States.”  

As luck would have it, I received two different invitations to openings by Indigenous artists that just happened to be taking place in Manhattan the very week I would be there. I RSVP’d to both, hoping that the busy schedule of our in-person intensive program would allow me the time to attend. 

Monday

I arrived on a hot, muggy, Monday night after sprinting through the airport in “Toronto” to make it to customs before it closed. I’ve never been rushed through a border that quickly before, but the employees clearly wanted to go home. The New Jersey air was sweltering outside the airport (interestingly enough, the airport in Newark, New Jersey, is closer to Manhattan than either of the two airports in Queens). 

My heart briefly stopped when I saw the price of an Uber into the city, but after wheeling around with my two suitcases looking for the train, I called my husband for emotional support. He gently suggested I be kind to myself and give in and take the Uber. I sometimes forget I’m no longer in my 20s, or able to withstand almost anything physically. I arrived at my lodgings after a 20-minute ride, only to discover that I was staying on the fifth floor of a five-story walkup. Those flights of stairs, combined with the heatwave the city was experiencing, would prove challenging for all six days of my stay.

Tuesday

My first day of the program! 

I woke up in Chelsea, but so close to midtown that within two blocks, I was passing Madison Square Garden (which is round, by the way). As soon as I got to the most touristy area of town, the sidewalks were so choked with people that it became a challenge to get from one end of the block to the other. I passed all the trinket shops and vowed to stop in for souvenirs for my kids before I left, although I never did. 

There are a lot of people in NYC, about eight million of them. The school was located 11 blocks from where I was staying, a choice I had made so that I would get a chance to walk a bit and see more of New York — or so I thought. The cacophony of midtown — the tourist destination of New York and home to Times Square and Madison Square Garden — combined with the heat made it a bit more of a hellscape than I had anticipated. But it was also amusing. As I approached each street, I came upon a sea of cars that seemed to have no beginning or end and did not seem to correspond at all with whether the light was green or red. The pedestrians, too, were a nonstop river, walking between cars like water through rocks in a shallow stream. The cars seemed not to move at all. The honking was endless. I was in New York!

I had chosen to wear my expensive, slip-on running shoes that day, and I was very glad that I did. Almost nobody wears heels in New York. Over the week I was there, I saw thousands of people and almost no high heels. 

The first day of the program was exciting and scary. The people in my cohort came from all over the world, including Romania, South Africa, Germany, China (by way of Brussels), Finland, Canada and all over the United States. Some of my classmates were from smaller outlets like I was, like the nonprofits Prison Journalism Project and Wisconsin Watch. Others were from huge, household-name publications, like Reuters and TIME. I felt a little out of my league but also proud that I was able to represent IndigiNews in such a prestigious space. We all had to give short presentations about our organizations. I got through mine OK, even though it was a bit scary.

Before leaving for New York, I had looked up Manhattan in Google Maps and did a search for “urban Indigenous.” Lo and behold, I found the Urban Indigenous Collective! It looked like I had found an Indigenous community centre, which I imagined would be like the friendship centres that we have back in “Canada.” Not only that, but they were only two blocks away from my school. So, at lunch, I headed out on my own to find them. As soon as I left our air-conditioned building, the heat was so intense that I realized I would only be able to walk for a limited amount of time. I followed the directions on my phone, sweating profusely and trying to avoid the direct sunlight, which felt like a blowtorch on my face. I soon found myself on the block where they were located. 

I expected to see something like a friendship centre or a community centre — a low building that took up half a block. This was midtown Manhattan, and those types of buildings did not exist here. So I looked at the address on my phone again — and realized they were located on the 12th floor of a highrise! I jaywalked in between two cars that were not moving to minimize the amount of walking I would have to do in the heat and entered the building. I pushed the elevator button uncertainly. This did not seem like a place I would find an Indigenous organization. I was nervous.

The elevator doors opened on the 12th floor, and I found their door. It was solid wood and painted yellow, with a little sign indicating that it was, indeed, the office of the Urban Indigenous Collective. But it didn’t seem like the type of place one drops into. I put my ear to the door and heard nothing. I gently turned the door handle. It was locked. Feeling anxious and self-conscious, I walked back to the elevator. I felt uncomfortable being in this building. I felt confused and lost. But I stopped myself from getting on the elevator. I knew I had to push myself. I had walked all the way to this building in the oppressive heat. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to make this attempt a second time, so I willed myself back to that yellow door and knocked. 

Like a fairy tale, it was opened by a friendly face, belonging to a lovely woman named Delilah, who welcomed me warmly and invited me into the centre. It was a large space, beautifully decorated with Indigenous art on every surface. I felt immediately at ease and was so glad I had pushed myself to be brave and knock on this door. Delilah offered me a Malta India, a sweet pop that was popular where she was from. She explained to me that she was Taino, the Indigenous people of what is now known as “Puerto Rico.”

I sat in a soft chair, grateful to be off my feet and grateful for the drink. “Let me get you some medicines,” Delilah said, and she opened a cupboard and brought out a paper bag. “Here you go, this is for you.” The small brown gift bag she held out to me contained two bundles of sage. I felt so taken care of at that moment. This stranger from a totally different land understood me. She spoke the same healing language of plant medicines as my people did, even in this large city.

I thanked her. What a gift to receive sacred medicines on one of my first trips to New York.

