#BUT AS SOMEONE WHOSE ANCESTORS AND LAND HAS BEEN COLONIZED BY AMERICANS

[twospiritstooprideful]

can't believe Americans are colonizing RedNote now

[nevermindirah]

I've been drafting and redrafting this meta post for weeks now. It's about to be 5781 and my country that was founded on settler colonial genocide and slavery and a deeply flawed but fierce attachment to democracy might go full dictatorship in about 6 weeks and it's time for me to post this thing.

All our immortals are warriors, all have been traumatized by war. But only three of them died their first deaths as soldiers in imperial armies. This fandom has already produced gallons of meta on Nicky dealing with his shit, because Joe would not fuck with an unapologetic Crusader. But there's very rich stuff in Booker and Nile's experiences and the parallels and distinctions between them.

Nile was 11 when her dad was killed in action - that was 2005, meaning she and her dad both died in the same war that George W Bush started in very tenuous response to 9/11. Sure, Nile's dad could have died in either Iraq or Afghanistan, or in a training accident or in an off-the-books mission we won't know about for a hundred more years, but he died in the War on Terror all the same. I had to look it up to be sure because Obama "drew down" the Afghanistan war in his second term, but nope, we're still in this fucking thing that never should've happened in the first place. The US war in Afghanistan just turned 19 years old. A lot of real-life Americans have experiences like the Freemans, parents and children both dying in the same war we shouldn't be in.

I know a lot of people like Nile who join the US military not just because it's the only realistic way for them to pay for college or afford decent healthcare, but also because they have a family history of military service that's a genuine source of pride. Military service has been a way for Americans of color to be accepted by white Americans as "true Americans" - from today's Dreamers who Obama promised would earn protection from deportation by enlisting, to Filipino veterans of WW2 earning US citizenship that Congress then denied them for several decades, to slaves "earning" their freedom through service in the Union Army and in the Continental Army before it. As if freedom is a thing one should have to earn. Lots of Black Americans have the last name Freeman for lots of different escaping-slavery reasons, but it's possible that this specific reason is how Nile got her last name.

Dying in a war you know your country chose to instigate unnecessarily and that maybe you believe it shouldn't be waging is a very particular kind of trauma. It is a much deeper trauma when your military service, and your father's, and maybe generations of your ancestors', is a source of pride and access to resources for you but your sacrifice is nearly meaningless to the white supremacist system that deploys you. That kind of cognitive dissonance encourages a person to ignore their own feelings just so they can function. How do you wake up in the morning, how do you risk your life every day, how do you *kill other people* in a war that shouldn't be happening and that you shouldn't have to serve in just so that your country sees you as human?

We see Nile do her best to be a kind and well-mannered invader. Depending on your experience with US imperialism, Nile giving candy to kids and reminding her squad to be respectful is either heartwarming or very disturbing propaganda. We also see Nile clutching her cross necklace and praying. From the second Christianity arrived on this land it's been a tool of white supremacist assimilation and control, but like military service, it's a fucked-up but genuine source of pride and access to resources for many Americans whose pre-Columbian ancestors were not Christian, and it's a powerful source of comfort and resilience. This Jew who's had a lot of Spanish Inquisition nightmares would like to say for the record that it's not Jesus's fault that his big name fans are such shitty people.

Nile is a good person trying to do her best in a fucked-up world. "Her best" just radically changed. Her access to information on just how fucked up the world is has also just radically changed, because everything's so fucked up a person needs a lot of time to learn about it all and not only does she have centuries but she won't have to spend that time worrying about rent and healthcare and taxes, and because she now has Joe and Nicky and Andy's stories, and because she now has Copley's inside scoop on just what the fuck the CIA has been up to. Like, I want a fic where Copley tells Nile what was really behind the brass's decisions that led to her experiences on the ground in Afghanistan, that led to her father's death, but also I Do Not Want That.

Nile was 19 when Alicia Garza posted on Facebook that Black Lives Matter. She grew up in Chicago well before white people on Twitter were saying maybe police violence against Black people is a problem. She knows this is a deeply fucked up country, and she put on her Marine uniform and deployed with her team of mostly fellow women of color, and maybe she and Dizzy and Jay marched in the streets between deployments, maybe they texted each other when a white manarchist at a protest sneered at one of them for being a Marine. Nile's been busy surviving, and she knows some shit and she's seen some shit but she hasn't had much time to think about what it all means. Now she's got time. And Joe, Nicky, and Andy are willing to listen. (Is Copley willing to listen? I could see that going either way.)

Booker might also be willing to listen. The brilliant idea of cleaning up the rat Frenchman so that Nile can have millennia of emotional support and orgasms sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and holy shit do Booker and Nile have a lot of shared life experience as pawns of imperial wars. Obviously Booker is white and a man and that makes a very big difference. (Though G-d help me, Booker could be Jewish and France was knocking its Jews around like ping-pong balls in the 18th-19th centuries. Jewish Booker wouldn't make him any less white but it does add a shit ton of depth of common experience: military service as a way for your country to see you as a full member of society who matters, because who you are means that's not guaranteed.)

Booker was hanged for desertion from the army Napoleon sent to invade Russia as part of his quest to control all of Europe. We learn in the comics / this YouTube video that Booker was on his way to prison for forgery when he was offered military service instead of jail time. While we don't know how he felt about the choice beyond that he did choose soldier over inmate, it's unlikely he thought invading Russia was a great idea, given he tried to desert because Napoleon like a true imperialist dumbass didn't plan for how he was going to feed his army or keep them from freezing to death in fucking Russian winter.

I find it very interesting that the French Empire was at its largest right before invading Russia and fell apart completely within a few years. My country has been falling the fuck apart for a while now - see aforementioned War on Terror, growing extremes of economic stratification in the richest country in the world, abject refusal to meaningfully deal with climate change that US-based corporations hold the lion's share of blame for - but between Trump's abject refusal to meaningfully deal with the coronavirus and strong likelihood that he'll refuse to leave office even if a certain pathetic moderate I will hold my nose and vote for does manage to earn a majority of votes, ~y~i~k~e~s.

Our only immortals who have never known a world before modernity and nationalism happen to have been born of wars that were the beginning of the end for the imperialist democracies that raised them, and I think in the centuries to come that's going to give them some very interesting shit to talk about.

Nile's a Young Millennial, a digital native born in the United States after the collapse of the USSR left her country as the world's only superpower. She's used to a pace of technological change that human brains are not evolved to handle.

Napoleon trying to make all of Europe into the French Empire was a leading cause of the growth of European nationalism and the establishment of liberal democracies both in Europe and in many places that Europeans had colonized. Booker's first war produced the only geopolitical world order Nile has ever known and I just have so many feelings ok. Nile the art history nerd is probably not aware of this, and why would she be? This humble meta author is, like Nile, a product of US public schools, and all they taught me about world history was Ancient Greece/Rome/Egypt/Mesopotamia and then World War 2. Being raised in The World's Only Superpower is WEIRD.

Nile the Young Millennial is used to the devastating volume of bad news the internet makes possible. But she has absolutely no concept of a world where the United States of America is not The World's Only Superpower. In order to get up in the morning and put on her gear and point guns at civilians in Afghanistan, she can only let herself think so much about whether that American exceptionalism thing is a good idea.

She's about to spend many, many years where the only people who she can truly trust are people who are older than not only her country but the IDEA of countries.

She's got time, and she's got a lot of new information at her disposal. But there comes a point where my obsession with her friendship and eventual very hot sex life with Booker just isn't about sex at all. Nile needs someone to talk to about the United States who Gets It. Booker the rat Frenchman coerced into Napoleon's army, and Copley the Black dual citizen of the US and UK who's retired from a CIA career that he half understands as deeply problematic but half still believes in hence his mind-bogglingly stupid partnership with Merrick, are the only people on the planet Nile can talk to honestly about, and really be understood in, all the thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes of her experience as a US Marine.

