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I take this mass murderer sooooo seriously guys I’m not smiling like an idiot wdym

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Smile Entity animated shots (before final composite)

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I don't want to hurt anybody. I don't enjoy hurting anybody. I don't like guns or bombs or electric chairs, but sometimes people just won't listen and so I have to use persuasion, and slides. My parents, Sharon and Dave. Generous, doting, or were they?

Addams Family Values (1993) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld

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I don't vibe with many but when I do, it's genuine.

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The pettiness is just 👌😂

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As more and more corporations scale back their DEI programs in order to kiss the ring of Agent Orange, I hope everyone remembers this. In ten years time, when those same corporations inevitably try to get back into the public’s good graces as part of some extended apology tour, remember how quickly they flipped on you when it was politically and financially convenient for them.

Corporations are not your friends.

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Trail of Tears: Memorial and Protest of the Cherokee Nation by John Ross

The Trail of Tears was the forced relocation of the “Five Civilized Tribes” – Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole – from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern region of the United States to “Indian Territory” (modern-day Oklahoma) between 1831 and 1850, resulting in the deaths of over 16,000 Native Americans and the removal of over 60,000 from their homelands.

Trail of Tears Memorial at New Echota

Christopher James Culberson (Public Domain)

Scholar John Ehle writes, “the Trail of Tears – or, as the Indians more often said, the Trail Where They Wept – was a trail of sickness” (385). Most Native Americans died of disease, exposure, exhaustion, and starvation on the forced marches from their lands east of the Mississippi River (modern-day Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee) to Indian Territory, a distance of between 1000 miles (1600 km) and over 5000 miles (8000 km), depending on where a given march began and the route taken.

The Trail of Tears was not a singular event but a series of forced relocations following the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The marches began the following year with the Choctaw nation and proceeding through 1847, ending in 1850:

Choctaw: 1831-1836

Seminole: 1832-1842

Muscogee Creek: 1834-1837

Chickasaw: 1837-1847

Cherokee: 1836-1838

Precisely where the term “Trail of Tears” originated is debated, but it is usually attributed to a Choctaw chief who described the journey as “a trail of tears and death.” Scholar Adele Nozedar comments:

The originator of this simple phrase is not known for sure, but it is believed to have been used by a Choctaw chief, Nitikechi, to describe the effects of the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokee had a similar term: “The Place Where They Cried.”

(500)

Cherokee Chief John Ross (l. 1790-1866) famously opposed the removal in his Memorial and Protest of the Cherokee Nation sent to Congress in June 1836, arguing that the US government had no legal grounds for relocating his people. Although his piece focuses on the Cherokee nation, the points he makes apply equally to the others who were forcibly removed from their lands.

Although the Trail of Tears is the best-known act of forced relocation of Native Americans, it is far from the only one as citizens of many other nations of Native peoples of North America experienced the same throughout the 19th century and up to as recently as the mid-1960s to the 1970s. This event, and others like it, notably the Long Walk of the Navajo (1863-1866) are, generally, understood today as acts of genocide perpetrated by the US government.

Background to the Marches

Although the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the immediate cause for the death marches known as the Trail of Tears, the policies informing that act date back to the 1630s, notably the Pequot War (1636-1638), which reduced the Pequot population of the region of modern-day Massachusetts from 3000 to 200 (many then sold into slavery) to open up their lands for English colonization. Among the “facts submitted to a candid world” presented by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was that King George III of Great Britain (r. 1760-1820)

Has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

As president, in 1803, Jefferson advocated the forced removal of Native Americans west of the Mississippi River and, by 1819, citizens of Native American nations were offered 640 acres of land in Indian Territory for giving up their lands east of the Mississippi. The US government in 1819 had no authority to grant these acres to anyone, however, as they were in so-called “Indian Territory” and, as John Ross points out below, the US government had no legal right to forcibly remove Native Americans from their homelands for relocation in the west.

Westward Exploration and Settlement of the United States c.1850

Simeon Netchev (CC BY-NC-ND)

The solution to the “Indian Problem”, included in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, was to buy the land from Native Americans, and then, having nowhere to live, they might be amenable to moving west on their own, which the US government promised to help them do. Although the cause of the Trail of Tears is often attributed to the Georgia Gold Rush of 1829, which brought miners into conflict with Native Americans living there, President Andrew Jackson already had Native American relocation as a priority when he took office that year.

Continue reading…

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it’s okay if you thought you’d moved on but still get triggered by something