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In February 2019, I posted on a Dutch Ontario Facebook group looking for someone who might teach me some Frisian. My interest was inspired by the imperative to decolonize and undo the damaging amnesia of whiteness by identifying myself and where I come from, what my lineage and inheritance is; secondly, by my experiences in queer-centred magical and witchcraft communities; and third, by a visit to Friesland in 2017. Friesland is a small province of the Netherlands and Frisian is linguistically distinct from Dutch.
My great uncle Marten VanderWal replied to my post. Over the next six months, we met by video and phone—I was usually in my apartment on the east end of Toronto and Marten lives in Belleville, Ontario. We worked together to translate folk tales from the Nederlandse Volksverhalenbank, a public archive of folk tales housed at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam (verhalenbank.nl).
This book is a document of our language lessons, produced at Artscape Gibraltar Point in December 2019. It is available by print-on-demand from Amazon, or by emailing me at eliot (dot) feenstra (at) gmail (dot) com.