And one more thing before I go get ready for Rosh Hashanah: Orientalism was a defining element of the Crusades and that legacy is painfully clear in current US-led Western military activity in Afghanistan, Syria, Israel/Palestine, you name it. Turns out memoirs by French veterans of the Napoleonic Wars are full of Orientalist language about Russia as well. I am maybe/definitely writing a fic where Booker spends his exile reading critical race theory and decolonial feminism and trauma studies monographs because he can't be honest with a therapist but maybe he can heal this way and become the team therapist his own damn self. I just really need him to read Edward Said and Gloria Anzaldúa and then go down on Nile, ok?

[kemetic-dreams]

In my research I learned that the word comes from tribus in Latin. Its earliest usage was in the time of the Roman empire where there were three original tribes, but more were added to organize the voting system.  At first, tribe may have been related to ethnicity, but as more were added, it became about geographical location, rather than kinship.   Tribe was a territorial voting unit in the Roman state. I've seen the word used to talk about Celtic and Germanic histories. It also became associated with the Hebrew people of the Torah and Bible. You must have heard of the 12 Tribes of Israel. The connotations evolved, and the problems with it began when it got into the hands of anthropologists. (Ironically, I have a degree in anthropology and I think it's a fascinating discipline; Good thing my favorite anthro professor back in my university days wisely recommended that we understand the controversies around the term.)

Truth be told, it offends many people. Here's why:

#1 For European missionaries and explorers who went out to conquer people, the word "tribal" was synonymous to "savage" and "primitive." It's mainstream connotation is rooted in colonial-era racist ideology. The word immediately conjures stereotypical imagery of brown people with bones in their noses or naked warriors running around in a rainforest

That “tribal” word

by

Chika Oduah

I cringe whenever I see that word in a news article. And I see it so often in journalese. Stories about developing countries often feature phrases like tribal healer, tribal land, tribal conflict, tribesmen, tribal chief, tribal wear, tribal name, tribal rhythm. The word is so problematic, I don't even know where to begin. I will suggest this - get some education on its history.

The Myth of the Noble Savage

The word plays into a historic imagination that classifies indigenous people outside of Europe into two categories of savages: the noble savage and the brutal savage. That leads me to number two.

The bottom-line problem with the idea of tribe is that it is intellectually lazy.

#2 Societies are constantly changing. No matter where you go, you're bound to see it. Technology, the spread of ideas, education, globalization, all of these elements contribute to sociocultural changes. But the word "tribal" freezes societies in a primordial past (real or imagined) where people wore animal skins and ran with wolves. I think it's hard for many people in the Western world to accept that societies in Africa (in other developing regions around the world) are dynamic. It's hard for some to grasp concepts of modernity in such places.   Even the most remote, far flung communities are not the same today as they were just 20 years ago.

The tribe, a long respected category of analysis in anthropology, has recently been the object of some scrutiny by anthropologists ... Doubts about the utility of the tribe as an analytical category have almost certainly arisen out of the rapid involvement of peoples, even in the remotest parts of the globe, in political, economic and sometimes direct social relationship with industrial nations. The doubts, however, are based ultimately on the definition and meaning which different scholars give to the term 'tribe', its adjective 'tribal', and its abstract form 'tribalism' ~ Dr. James Clyde Mitchell

Westerners have romanticized certain ethnic groups, like the Maasai in eastern Africa, because they have this romantic idea that the Maasai people are living the exact same way as their ancestors did. Untouched by modernity. But that's simply not true. And where does this desperate need to have ethnic groups permanently living in primordial or precolonial states come from? Is the "primitive," noble savage look more marketable for tourism? That leads me to number three.

#3 The relentless attempt to cast Africans are primitive, unchanging people relates to another popular notion that the past, when there was no internet, airplanes or sliced bread, was more peaceful, more pure and less complicated than modern times. The problem with that is that it pushes an identity (based on a misconstrued premise) on other people. It's someone from the West saying I want the kind of African who lives in a thatch-roofed hut in a village in Niamey, not the African who lives in a  brick home in a Harare suburb.  Africans are constantly being defined by the Western world, submitting to the names and descriptions put upon them. In my favorite work by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, the character Odenigbo says, "But my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” (I'll talk about Africans using the word tribe further down!).

In the Americas, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere, colonial administrators applied these terms [tribe and band] to specific groups almost immediately upon contact. ~Encyclopedia Brittanica

#4 The word "tribal" distorts reality because it leads to misguided ideas of what is authentic and what is not. This is when a Westerner, looking at a picture of expensive cars parked at a chic hotel in Accra, says "this is not the real Africa." I hear the comment very often because there's this prevailing perception that the real Africa is "tribal." Its stick, bones, dirt and chiefs draped in leopard print. Anything outside of that, according to that line of thought, has been touched (contaminated, even) by the Western world, therefore is inauthentic. Again, it's that insistence on denying dynamism, that change happens. And that prerequisite applies to people, too. The African woman who graduated from Harvard Business School, works as a bank executive and wears Chanel suits is not a real African. The woman chopping firewood with a naked baby on her back is and gets bonus points for authenticity if the child has flies swarming around the face.

Over to You, Is the Word 'Tribe' Offensive? - BBC World Service

#4 For peoples who experienced oppression, suppression or marginalization from European colonizers or their descendants, the word "tribe" triggers memories of a traumatic past.  This is especially true of Native Americans, also called the First Nations. (I remember learning about the Trail of Tears in elementary school and feeling quite sad about it.)  Thousands of Native Americans were brutally uprooted from their ancestral lands when Europeans and their descendants decided to forcibly expand their presence in the Americas. Today, the U.S. government still officially uses the word "tribes" to refer to Native Americans, but I have read that they prefer to be called "nations" or "people."

#5 There's also this thing with numbers. British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, originator of the Dunbar's number theory, said that 500 - 1,500 people (who follow their ancestral culture, beliefs of unity, laws, and rights; are self-sufficient and have strong emotion towards their lands) can be classified as a one tribe. Those are pretty much the same numbers that other nineteenth century anthropologists used, defining a tribe as a human society made up of several bands. A band was a small, egalitarian, kin-based group of perhaps 10–50 people. So when you're looking at the large ethnic groups in Africa today, some numbering millions, they can't be described as tribes.

Tribe has no coherent meaning. What is a tribe? The Zulu in South Africa, whose name and common identity was forged by the creation of a powerful state less than two centuries ago, and who are a bigger group than French Canadians, are called a tribe. So are the !Kung hunter-gatherers of Botswana and Namibia, who number in the hundreds. The term is applied to Kenya's Maasai herders and Kikuyu farmers, and to members of these groups in cities and towns when they go there to live and work.

Tribe is used for millions of Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin, who share a language but have an eight-hundred year history of multiple and sometimes warring city-states, and of religious diversity even within the same extended families. Tribe is used for Hutu and Tutsi in the central African countries of Rwanda and Burundi. Yet the two societies (and regions within them) have different histories. And in each one, Hutu and Tutsi lived interspersed in the same territory. They spoke the same language, married each other, and shared virtually all aspects of culture. At no point in history could the distinction be defined by distinct territories, one of the key assumptions built into "tribe." ~Pambazuka News

Zambia is slightly larger than Texas. The country has approximately 10 million inhabitants and a rich cultural diversity. English is the official language, but Zambia also boasts 73 different indigenous languages. While there are many indigenous Zambian words that translate into "nation," "people," "clan," "language," "foreigner," "village" or "community," there are none that easily translate into "tribe." Sorting Zambians into a fixed number of "tribes" was a byproduct of British colonial rule over Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia was known prior to independence in 1964).

#6 In anthropological theories of social evolution, "tribe" is lower than "civilization." After studying early cultures in Central and South America, American neo-evolutionary cultural anthropologist Elman Rogers Service devised an influential categorization scheme for the political character of human social structures: band, tribe, chiefdom and state.

A band is the smallest unit of political organization, consisting of only a few families and no formal leadership positions. Tribes have larger populations but are organized around family ties and have fluid or shifting systems of temporary leadership. Chiefdoms are large political units in which the chief, who usually is determined by heredity, holds a formal position of power. States are the most complex form of political organization and are characterized by a central government that has a monopoly over legitimate uses of physical force, a sizeable bureaucracy, a system of formal laws, and a standing military force.

