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Well congrats anyway! I hope you two are super happy together!

Thank you, we are! I am really lucky to have him.

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so um

i’m... not a lesbian. i am in love... with a guy. and it’s as much of a surprise to him as it is to me, because he thought he was gay and i thought i was a lesbian and... well.

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i havent slept in 72 hours because this photo of peter capaldi is all i can see whenever i close my eyes

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Never deny the oppressive realities of oppressed people. Never tell them they’re wrong about their lived experiences.

Unless they disagree with you about the q word being 100% reclaimed by everyone and if you say otherwise you’re a liar /s

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I didn't fuckin ask

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The final episodes of doctor who had a lot of subtext that knocked me for a loop. The internalized transphobia of the master, the conversion (therapy) chamber that bill was put through, the fact that she was rescued from its clutches literally by the strength of lesbian love, the parallels (tho I think these ones were unintentional) between the way bill was "fixed" and the forced surgery performed on intersex people The finale episodes were tough to get through but so, so good.

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Proud plant pup

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In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.

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No one has a lack of the math gene, says someone who doesn't know what dyscalculia is

It was a huge disappointment as a child to fall in love with the stars and then find out how much math it requires to get anywhere near them. 

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I binge watched selfie over the weekend and um it was delightful But also, the last episode was Eliza encountering the popular girl who had tormented her as a child. And she was a published author, and as she was talking at her book signing, she said all this stuff about how she had been unpopular as a kid. She basically said that all the stuff she had done to Eliza had been done to her, to make her sound like an inspirational success story And when Eliza confronted her about it she was like "You made me hate the person that I was. I spent my entire life changing everything about myself so I wouldn't be that person. And then you stole that person." I need to gif this scene because the moment she said it I started sobbing, both as someone who was tormented to an extreme degree, and because that is exactly why cultural appropriation is so harmful

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Gather around American boys and girls, it’s time to play “Is it fireworks or gunshots?”

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can i hear more about the class you hijacked? (this doesnt have to be private)

I actually got out of bed just so I could go full rant about this on my  computer, so y’all buckle up (thank you for giving me this opportunity lololol)

Okay, so this happened about a year, maybe a year and a half ago. I’m gonna go ahead and make this one public for the benefit of those that didn’t follow me back then, if that’s cool.

Let me preface this by saying that I had taken literally every one of the professor’s classes before then. Partly because they were the only anthropology style class the uni offered, and partly because halfway through the second class I realized that literally everything was the same, except the books, which we never used. Even the assignments were the same, and I had perfected a system of how to do those quickly, easily, and last-minute, lol. So it was pretty much the definition of an easy A, and the prof liked me bc I was nice, actually listened to her even though I’d heard it all before, and didn’t rat her ass out for not actually teaching what she was supposed to, lol.

I should’ve known right there.

So when there was an opportunity to take a Native Americans in North America class with her, I jumped on it. I needed the hours, I obviously knew a lot on the subject already, and it would be another easy a, if history was anything to go by. 

It became one of the most frustrating classes I have ever taken.

As always, the class started the same as the others. We started out learning about vocab and models. NBD, we’d get to specifics eventually, right?

Now there are about 16 to 18 weeks in your average semester.

By week 6 we had yet to learn anything about Native history. She’d assigned some reading about the moundbuilder’s archeological sites, but nothing about the modern day. Maybe she was just taking it slow, I thought, though I was bothered by her only talking about Natives in the past tense. But she’d told me in the first class I’d taken with her (years ago by now) that she was enrolled Native, so I didn’t call it out immediately. 

We get to week 8, halfway through the semester, she hadn’t covered anything. No mention of treaties, modern movements for civil rights, AIM (American Indian Movement), the illegal overthrow of Hawai’i, buffalo kill offs, smallpox blankets, Chicago museum’s bullshit, NAGPRA (a law protecting grave sites and demanding the return of remains to their Nation by museums and sites, if the Nation will accept them (sometimes they allow the remains to be housed by the museum bc they’re typically more secure there, but that’s very rare)) beyond how it affected archeologists, the different regions, the language families, ghost dance, the flooding of lands by companies illegally, human zoos, RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS, THE FUCKING TRAIL OF TEARS, NOTHING.

Like your 4th grade history segment, as racist as it probably was, probably was more informative than this bitch was being, okay? And I was getting mad. Y’all know me. Native activism is a huge part of my life, and has been for years. Students were being allowed to say really racist shit unchecked. The prof wasn’t teaching jack. Misinformation was being spread, even by the prof.

