Naɫisqélixʷ

This manuscript engages Indigenous epistemologies or ways of knowing, within which—as Gregory Cajete, a Tewa educator and Humanities scholar, writes—an individual “gains knowledge from firsthand experience in the world and then transmits or explores it through ritual, ceremony, art, and appropriate technology.” My project embodies this and is a creative scholarship piece that uses storytelling and personal reflection to engage core structures of Salish-Kalispel worldview in order to deal with chronic pain and to help me redefine my relationship to it in physical and well as metaphysical terms. This project also utilizes Indigenous research methodologies or inquiry techniques through which I accessed knowledge from Elders and my tribe’s oral traditions, especially our sacred stories of the creation and transformation of the world that led me to engage in an array of culturally-specified healing approaches, amongst many others. The title of my manuscript, “Naɫisqélixʷ” (which translates from Salish into English as “people-eating monsters”), comes from our Coyote stories because, just as these entities posed grave threats to humans in the primordial past, they continue to do so today but now they can take the form of addiction, self-doubt, or—in my case—chronic pain. I started working on this manuscript nearly two years ago and have been slowly working on it as I can find the time and funding. At this point, all of the research is done and I only need to write it. Last year, a grant from the Montana Arts Council enabled me to begin writing in earnest and a subaward from the Mellon Foundation will allow me to resume working on it again this summer.