With this understanding, again, many of the large ethnic groups in Africa's modern nation states cannot be called tribes.

But... a lot of Africans use "tribe" to describe themselves. The word is taught in schools across African countries, because the secular educational system was largely created by Westerners. That's the basis of the ongoing  "decolonize education" campaign in South Africa. Check this out: When Africans learn English, they are often taught that "tribe" is the term that English-speakers will recognize. But what underlying meaning in their own languages are Africans translating when they say "tribe"? In English, writers often refer to the Zulu tribe, whereas in Zulu the word for the Zulu as a group is isizwe. Zulu linguists translate isizwe as "nation" or "people." Isizwe refers both to the multi-ethnic South African nation and to ethno-national peoples that form a part of the multi-ethnic nation. When Africans use the word "tribe" in general conversation, they do not draw on the negative connotations of primitivism the word has in Western countries.

But there has been a decades-long push by many African scholars and media professionals to get media outlets, textbooks and academia to stop using "tribe" and "tribal." Some have addressed their concerns to The New York Times, among other news publications.  Here's how Bill Keller, New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning executive editor from 2003 to 2011 responded:

"I get it. Anyone who uses the word "tribe" is a racist. [. . .] It's a tediously familiar mantra in the Western community of Africa scholars. In my experience, most Africans who live outside the comforts of academia (and who use the word "tribe" with shameless disregard for the political sensitivities of American academics) have more important concerns."

The logic here is, since the real Africans are using the word themselves, then what's the big deal? Well, for all the reasons I just presented and more. And recently we're seeing a wave of companies and organizations come out to announce that they will not longer use "tribe" and "tribal." The New York Times is now using "ethnic group" and "ethnic." (I have issues with ethnic. At a Walmart, I noticed that the aisle for hair products tailored to people of African descent was the "ethnic hair" aisle; that's literally what the sign said). These entities may have been motivated by political correctness or could be trying to save face. I don't know. I know that, what to do about the tribe/tribal word is a conversation that matters.

[kuramirocket]

MEXICALI, Mexico — Lucía Laguna carries her fate tattooed on her face — from the corner of her mouth to her chin, black lines surf across her coppery skin — the tribal art honoring her people will also serve an important function later on.

“After my death, it will be guide me to my ancestors. With the tattoo, they will recognize me and can take me where they are," she said, as she talks on the banks of the Colorado River.

But under the merciless sun, Laguna, 51, worries about the fate of the river and its impact on the Cucapá, her Indigenous people. A searing drought is exacerbating the deadly heat in a region that long ago saw its river flow diminished, after almost a century of U.S. engineering projects.

"Cucapá means people from the river, that's why we are fighting for it," she said, pointing to a decrease in the river's flow she is seeing every year. “We cling to the river and fight because it gives us water so that the fish can arrive and we can earn our livelihood. But it is a fight that seems that we will never win," she said, disheartened.

Mexico is experiencing the worst drought in three decades. NASA images from the recently released Landsat 8 satellite showed the extremely low levels of the Villa Victoria dam, one of the capital's main water reservoirs.

According to meteorologists, three quarters of the country suffers from drought; in 16 of the 32 states, it affects their entire territory. Thus, 60 large reservoirs, especially in the north and the center, are below 25 percent of capacity.

"Over the past 70 years, the temperature in Mexico has a clear and conclusive increasing trend. In the last decade, it increased very rapidly and that rise is even higher than the average for the planet," Jorge Zavala Hidalgo, general coordinator of the National Meteorological Service, said.

Rainfall has always fluctuated, he explained, but now the rain is concentrated in fewer days. "And that is bad because we all want it to rain — but nobody wants it to flood, especially the farmers, because that destroys the crops. That is why we are studying everything that is happening."

The increase in temperature especially affects the forests, which go from being a paradise of greenery to time bombs for fire risks. As of May 5, 562 forest fires had been registered, 27 percent more than in 2020. And the burned area grew 69 percent, reaching almost 900,000 acres.

"There is more drought and therefore the vegetation is waiting for someone to arrive, light a leaf and from there, the fire begins," said César Robles, deputy manager of the Fire Management Center of Mexico's National Forestry Commission. "The area affected by fires is directly correlated with the increase in temperature and the decrease in rainfall."

An area resident, Imelda Guerra Hurtado, 43, pointed to the barren lands of El Zanjón, an arid, semi-desert enclave that reaches the banks of the Colorado River delta.

She remembers her grandparents taking her fishing — and points to areas that used to have water.

"Sometimes we feel that we are dying of thirst. Although many deny it, the climate has changed," she said. "We have always lived off the fish in the river, since I can remember. Now we can only fish once a year and it is our main livelihood."

U.S. engineering and their consequences

The Cucapá are one of the five native tribes of Baja California, and they descend from the Yuman people. According to official data, there are now only between 350 and 400 members of the Cucapá people but, in the 19th century, Western colonizers documented between 5,000 and 6,000 nomads who organized into clans.

"You have to understand that these Indigenous people see the entire region, both the part of Mexico and the United States, as their territory. In their traditions, it is remembered that they received a lot of water and, little by little, they were running out of that flow," said Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, director of the Coastal Solutions Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The history of the Colorado River, and the problems it suffers today, is an ode to progress and engineering that tried to tame nature. It is the most important water system in northwestern Mexico. It is essential for farming in a semi-desert region.

In the 19th century, the river reached Mexico with a wild power of about 42,000 cubic feet per second. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, the United States began struggling to convert the arid regions of the Southwest to arable land, thus undertaking engineering works to divert water to the Imperial Valley of California.

"From 1922, everything started badly," Hinojosa-Huerta said. The United States did a study to divide the water from the Colorado River and, coincidentally, it was the 10 wettest years in the basin." Thus, a distribution was made on paper that included more water (16 percent) than there actually is. And then the reservoirs began to be built.

Treaties, dams — and then climate change

In 1936, the Hoover Dam was inaugurated, between Nevada and Arizona, which lowered the flow to 164 cubic meters per second for Mexico. In 1944, a bilateral treaty was signed that guaranteed Mexico about 1.8 million cubic meters of water per year, but most of it goes to agriculture.

The agreement did not consider the rights of the Cucapá people and their ancestral relationship with the river. But it affected their traditional ceremonies, causing a shortage of fruits and grains, and the trees and shrubs used to make houses, boats and clothing. "Nobody asked us anything," Guerra said. 

In 1966, the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona was erected, and the river's flow decreased to 8 cubic meters per second. But what no one seemed to count on, between treaties and dams, was climate change.

"In Mexicali, it has never rained," Hinojosa-Huerta said, "the flow that reaches the region and that supports agriculture comes from snowfall 2,600 kilometers [1,600 miles] in the Rockies."

It all depends on precipitation in Wyoming and Colorado, but since 2002 snowfall has been below average, depleting the river and resulting in a "desolating panorama," he said.

Years of warmer temperatures, a failed rainy season last summer and low snow cover have combined to cause Mexico's Baja California rivers to decline.

Hell on Earth

But heat also kills. In 2019 there were at least eight deaths in Mexicali associated with high temperatures; in 2020, they were 83.

"People cannot live with those temperatures, that is, people die", Zavala said, "although they are used to the heat, even small increases break the threshold for the human body to survive."

On Aug. 14, 2020, Mexicali registered 122 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking the record of 121 that dated from August 1981.

Froilán Meza Rivera, a veteran journalist and writer from northern Mexico, consulted the archives of the Secretariat of Hydraulic Resources. It appears that in July 1966, in Riíto, a Mexicali community, a thermometer reached an unprecedented figure of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And that was its limit: the mercury rose to the top and could not measure any more.

It would be the highest figure in the world: according to the World Meteorological Organization, the highest recorded temperature is 134 degrees Fahrenheit on July 10, 1913, in California's Death Valley.

The region is exposed to the worst possible scenarios in terms of a climate emergency, according to Roberto Sánchez Rodríguez, an academic from the Colegio de la Frontera Norte. "Governments have mismanaged resources, and that is why there is less water available," he said.

