Brainstorm #6- Emily Eckey

Patrisia Gonzales’s “Ceremony of Memory: The Call and Response” associates technologies with resilience practices and describes them as the objects people use to express themselves and culture. Traditional technologies are both cultural matter and medicinal instruments. Gonzales gives examples of these traditional technologies writing, ”For instance, just as a woman’s braid is a traditional birth technology, the woman’s shawl is considered a technology in Indigenous birthing because it helps to adjust the position of the fetus” (Gonzales 85). In these ways, the technologies connect to ancient female practices and culture. Female power is expressed through this traditional medicinal and ritual knowledge as Indigenous medicine is shared across generations. Gonzales expresses that women derived their power from their relationship to the natural world and their knowledge of the body (Gonzales 76). These traditional technologies and female practices can also be connected to technologies today. In 'Girl in a Coma' Tweets Chicanafuturism: Decolonial Visionaries, Michelle Habell-Pallan reviews the connection of traditional technologies to Girl in a Coma’s development as a band with the rise of social technology. Girl in a Coma uses social media and communication technologies to convey the past, present, and future and incorporate it into their music. In previous readings, Martha Gonzalez described convivencia as “the deliberate act of being with or present to each other” (Gonzalez 70). Martha Gonzalez’s writing on the practice of “convivencia” is represented in the “Clumsy Sky” video by Girl in a Coma through the shifts between the band and dancing audience as they come together as a community to enjoy the music.