We chatted for a bit and, before long, were sharing personal anecdotes about our families. There are some issues that are common in every Indigenous community, and we soon found that ours suffered from many of the same afflictions that colonization had caused on both sides of the imaginary line. It was a beautiful chat, and I told Delilah I would be back again.

Wednesday

As I chose my outfit for the day, I kept in mind the heat that would almost destroy me on my walk to the school and the air conditioning in the classroom that would later turn me into a block of ice. I slipped on my running shoes again, glancing briefly at the five other pairs of shoes I had brought, all of which had heels of varying heights and were, therefore, unlikely to see the pavement here. 

I made it to a Starbucks next to the New York Times building, which was on the same block as my school. “I’ll go in and grab a coffee,” I thought to myself naively, not realizing what I was about to walk into. Inside was pandemonium. The store appeared to be a dystopian nightmare — a conglomeration between Starbucks and Amazon. There were three separate lines, all of them long. An employee walked the length of the room shouting, “IF YOU’RE ORDERING, STAND IN THIS LINE. FOR PICK-UPS, GO TO THIS LINE.” I never did figure out what the third line was for. After a loud, confusing few minutes, I secured my cup of coffee and made my way to the exit. I vowed never to return.

Thursday

It was the third day of the cohort, and my classmates and I were starting to get to know each other. We had many engaging conversations in which I had been comfortable enough to speak my mind. So far, no one had shunned me for it. Being leaders in their careers, they were all a bit older, like me. Between lectures on strategy and brainstorming sessions on how to save journalism, we showed each other pictures of our families and pets.

Spoiler alert: a cure for what ails journalism was not found.

This was also the evening that Caroline Monnet’s exhibit, WORKSITE, was opening in Tribeca! Before the trip, I had been contacted by a publicist for the artist and gallery and invited to Caroline’s exhibit opening and a sit-down dinner afterward.

Caroline Monnet is a francophone Anishinaabeg with ties to Kitigan Zibi. Her career as an artist is multifaceted and expansive, with a practice that combines art, film, architecture and furniture design. I got on the subway and then I made my way to the back alley that housed the door to Arsenal Contemporary Art and made my way up the concrete steps to the modern gallery on the second floor. 

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to the gallery — it can be hard to comprehend size and scope through pictures. Caroline’s works are beautiful and thought-provoking. They are large and colourful and were displayed so that I could walk around them and see them from many different angles. I read the curation statement and took pictures. 

I loved the way they wove together materials that would not necessarily come to mind when thinking of Indigenous artistic practice, such as construction materials or FedEx packaging. With WORKSITE, Caroline was able to turn these into something entirely new and unanticipated. 

Most of Caroline’s pieces in the exhibit seemed to be asking the viewer to interrogate the idea of ‘home.’ There were works created out of pink insulation, roofing tiles and house wrap, arranged in patterns that invoked Indigeneity. I’m not Anishinaabeg and wouldn’t know if they were a continuation of patterns found in materials from Caroline’s ancestors, but it felt like that’s what her pieces were pointing to. 

Her art had me thinking of land use. Who gets to “own” land and who gets to build their lives, literally or metaphorically on lands where Indigenous people have been displaced. It had me reflecting on the many cultures that we now share our homelands with and the new home-building practices they have introduced here.  

After the opening, I met up with the publicist who had invited me, and we made our way over to Au Cheval in Tribeca for the sit-down dinner with the artist. At the restaurant, we were served an upscale three-course meal, and I found myself sitting across from a reporter from Native News Online and an Indigenous Studies professor at nearby NYU.

There were many other Indigenous creatives at this little private party, and I marvelled at the community I had just happened to stumble upon. Within four days in New York, I had found two engaging, stimulating rooms of Indigenous folks, which in my twenty years of being back in “Canada” had happened to me maybe three times (aside from my amazing family, of course). We’re a small population spread out over a large land mass. With its huge population and relatively small area, I believe New York makes finding community for almost any person exponentially easier. 

Friday

We were treated to a thunderstorm, which I’ve always loved. It was time for our field trip to meet with folks from The Marshall Project, an organization that practices accountability journalism regarding the criminal “justice” system. We walked in the rain through Times Square to their offices, where they fed us lunch and spoke with us about what they do. It was inspiring, much like the Prison Journalism Project, co-founded by my CUNY cohort classmate Yuko Kane, which publishes stories by incarcerated people.

A bunch of us went out to a Korean BBQ restaurant that evening and then to two different karaoke bars, where we sang into the wee hours. I was bonding with my classmates.

Saturday

I missed my husband and children. I missed my dogs. But I don’t have a lot of close in-person relationships where I live. I have a handful of friends that I see sporadically. Most of my closest relationships are with the incredible people I work with – and we all work remotely. So, I was feeling a little bit sad to be leaving New York that Saturday. But that’s what I did after my week at CUNY concluded with a mini day-long journalism conference with current and former participants and faculty members of CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism and the Executive Program for News Innovation and Leadership. 

I’m looking forward to returning in February for the program’s mid-year residency. I’ve met the most fascinating and inspiring journalists from around the globe. I’ve found a new home away from home where I feel comfortable and safe. This nehiyaw iskwew is looking forward to spending more time in what some have called the greatest city on earth. 

The post Hot Cree In The City: My time representing IndigiNews in NYC appeared first on IndigiNews.