Fishing

Since 1993, the fishing territory of the Cucapá has been included in the Upper Gulf of California and the Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve, which has a surface area of ​​2.3 million acres. This protected area was created to preserve the flora and fauna, such as the vaquita porpoises and the totoaba, which are at the brink of extinction.

"We abide by the rules, we know that species have to be protected because we are an Indigenous people, we use the nets and equipment that the government asks of us and we do not go out when it's not our turn," said Rubén Flores, captain of a panga, a boat used for traditional fishing.

An earthquake in 2010 also affected fishing. "It left us huge cracks that got bigger, and that doesn't allow us to fish like before," said Hilda Hurtado Valenzuela, 68, president of the Sociedad Cooperativa Pueblo Indígena Cucapá, one of the associations that groups together the people who are still fishing.

Sitting on a plastic chair near the patio of her home in El Indiviso, a semi-desert piece of land, she said she likes to get away from the sun. For a long time, she has not seen the sun as a source of life but as a tough enemy who takes out her tribe, destroys the river and forces them to forces them to do their chores and work at night during the harshest moments of summer.

"Unbearable"

"The heat here is unbearable, we have never experienced this. There are even people living on the streets who die because they cannot stand the temperatures," Valenzuela said. "And it also affects the animals because less water arrives from the river and the fish breed with the mixture of fresh water and salt, so there are fewer and fewer fish."

The townspeople insist that they do not fish the totoaba, whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in the Asian market for its supposed medicinal and aphrodisiac properties (when it reaches China it costs $55,000 or $60,000).

But the intense demand leads to fishing with professional nets, thus also trapping the vaquitas and leaving them on the brink of extinction.

Various environmental and journalistic investigations have pointed to the Dragon Cartel, a criminal network with Mexican, American, Chinese and other intermediaries who conspire to exploit and fish the totoaba in that region.

Flores said that just by looking at the sky, he knows what the weather will be like. That's why he shakes his head disapprovingly every time he sees the relentless sun.

"Something strange is happening here. It is as if the sun lasts longer, so the fish do not like that heat. They are born less and weigh less." It used to take them two days to fish for curvina, now it takes them a whole week, he said, looking at the river.

The intense drought also has affected the fish's reproduction, so they must go further and further out, with poorly prepared boats, with small engines and without much fuel.

"We comply with everything, but the people of the surrounding towns also fish and don't (comply) —and many times we're punished for that, said Paco, a veteran fisherman with more than 25 years of experience.

"And we must also be careful because the narco is there, they follow our routes through the area and they fish in order to hide tons of drugs underneath. We tell the police, but nobody does anything," said Paco, whose last name is being withheld for fear of retaliation.

"I want the river to stay"

Lucia Laguna considers herself a guardian of the Cucapá, keeping alive their language, customs and traditional clothing to preserve them. Her memory is one of the most important reservoirs of the Cucapá past.

Kneeling on the banks of the Colorado River, she touches the dark water with special devotion while reciting an ancient song. Two little girls are with her.

"My tata [grandfather] fishes because without that we cannot eat. I too would like to be a fisherman, because I really like the river and being here," Marleny Sáenz, 10, said.

"I want the river to stay, to have our traditions," she said. "I like to sing because it is part of me, I feel very proud to be part of this town."

It is a ritual that they used to celebrate on the banks of the river. From time immemorial they burned the cachanilla, a wild plant with a fresh aroma, while chanting their songs so that the fishermen would be lucky in their long expeditions at sea.

"It is about opening paths, so that everything goes well," Laguna said.

"We are paying the consequences of the pollution of other people. The people of the cities have to understand that we are affected by what they do. They do not live alone in the world," she said sadly, touching the water and singing to the river.

[revlyncox]

No Human Being is Illegal on Stolen Land

This address was written for the Washington Ethical Society for indigenous People’s Day Sunday, October 11, 2020, by Lyn Cox. 

One of the things I notice about the values expressed in the story, “Grandmother Spider Brings the Light,” is that none of the characters attempt to keep the sun for themselves. In this legend, we are entering a paradigm in which the basic necessities of life are shared freely. In the world of the story, members of the community are willing to sacrifice for the benefit of all. The warmth of the sun is something that would be ridiculous to hoard. Part of the sun’s worth comes from the way it shines on the whole community, and the way in which the whole community works together in response. Each character makes suggestions and participates in the work, and even the setbacks give the whole community something to learn from. Proximity to raw power leaves its mark on some, and this is another reason to take turns. In the world of the story, people understand that their well being is bound up together.

These values stand in sharp contrast to the values brought to this continent by European conquest and colonization. The colonization mindset is still a strong current in United States law, policy, and culture. The assumptions of colonization influence ideas and customs about property ownership, the scale of impact of moral choices, and what it means to be an American. The way we understand class, race, education, the use of force in civil society, and so much more is tangled up in the mindset of colonization. Among the urgent issues arising from these roots is that of immigration justice. The way we understand who is welcome in our communities and how we demonstrate that is filtered through the assumptions of colonization. Justice for Indigenous people is one aspect of the project of dismantling systemic racism. Economic justice is an aspect of dismantling systemic racism. Immigration justice is an aspect of dismantling systemic racism.

The abstract concepts can be dizzying when we first become aware of the connections between all of the issues that bring suffering and division in our society. Today’s Address has a lot of history and facts, and we’ll put out a document with references and links after Platform. We might begin by focusing on our relationships, and on understanding that our interrelatedness extends beyond our immediate circles. We show up for our neighbors because of our common humanity, because we are connected in community, and because our liberation is bound up together. We work to understand how the myths of colonization have affected our minds so that we can clear away the obstacles to rich and full relationships with all of our neighbors and loved ones.

The impact of injustice for Indigenous people and for immigrants is closer to home for some of us than others; WES includes people from a variety of backgrounds. When we add just one degree further to include the consequences for our spouses, children, and close loved ones, many of us have a very personal view of the effects of systemic racism in affairs related to Indigenous communities, in policies toward immigrant communities, and in a variety of government actions that fall especially heavily on people of color. If it’s not you or someone in your immediate inner circle who is impacted by any given manifestation of systemic racism, it is almost certainly a friend in this Zoom room or someone close to them. Shifting our priorities to be rooted in love means remembering that threats to Indigenous sovereignty, cruelty and abuse in our immigration system, out-of-control policing that destroys lives in favor of property, all of these things affect specific human beings-- people we care about.

Indeed, the very assertion that the people we care about are human beings, with human rights -- people who deserve dignity and self-determination -- flies in the face of colonization. So let’s step back a bit and look at the roots of that philosophy.

In her book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz traces the roots of the European mindset of conquest back to the Crusades, heading into the Inquisition and to the enclosure of public lands in the 1600s. She writes that the privatization of the common lands, creating a permanent underclass of landless poor, was both an expression of the trend in European conquest and also one of its mechanisms. “The traumatized souls thrown off the land, as well as their descendants, became the land-hungry settlers enticed to cross a vast ocean with the promise of land and attaining the status of gentry.”  In essence, what happened with enclosure was to more deeply codify the idea that a few people mattered but most didn’t, and that property mattered more than the majority of people.

Meanwhile the Crusades, which was an attempt to take control of lucrative trades routes, also brought new avenues for oppression. Dunbar-Ortiz reminds us that this period brought us the papal law of limpieza de sangre, cleanliness of blood, beginning in 1449. Clean blood referred to ancestry that was exclusively Christian. So, in other words, even converting to Christianity did not bring legal equality to those whose ancestors were Jewish or Muslim. Some people are more important than others. Only some people are really human.

It is not an accident that this is the same period of history that brought the Doctrine of Discovery. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V decreed that so-called Christian nations had permission for the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian territories and peoples. This became a cornerstone of international law. In 1823, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the discovery rights of European sovereigns had been transferred to the new United States. Indigenous ways need not be respected, according to the Supreme Court in 1823.

