i'll leave for peru in 11 days so here is a substack introduction

perhaps not a logic that follows smoothly but neither do most chains of event

I've wanted to start a substack for a while with the cumulation of personal essays lining unread in the depths of my google docs. Conveniently, here I have a chance to absolutely destroy my digital footprint for 6 credits in a foreign country. But if I ever decide to discard all of my criticality gathered from my education and become a politician or fashion influencer (same thing actually), at least if someone tries to cancel me they will see some sort of genuine humanity behind my writing, a semblance of growth.

A tiktok once told me (because tiktok tells me all the important things) that you have to learn how to introduce yourself without mentioning your hobbies or work or schooling. My name is Annie, I am a sensitive person though I’m unsure if that is because I don’t disassociate from the plethora of tragic stimuli in a world of violence and individualism, and I think this sensitivity motivates much of my life. I want to understand people, how and why they act, why good people to bad things, what we do when we are privileged, what we do when we are resentful, what we do when we are inspired. I am open-minded and considerate, but I am also deeply biased and positioned in my identity as a queer person of colour, and this awareness of who I am, why I act how I do, allows me to acknowledge that I may not ever truly understand differently positioned people, and that might be the closest to neutrality and universalism that this world tries to achieve. I deal with my sensitivity with creativity, a creativity that is sometimes analytical and logical and sometimes abstract and artistic. But always there is vulnerability behind my creativity, sometime at stake, because what then will I ground myself to if I do not sacrifice something to put knowledge and art into the world?

For someone who has such naive hope in humanity I’m a pretty deterministic person. I believe everything happens for a reason, has happened for a reason. I can trace all of my current choices to the way I was raised and the randomness in my live, and future is logical though not predictable. My 8th grade teacher made me a feminist. I started arguing with a liberal white boy throughout high school. I developed a love-hate relationship with political science. I became a trail guide during COVID. My knowledge of Indigenous history got me a job as an archeologist assistant. I chose to major in political science. My close friend in my political science taught me how to suck up to our prof. My prof brought in another prof who advertised a global seminar regarding Indigeneity in the Andes. And now I’m here, writing this blog. One day, this experience is going to lead me somewhere else, and I cannot help but wonder what.

Place is such a weird thing. There is so much history on the ground we stand on and so much history to how we got there. I’m from Whitehorse, Yukon, and it’s where I this blog from. There is timeless history on the land of the Kwanlin Dun and Ta’an Kwach’an and there is also a fragment of mine, a footprint somewhere in the water, a ripple in the spruces. When I’m in UBC, I don’t feel these footprints and ripples. I flew in a plane and did not carry myself with my two legs as a place to explore, nor did I learn the history adequately to know what it means to be on Musqueam land. And when I go to Peru, it will undoubtedly be the same. 6 weeks situated in the place of the people you will be studying is a far better way than staring at a computer, but still, I suspect that there will be a dissonance that is inevitable.

There must be some inherent worth in learning, I know, but a part of me wonders what exactly, will I learn in Peru? Is the comparative perspective on Indigenous liberation and identity-building really what I seek, will really be impactful to myself or my community, or is there something more? Can I say for certain that my airplane carbon emissions will be made up for by a hypothetical spiritual enlightenment? I’m wary to say so—there’s been a deep history of white anthropologists exotifying Indigenous peoples for intellectual and emotional fulfillment and claiming universal zero-point to their identities rather than viewing themselves as a culture. And I am not white but I have been assimilated to these outlooks, I have been socialized to see Indigenous peoples as the other, not white people as the other, and I wonder, could these 6 weeks be spent better home? I may have had my dream summer job of working for an intersectional non-profit women’s centre, helping my community directly, learning my language. I also almost got a job in Vancouver and what if I stayed and built lifelong career connections? But is there not just as equal as a chance that there is someone more qualified for that job than I, and no one better for the program than I? What if my classmates and I are destined to instigate a decolonial revolution together? What if I share a cigarette with a Peruvian bartender and we start a small business in my hometown? What if I, like Jon and my polisci professor (and one of my anthropology professors), develop a fascination with Latin America and commit the rest of my education to its research? The last one is a bit of a stretch but you get the idea.

To Jon and my fellow classmates, I suppose this is a taste of what more existential cultural identity place-based crises are yet to come. By July, I know I’ll have answers and more questions.