It felt like even in a class dedicated to us, we didn’t matter. Our history didn’t matter. 

I was fed up.

Then, she pissed me the absolute fuck off. She proceeded to spend the rest of the class talking about South America.

Now, our Indigenous family below the equator absolutely deserve to be discussed. They have so many issues that really, really need to be boosted and respected. We do not raise their voices often enough. But this was a class specifically about North America, and her reasoning for making it otherwise was racist in so many ways.

First, she changed the curriculum outside of its scope because she was “MORE INTERESTED IN SOUTH AMERICA, AND WOULD HAVE TO DO RESEARCH TO TALK ABOUT” the issues I was publicly demanding to know when she would cover. As if her personal interest and ignorance were more important than our lives. 

(side note, it turns out she was lying about being enrolled and Native. Her white supremacist brother (not even kidding) had said that a Cherokee woman chief in Minnesota or some shit had enrolled them. I asked her if she meant Wilma Mankiller, the first modern female Cherokee chief. She said no, it was someone else, and in the late nineties, after Wilma would’ve no longer been Chief. I publicly called her out, and even another student jumped in to help, because there was no other woman Chief then, and there was no recognized Nation that far North. Her white supremacist brother had lied bc he felt othered while working near the Din’e on a job site, bc they didn’t include his racist ass, lol. So she’d lied her way into being allowed to teach a class she didn’t even know or care about. So at this point, I was fucking done with her, lol)

She also was showing us old propaganda films, and literally every group she discussed was being painted as ignorant, warlike savages by her and the materials. She even defended a man that intentionally exposed Indigenous peoples with no immunity to certain diseases to said diseases ‘just to see what would happen.’ She recommended his books, including ‘Noble Savages’ to us. I shouldn’t have to explain why that’s racist, lmao.

All of this is to say that I was VERY fed up, she (and the class) was VERY racist, and she was going down.

Then her foolish self decided to assign a massive project where we were supposed to ‘teach the class’ about a Native subject (y i k e s, esp. since the class was full of non-Natives). Since I was Fed Up, I decided to skip the usual schooling on cultural appropriation to instead teach everyone (including her) about just a smattering of the important things she hadn’t even mentioned in passing. :)

What followed was a 33 page powerpoint.

Apologies for any inaccuracies, and blanket tw for slurs, racism, death, csa, torture, child abuse, etc etc etc

(I added all the regalia pics bc they made me happy and calmed me down, which I was gonna need. I set the presentation up as “Man, I sure had trouble deciding what to make my presentation about. Should I talk about X? Y? Z? This? That? This? And so on until I reached residential schools and Reconciliation as my discussion topic.)

I hope those gifs work. If not, they should be under my “Oka Crisis” tag, or “n i fn a history” and “n i fn a protests” tags. I also had decided early to use the Nations actual names where possible.

Oh look, a quick and easy way to make people realize THIS IS WHY YOU DON’T FUCKING REFER TO US AS SLURS, and here’s how to discuss the issue without being additionally harmful.

OH LOOK, SOURCES

#FreeLeonardPeltier

Getting progressively angrier at this point. The class is smart enough to stay silent.

#MMIW #NoMoreStolenSisters. Please bring them home. Whatever it takes.

Stayed on this slide juuust long enough to stare each person in class down.

Oh look, we’re finally hitting my actual topic. Again, shit’s about to get very heavy. Please read only if you can. I will not be glancing over these to check them rn, bc I can’t. I’m sharing just for y’all to see, and hopefully reblog to educate people.

I honestly wept as I worked on this part. I can’t read it again.

Calling it out.

AYUP. Canadians are so nice and their government isn’t problematic at all

There are survivors that are my age, and younger.

Not letting them forget that this isn’t just in the past. It still wounds us.

It still hurts. We’re still recovering.

I included resources for them, including the prof, to actually educate themselves, since our school sure as shit wasn’t going to do it.

A handful of my sources.

Anyways. I was done. So fucking done. She (the prof) still tried to guide the class back and pretend that it was acceptable that she hadn’t taught them anything. I didn’t let her. I reminded them all that the only reason that this was Canada focused was bc they’d just had the Truth and Reconciliation reports, whereas the US government hasn’t put any effort into assembling data on their atrocities. Go figure.

Anyways, happy #Canada150 everybody :)

OK to reblog.

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Like I know bus stops are liminal spaces and all but this kind of thing is a little too surreal for first thing in the morning

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