Some people are more important than others. Only some people are really people. And who gets to be a human being, who gets to have human rights, is inextricably tied with the thirst for wealth and the desire of conquering nations to extract resources and labor from land and people not their own.

These are not natural laws. These are not ethics that are universal for all people. Civilizations all over the world have shown that other ways are possible, ways built on mutual relationship and community thriving. But the baseline assumptions of conquest helped make all of the misery of colonization possible. These baseline assumptions fed the lies that justified the enslavement of human beings, generation to generation, because the extraction of wealth for the few was more important than the human rights of the many.

We can plainly see the destruction that this worldview brought to all of the places that were targeted for conquest. But it wasn’t done destroying lives in Europe, either. There may have been periods of uneasy peace, when it seemed like enlightenment might eventually bring liberation to all, or at least to all who could be admitted to European universities. But the bargain was still built on inequality, and in times when there was land or wealth to be gained by the few, or in times when scarcity arrived and the ruling class needed someone to blame, the illusion fell apart. Felix Adler, educated in Germany in the 1870s, absorbed the hope that it was possible for people to regard one another as full human beings. But the powers of division had been dug too deeply. The legacy of dehumanization was still there, and the horrors of World War I and World War II showed that, once again, only some people were regarded as human.

It has been observed that the phrase “illegal immigrant” was not in popular use until World War II, and it was first used to describe Jewish refugees. You may recall that the potential arrival of these refugees in the United States led to another layer of racism and cruelty in U.S. immigration policy, on top of the racism and cruelty in laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. The attempt to keep out Jewish and Eastern European refugees, based on concepts of race rooted in blood, brought immigration quotas to carefully control who was allowed in. Having no place to go, those subject to Nazi persecution were tortured and slaughtered. It was this experience that led Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to coin the phrase that makes first half of the title of this Platform, “No human being is illegal.”

Wiesel said, “Know that no human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?”

Yet, in 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice instructed U.S. Attorney offices to refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegal aliens.” Immigration attorney Shahid Haque-Hausrath explains that this term is used to “dehumanize immigrants and divorce [us] from thinking of them as human beings.”

Are we clear how we got here? Are we clear about how the dehumanization of Indigenous people, the dehumanization of people who were enslaved, and the dehumanization of immigrants and refugees, even unto this day, are all related? When it benefits the few to exploit people and land and all of our relations in order to extract wealth, that system rests on the idea that only some of us are humans, only some of us are worthy, only some of us deserve human rights. There are lies that are told to make it seem like some of us have provisional worth, conditional humanity; lies that try to entice us to help maintain this system -- lies such as purity of blood, or the superiority of the Euro-American definition of civilization, or that scarcity comes from the arrival of other poor people rather than from rich people hoarding wealth.

We need to untangle all of it so that we can remember that we are in relationship with each other. Colonization has been part of Western civilization for so long, it has infected our minds and hearts. Few of us are immune from subtle messages about the worth or lack of worthiness of people, especially people who do not contribute to wealth as it is commonly measured.

Our liberation is bound up together. Like the people in the story, “Grandmother Spider Brings the Light,” we can operate with a different mindset, one of collective well-being and shared wisdom. To get there, we will need to re-think our assumptions about the way people are permitted to live and move in the world.

That brings us back to re-thinking the rules and customs around us, a network of assumptions that rests on colonization. Basing the United States legal system on the belief that Indigenous forms of government were and are not valid and that Indigenous value systems were and are inferior meant that the treaty rights and governmental systems of sovereign Indigenous nations have not been respected. If we take Indigenous sovereignty seriously, different solutions become evident.

When we consider the issues of immigration justice, to take one example, many assume that the United States government is the only entity that can determine who remains within and who is expelled from this territory between Millinocket, Maine, and San Diego, California, let alone the territories currently known as Alaska and Hawaii. Elizabeth Ellis, Assistant Professor at New York University and a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, questions this paradigm. She writes:

“If we reposition ourselves, and think about migration not as American citizens, as documented or undocumented, but as settlers who have built lives and identities on Indigenous lands, and often at the expense of Indigenous peoples, this conversation looks very different.”

She goes on to say: “In articulating support for these critical [immigration] reforms, many typically appeal to humanitarian sympathy and visions of a modern world that provide all humans with the right to migration and citizenship. Yet we often forget that Native people have been fighting the United States’ efforts to carve borders into their homelands and territories for centuries and, in many ways, we have come to see exclusionary borders as a natural and normal state of international relations. In this context, then, including Native people [in the conversation] both bolsters challenges to US borders and provides alternative models of relationality and nationhood that may help us reimagine solutions to our current humanitarian crisis.”

Ellis gives a number of historical examples and contemporary applications in her full article. We’ll send out a link after Platform to a document with all of the links related to today’s Address.

Remembering that we are all related, then, we include immigration justice and supporting Indigenous sovereignty among our action plans for anti-racism and anti-oppression. As we heard in the reading that Karen shared, we can think of this in terms of restitution, in addition to being simply ethical and in right relationship with a goal for the common good. Not every person can do everything, yet we can coordinate in this community and with our community partners to embrace the whole circumference of the ethical manifold. We do this not simply out of compassion, but with recognition that another world is possible, a world of right relationship, and we hope to live into that world to make it as real as possible as soon as possible.

This Indigenous People’s Day weekend, there are two action items that might interest you. There is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, “The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy in the United States,” which aims to help us come to terms with the atrocities committed against Indigenous children and their families through boarding schools. Contact whoever will listen to you in the U.S. House of Representatives to let them know your thoughts on this bill. There is a lot of history to unpack, and this is a place to start. While you’ve got the attention of your favorite Member of Congress, you can ask them about the Native American Voting Rights Act. Indigenous voters are subject to many of familiar voter suppression tactics, such as reduced polling places and interrupted mail service. Check out the Lakota People’s Law project for more information on both of those. https://www.lakotalaw.org/

I asked R. of WES’s Immigration Justice Team for some other ideas about how we can work together toward collective liberation. R. reminded me of the Food Justice Initiative, which is connected with Sanctuary DMV. The Food Justice Initiative is a “systemic program rooted in justice” that helps immigrant families, regardless of immigration status, access mutual aid in the form of food and other necessities. Keep in mind that the COVID relief bill blocked aid to families in which any person in the household is undocumented. The Food Justice Initiative (article in the Post) gives us a chance to stay in touch with our neighbors and the needs they identify for themselves.

WES’s Immigration Justice Team has also been monitoring the situation of Binsar Siahaan (article in the Post), who was snatched from his faith community, Glenmont United Methodist Church, when ICE showed up and lied about the purpose of their visit. WES members may recall your past support of Rosa Gutierrez Lopez, who has been living in sanctuary at Cedar Lane UU congregation. R. points out that the strong organization of the Sanctuary team at Cedar Lane made it much more difficult for ICE to try the kind of underhanded tactics that they used to arrest Binsar, and that community support makes a tremendous difference. If you are on WES’s Immigration Justice action email list, stay tuned for possible actions we can take to support Binsar and help him return to his family.

R. told me, “Doing support work changes you as it changes the world. You meet people who are not anything like you, from different races, classes, faiths and world-views. It is the antidote to helplessness in the time of neo-fascism, as well. There are so many opportunities to join in.” He said WES members have written letters, gathered materials and funds, and attended vigils. The work is ongoing.

Humanism, to me, is a worldview in which we seek human solutions to human problems. And most problems are human problems; the few problems that are facts of the natural world are made exponentially worse by human choices to favor greed and selfishness over the recognition of our interrelatedness. Intellectual rigor and a humanist outlook lead us to dismantle the fallacies that undergird conquest and colonization; to note clearly the common roots of injustice affecting Indigenous peoples, people of color, and immigrants; and to turn toward right relationship in our thinking and in our practice. Let us remember that we are all related, and that our liberation is bound up together. So be it.

[powerandmagic]

MAÑANA: Latinx Comics From the 25th Century is now open for submissions.

[Noten: Toda esta información también está disponible en español a pedido.]

