“I feel that this conference brought it all together for me. I can fit in with these people, these ideas. They all understood implicitly the importance of the relationships that we built together, between us, our homelands and our ideas. This is where I belong as a scholar, as an Indigenous person, as an Indigenous scholar.” -Shawn Wilson describing a 2002 Indigenous Scholars Conference in Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008)

                In 2022 I went to a really cool five day conference. I met wonderful people facilitating all sorts of cool programs and projects. I went on a hike. I was part of a little “home group” — seven of us, connected before the conference, and checking in together at least once a day. The idea was that everyone would have a few people who were a kind of “home,” even as we came together from many places. I remember one of the people in my group (someone I really liked) commenting how close you start to feel to people at a conference like this. And commenting, a few days later, how after the conference we would all drift apart again. “You realize that’s okay, too,” they said. “That’s how it goes.”
                And it was okay. I guess. I could say that I carry the people from that conference with me (I do: I’m thinking about them now), but looking back, really I wonder: why have it go that way? Like most of the educational programs I’ve been part of, the conference I went to seemed to assume that there was something else we were doing that was more important than whatever bonds we were forming. Maybe that something else was supposed to be ‘the ideas themselves:’ the refined understandings that went into our ‘professional development.’ Maybe we were supposed to be enriched, individually, and take that ‘individual’ enrichment back to our ‘separate’ institutions. Maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, I’m not convinced.  I think “That’s how it goes” because our social systems led participants to go that way. Reading Shawn Wilson, I want to work toward a conference that’s about the bonds themselves, the relationships, the ways of being together and in the world. Looking back years later, I want to hear someone say “That conference brought it all together for me.” That would mean, years later, we were still talking, sometimes at least. Maybe someone else would say, “That’s how it goes.” Or they’d say: “I belong here.”