"In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed to the islands of the Caribbean. That single event led to the radical transformation of the region, the hemisphere, and eventually the entire world.

Indigenous peoples were decimated. Lands were colonized. African peoples were displaced and enslaved. Race, as a concept, took root. Black women and indigenous women were subjugated. Cultures died, fused, changed, and were, sometimes, reborn. Art, music, foods, and faiths echoed these tangled pasts. Immigrants from across the planet flocked to the newly christened "Latin America." A caste system based on race and color reigned. Liberation struggles were fought. Revolutions were won. Wars of independence were waged. Coups were orchestrated. Global capitalism ran amok, fueling the mass exodus... And we survived it all.

That all seems so far away now."

MAÑANA: Latinx Comics From the 25th Century is a speculative fiction comics anthology set throughout Latin America in the 2490s, roughly one thousand years from the voyage that changed the world. It took 500 years to get us where we are now -- where could 500 more take us?

Submission Period

Submissions will be open to the public from May 27th - July 7th, 2019 (11:59 PM Pacific Time).

Who Can Participate

To pitch a story to MAÑANA, you must be Latinx or Latin American. We define Latinx as "a person living outside of Latin America whose cultural background includes any of the Spanish, Portuguese, or French-colonized countries of the Americas and the Caribbean." We define Latin American as anyone born, raised, and currently living in any of those same countries.

You may pitch as a SOLO CREATOR (making the whole comic by yourself), as a WRITER ONLY (story writer who we will pair with an artist), or as an ARTIST ONLY (a comics artist who we will pair with a script).

Solo Creators with a strong story idea but not-as-strong artwork may receive an offer to be paired with a different artist (vice versa for pitches with stronger art than story).

"Writers Only" may request to be paired with a specific artist. The artist they request must be someone they know for a fact is filling out the "Artist Only" submission form. The reverse applies to "Artists Only" requesting a specific writer.

Age Restrictions

All contributors must be 18 years of age or older. All content must be suitable for readers as young as 14 years old.

Specifications

Comics from 2 - 12 pages long (must be an even number)

6.625” x 10.25” trim size (template will be provided)

Bleed? Yes.

Black & White, or Grayscale (no screen tones)

600 dpi

.PSD final files

Timeline

Selection Process (May 2019 - Aug 2019)

Open Submissions: 5.27 - 7.07 (6 weeks)

Selection Period: 7.08 - 7.28 (3 weeks)

Acceptance Emails & Feedback: 7.29 - 8.08 (1 week)

Paperwork: 8.09 - 8.15 (1 week)

Creation Period (Apr 2019 - Sep 2019)

Script: 8.16 - 9.15 (4 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 9.16 - 9.29 (2 weeks)

Thumbnails: 9.30 - 10.20 (3 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 10.21 - 11.03 (2 weeks)

Pencils: 11.04 - 12.15 (6 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 12.16 - 12.29 (2 weeks)

Inks: 12.30 - 1.26 (4 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 1.27 - 2.09 (2 weeks)

Toning & Shading: 2.10 - 3.01 (3 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 3.10 - 3.15 (2 weeks)

Lettering: 3.16 - 4.05 (3 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 4.06 - 4.19 (2 weeks)

Final Files Due: May 3rd, 2020

Kickstarter (May 2020)

Payment (June 2020)

Compensation

Contributors will be compensated at a rate of $107/page plus any Kickstarter bonuses unlocked through stretch goals. Contributors also receive a minimum of 10 complimentary copies of the anthology, royalties on all digital sales proportionate to their page-count contribution, and royalties on any future print runs of the anthology after the first printing sells out.

"Writers Only" will receive $42/page, with bonuses, comp copies, and royalties split evenly between themselves and their artist.

"Artists Only" will receive $65/page, with bonuses, comp copies, and royalties split evenly between themselves and their writer.

All contributors have the right to purchase additional copies of the anthology at 50% off the cover price for as long as the anthology is in print.

Rights

Creators will cede exclusive first worldwide print and digital rights to their stories for a full calendar year from the date of publication, and non-exclusive worldwide print and digital rights (in both the English and Spanish languages) in perpetuity. Ownership remains with the creators.

What We WANT:

Comics (not illustrations, not prose, not poetry).

Previously unpublished stories.

The protagonist (or POV character) must be Latinx or Latin American.

Writers who have a connection to the country they choose as their setting (either from there, born there, parents or grandparents born there, lived there for many years, etc.)

Speculative fiction: How has technology changed? How has society changed? How have politics changed? The natural world? Fashion? The thoughtfulness of your world building will make or break your pitch.

Informed fiction: We want stories whose ideas about the future are rooted in an understanding of the past and present. For example: we're less interested in whether flying cars exist and more interested in whether the Amazon rain forest makes a full recovery (and what that means for Brazil).

Optimism: your vision of 25th century Latin America doesn't need to be utopic (although it can be) as long as themes of improvement, empowerment, growth, or problem-solving predominate.

Peaceful stories, sad stories, triumphant stories, funny stories, failure stories, action stories, philosophical stories, love stories -- the full spectrum of humanity is welcome. The catch: it must end “positively.” Everything doesn’t have to work out, but we prefer stories end on a note of hope, new understandings, resilience, etc.

What We DON’T Want:

No fan works. No auto-bio. No prose. No one-off illustrations.

Comics that are already finished or that you’ve already started drawing.

Hacking the Mainframe: Unless you really, really think you can "WOW!" us with a highly original take, avoid "hackers take down the mega corporation" as a plot (because it's been done to death).

Fantasy: We want science fiction and/or speculative fiction based in the real physical laws of our universe. However, certain elements of magic realism can work for us (e.g. in an otherwise realistic setting, a character speaks to a long departed ancestor, experiences old gods in a vision, or watches their life unfold out of sequence).

Ahistorical Takes: any stories that erase, deny, or revise the real-world histories of Latin American peoples will be rejected.

Horror: Your story can use fear and danger as plot elements, but if instilling fear/existential dread in the reader is the overarching goal, this is the wrong anthology.

Cursing is permitted as long as words aren’t used literally (i.e. “Shit, you scared me!” as opposed to “Let’s go shit in the woods!”) and are used very sparingly when used at all. In general, we’d prefer not.

No porn. No references to specific sexual acts. No explicit nudity whether sexual or non-sexual (sorry, folks). “Consensual fade-to-black sex between legal adults” is fine.

No depictions of abuse (sexual, physical, psychological) whether pictorial or written. Characters may vaguely reference (in non-graphic language) abuse that they have suffered in the past if doing so serves the story or is integral to the character.

No gore. People can get hurt, bleed, die, etc, but not in a grossly over-the-top way that fetishizes violence.

No slurs, no racist statements nor imagery, no misogyny, no transphobia, no ableism, no xenophobia, and no white supremacist nonsense in general. Since this anthology is about Latin America's future, these topics can be broached in your story, but we urge you to tackle such subjects in a more creative way than "[insert drawing of some guy yelling a slur]."

Ready to pitch?

"SOLO CREATORS" APPLY HERE.

"WRITERS ONLY" APPLY HERE.

"ARTISTS ONLY" APPLY HERE.

Here’s what you’ll need to complete each form:

SOLO CREATORS:

A working title and page count for your comic (doesn’t have to be exact).

A synopsis of your story, including a beginning, middle, and end. Spoil everything, but try to keep it under 300 words.

Preliminary sketches associated with your pitch: character ideas, environment concepts (the latter is especially important if your portfolio lacks strong examples of background art), etc. These don’t need to be final or polished pieces! Just clear enough to give us an idea.

Links to any relevant publishing credits. Self-published works and webcomics count as credits! Choose examples that best reflect the style you intend to use for this comic. You may simply include a link to your portfolio if you have no pre-existing credits, but please note that folks with sequential storytelling examples will receive preference.

Tell us about yourself, your cultural and creative background, and why you want to be in MAÑANA. Short and sweet is best!

WRITERS ONLY:

A working title and page count for your comic (doesn’t have to be exact).

A synopsis of your story, including a beginning, middle, and end. Spoil everything, but try to keep it under 300 words.

Links to any relevant publishing credits. Self-published works and webcomics count as credits! You may simply include a link to your writing portfolio if you have no pre-existing comics writing credits, but note that folks with comics writing experience will receive preference.

Tell us about yourself, your cultural and creative background, and why you want to be in MAÑANA. Short and sweet is best!

ARTISTS ONLY:

Links to your portfolio and/or any relevant publishing credits. Self-published works and webcomics count as credits! You may simply include a link to your portfolio if you have no pre-existing credits, but please note that folks with sequential storytelling examples will receive preference.

Tell us about yourself, your cultural and artistic background, and why you want to be in MAÑANA. Short and sweet is best!

More Questions?

Check out the FAQ. If your answer isn’t there, Ask away!

[kataibusaibiin]

Offering our voices to honor our ancestors

Protecting What is Sacred: Our land, Our water, Our hope for a better future 

 I preface this with an apology because these thoughts were scribbled in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep and thus this lacks the clarity I’d hoped for in sharing some of what’s been weighing so heavily on my heart. That said, some folks have nudged me to share some of these reflections and it felt important to start somewhere in voicing how my heart connects these dots. So, below are some meandering thoughts as I reflect on Obon and how it threads us together with our past, present, and future... and ultimately each other...

In less than a month, I will be returning again to my place of birth - my maternal ancestral homeland in Okinawa - to visit with family and friends and to pay my respects to those who came before us.  It’s been 2 years since my last visit and it will be the first time I am able to speak to my beloved grandmother in Uchinaaguchi -  one of Ryukyu/Okinawa’s indigenous languages which I’ve been studying - to thank her and share with her my ongoing studies here in Hawai’i as I continue working to record our family’s stories, deepen my appreciation and understanding of our indigenous Ryukyuan history and culture, and create resources to share with fellow Uchinaanchu/Okinawans living in the diaspora across the globe. My grandmother is 96 now and has been my trusty compass since as far back as I can remember - back to my earliest childhood memories in Okinawa. Her visits to see us once we moved to North Carolina are highlights of my youth. Even when we moved to the states and we were thousands of miles apart, I could still always feel her love and would sometimes look out across the ocean in the direction of Okinawa, trying to picture her and the rest of the family there, hoping that I too could cultivate the kind of love she shares which could be felt across time and space.

It is not coincidental that my upcoming trip to Okinawa next month was planned to coincide with Obon and, as such, will involve returning to my grandmother’s village in Kijoka, Ogimi where some of our family tombs (ohaka) are located. I have yet to find the words to express what it means to me to be able to revisit the same land where generations of my family have lived and where we continue to return, year after year, to offer prayers and gratitude for our village, our ancestors, and all the sacrifices they have made for us. It is something to treasure all the more since there are many who are unable to do so, especially since I know many in Okinawa whose family tombs were destroyed during WWII or were paved over for US military bases under US occupation in the aftermath of the war.

I remember before taking that trip back to Okinawa two years ago, my mom had told me on a number of occasions that visiting our family tombs to pay respects was something she had always wanted us to be able to do together. I was never able to line up the time and resources to return for Shimi but she’d made clear that the timing wasn’t even what was important - just that we made the time.  And I vividly remember when I finally had the opportunity to join my family to do so as an adult during that trip, time seemed to collapse onto itself. I could feel an overwhelming connection to the past, present, and future as a continuum extending well beyond the 5 generations of our family represented in the gathering that day.

One of my young nieces and I tidied up the area and altar together as other family prepared the offerings we brought.  As we did so, I recall my grandmother commenting how happy the rest of the family (meaning our ancestors) must be to see my niece Sawana and I there together, putting such love and attention to detail in cleaning and helping with preparations. Hearing this as a gentle breeze passed, it certainly didn’t feel like we were alone. After our prayers and offerings, we found a nearby spot to enjoy our family picnic. Sitting in a circle, I looked around at my family with the sweeping views of the ocean behind them and my eyes welled up with tears of joy as I laughed and we talked story, savoring the beauty of that moment and seeing it similarly reflected on their faces. As I think back on such moments, my hope is that each day, I find a way through actions to express how much I cherish these gifts of love, tradition, and hope for a better future that have been and continue to be passed forward through my family and communities.

As many of you know, my return to Okinawa two years ago was something I was apprehensive about in many ways - despite longing to return since I was little - and I am beyond grateful that it was ultimately a deeply healing and transformational experience. During this trip in August, I plan to return to Shuri were my grandfather’s family is from and offer prayers and gratitude for my grandfather’s family at their hakas too, in hopes of contributing towards intergenerational healing within my family. After all, the history and stories of my grandfather’s family are part of what motivates me to do some small part to preserve Uchinaaguchi and not only Ryukyu/Okinawa’s history and culture but also our family’s legacy as part of that living history.  (Some of you already know why I’ve not grown up close to that branch of our family but for others, suffice to say my grandmother is a strong, fiercely loving woman who would always stand up for what is best for her children...no matter the self-sacrifice involved.) I mention this because history is never clean - often filled with pain, conflict, and contradictions - but we shouldn’t shy away from certain parts of our past because of that; those parts shape(d) us too and can be part of how we learn, heal, and ultimately reclaim our futures.  This is true even of my father’s side of the family - direct descendants of both Reverend John Robinson “Pastor of the Pilgrims” who sent his congregation over on the Mayflower as well as the Mississippi band of Choctaw who were nearly wiped out by the arrival of these European immigrants. I often think about how to hold these complicated truths and seeming contradictions of our past and/or different perspectives and the importance of doing so even as we face such situations in the present...

To Honor My Ancestors Is to Honor All Our Ancestors

Here in Hawai’i, Obon festivities have already begun as there are literally bon dances held every weekend from mid June through August. To write about some of my experiences and reflections thus far (including the way Obon is celebrated here versus back in Okinawa) is a topic for another time. I share this as context though because as a member of the Young Okinawans of Hawai’i (YOH), we share our song, drumming, and dance as offerings to our ancestors and to communicate with them, just as Okinawan eisaa was traditionally intended for. It is not entertainment for the crowd that gathers but, if anything, an invitation for the community to join us in this collective offering for all our ancestors. Whether it’s the little ones that find their way towards the inner circle around the yagura to dance by our side during our bon dances or the young ones in my family and communities, I hope that any child I ever interact with can feel and cherish the gifts of our uyafaafuji (ancestors) and learn to manifest that gratitude with their voices and in their actions, guided by what’s in their hearts. I do not take lightly the moments like this weekend when a group of little kids surrounded me and looked up wided-eyed and open-hearted, eager to watch and follow in my footsteps as we sang and danced around the yagura together. When I heard one of the littlest ones next to me begin to join me as we called out with our heishi, I’m not ashamed to admit I got a little something in my eyes.

In sharing the history and meaning of Okinawan eisaa and inviting friends to join us for Bon dancing, I have found myself often clarifying for folks that when I say I dance and sing for “our ancestors” I am referring collectively to the people we are tied to through our connection to place as well as our families of origin which we are connected to through blood and other familial connections. So, when I sing and dance here in Hawai’i, I too sing for the kanaka maoli - the indigenous Hawai’ians and the Kingdom of Hawai’i. I am aware that in moving here to study and build community with the Asian plurality and fellow Uchinaanchu here, I am also a settler. So, I strive to listen and learn from not only the elders I meet but also to their ancestors who sought to protect this land and its precious resources.  That comes with inherent responsibilities to listen, learn, and take heart when I am asked to speak out as someone whose ancestral homelands were similarly colonized, whose people also endured physical and cultural genocide, and whose democratic voice and right to self-determination is still being ignored. As shimanchu whose past have so many parallels, I believe our hopes for a better future and collective liberation are also bound together. So too, I feel a deep responsibility as someone raised in the US and with the relative privilege that comes with that, even when so many Americans have made it clear that they will always see me as an outsider. It is all too clear to me how these things are all interconnected.

So, this weekend, I danced not only for my ancestors back in Kijoko but also for those in Henoko, Okinawa where my parents met and for the community there who have been dedicated to protecting our one ocean in the face of joint US-Japanese military construction in Oura Bay. My heart also joined the protectors here in Hawai’i who have been gathering at Mauna kea to prevent the desecration of that sacred land. I lit candles and held in my heart the memory of my paternal grandparents and their families. My heart too, also sang out for the children who are locked up in cages across the US for the crime of having a family who dreams of a better future for them but come from another side of an imaginary line.  I carried in my heart - the heart of a first-generation immigrant to the US - all the families of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants who are dreaming for a brighter future.

I might not have all the answers for how to re-envision the future to be a better one for all, but I’ve seen enough to know one thing we have to do is speak out to say that this current path we’re on sure isn’t the way. 

To honor my ancestors is to honor the preciousness of all life. Nuchi du takara. So, to honor all my ancestors, I offer my voice to honor the ancestors of all of us - to acknowledge our interconnectedness - and to share our ancestors hopes of a better future for us all. In sharing my voice as an offering, I also extend an invitation: Let us never give up the hopes and dreams of our ancestors. Instead, let that be what unites us as we protect what is sacred. 

Rise for Henoko! Aole TMT! Protect Our One Ocean! Kū Kia`i Mauna!  Never Again is Now!  Together, We Rise!

p.s. I recently shared this music video but felt it was apropos to share this song again here with a gentle request to take the few minutes to watch and reflect:

[peaamlipoetrydoctor]

Revisiting The Sealey Challenge 2021 ~ 8

Well, this is another poet that it's a thrill to come back to. A very different tone from my memory of Ross Gay, whose register (in my recall if nothing else) seems rooted in a boyish sense of mischief, from which grounding he can dip and weave towards fun or towards seriousness - even atrocity - having first disarmed his reader/listener.

With Jo Harjo, I have zero difficulty believing that her ancestors were the leaders of the people. She bears such grave dignity that I find myself a little nonplussed, a little silenced. What should I say?

While I'm thinking about that, here's what her publisher said about the collection, An American Sunrise -

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and “one of our finest—and most complicated—poets” (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.

Well, I can say, I guess, how moved I was with the reading - I keenly felt the sense of being in the presence of a great dignitary. An elder. One with wisdom. Someone connecting the past to the present, anchoring the people in memory of their history - a gesture which, somehow, paradoxically, opens possible fresh futures.

Probably because I heard her read it, I particularly remember the mood of the poem, positioned early in the collection, Exile of Memory, which begins -

Do not return,

we were warned by one who knows things -

you will only upset the dead.

I have been doing quite a bit of returning, myself, over the past several years - following the threads of family that I couldn't quite admit to myself were essential to the pattern of my thesis.

Because, acknowledged or otherwise, they were fundamental to shaping the pattern of my life. Not the same story. At all. But something about standing in the power of a known history. Knowing who I am, who I am not. The first focus taken by the maternal line because that side of my family heritage has reached so fiercely towards me, throughout. It has made a significant difference.

A few weeks ago - a little wrung out and grumpy - I went to the British Museum to see the Stonehenge exhibition and (in addition to being a great relief that I was looking at the artefacts that indeed belonged to the peoples who had lived here some thousand of years ago, and had not been carried here from other places by colonizers), there was something moving about seeing traces of MY history.

Best I know, my genes are Celtic, Anglo-Saxon - local. No hint of French nobility, nor any recent twist of interesting Other origins.

That said...

Clearly, I mean - if you go back far enough... no-one lived on these islands all the way through the worst of the Ice Age of 20-30 TYA (thousand years ago). So everyone here came here from somewhere else, if you can see back far enough. And before that, the settlers who lived here (and across Europe generally) were Neanderthal. Thus, geologically speaking, my people are pretty recent immigrants.

PS when I had a Masterclass subscription, I don't think Jo Harjo's lectures had been recorded. ALMOST - not quite - enough to tempt me back. I'm trying, with some success, to be "good" with ££...

[smitheeblog]

Dealing with Historical Injustice, colon, Reparations

I

I was hate-consuming some right wing grift the other day, as I sometimes tend to do, and this headass was making the following, paraphrased, argument:

If you continue asking someone in the black lives matter movement about their position, and you just keep asking “why?” to each of their answers, sooner or later you will end up discussing slavery.

The writer probably thought this was a home run argument. He had wound up and windmill dunked on the entire black lives matter movement. Theoretically, if you trace America’s racial inequity back to its roots, it would lead back to slavery, right? And, so the argument goes, all those people are dead, so spending resources to shrink the racial gaps (affirmative action, economic reparations, etc.) would require people who never themselves owned slaves to pay to assuage the legacy of slavery. Checkmate. Pack it up and go home.

           I think this argument is really stupid, mostly because it’s probably some bad faith attempt to use fanciful rhetoric to decry progress. But I also think it’s stupid in an interesting way that gets at an important question of how to deal with injustices where everybody involved is dead.

First, on a clarification note, it’s important to note that the large racial inequities that exist don’t stem unilaterally from slavery. Recently, an economic consensus has been forming that most of the gaps in wealth and income in present day America come from FHA housing discrimination (aka redlining) in the mid-1900s, which systematically denied black Americans the ability to live and work in high-income areas, which has led to the gross levels of segregation and unemployment that exist in black communities today. 

           But even if we rephrase the argument to “the major inequities that haunt black America are the result of manynefarious actions of long dead power brokers,” we still have a problem. Are we really going to say that groups have no way of seeking recompense if the perpetrators of their oppression are dead?

I’m going to try to progress through examples of how the dead can repay debts. For clarity, the person who did the bad thing is called Bad Guy and the victim is called Victim

Bad guy hurts victim, then dies.

In civil law, if someone wrongs you, and then dies, you’re allowed to sue their estate. But this nuzzles our intuition well, I think. If I fuck with somebody’s life, I should pay for it. So, when I die, if I still have money lying around, it would make sense they should get that money, because it’s my money.

But what if the bad guy is a government?

When we’re talking about governments, it feels a bit weirder than just suing the estate, since the bad guy is not the person paying it, the guy paying just happens to be operating under the same banner as the bad guy. But on the other hand, if the government passed a law that took all of your money away, and then later you tried to sue the government for this law, it would seem pretty fucked up if they responded with “all the senators who voted for that law are dead, and that law has since been repealed, therefore you get nothing.”

Companies are kind of like governments.

           Another large institution, corporations, seem to operate in the same way individual people do. If a company spilled oil all over my farm in 1968, a court would still likely hold that company responsible for paying me back, even if the CEO who oversaw the oil spill had been decomposing for decades.

(companies spend a lot of money apologizing)

But what if the victim is also dead

So far, I’ve talked about the easy ones. If a person does something bad to me, then dies, I get paid. If an institution does something bad to me, then everybody in the institution dies, I can seek justice. Now here’s the tricky one. What if an institution does something bad to me, they die, I die, but the damage inflicted to me spills over onto my descendants? Do we allow themto seek reparations?

           My short answer: we have to.

Take the case of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. 

Make a long story short: Israel controls a lot of land, Palestinians control most of the West Bank, the UN explicitely tells Israel not to expand to the WB. Israel offers massive economic incentives for settlers to move to the WB, paves roads, builds cell towers, etc.  Most nations in the world have condemned this action, and many agree that Israel, in some way, should give the land back to the Palestinians, even if the people who offered those incentives are dead, as are the people whose land was taken.

The moral framework that says that Israel should give the land back is treating the Israeli government as one collective, and the Palestinian people as another collective. But these collectives are intergenerational. So, under this system, inheriting problems from past injustices against your ancestors makes you eligible for recompense.

I think this same principal should apply to America’s racial issue. It probably also applies to Australia’s treatment of aboriginal peoples and other historical injustices in other countries, but I don’t feel informed enough on those to say concretely.  

Someone might say that this is a broad-brush stroke. That is true. It willpunish people who would never support injustice and whose ancestors never perpetrated it. It will also reward some people who maybe don’t need reparations. Seemingly, Lebron James does not seem like he is in dire need of government-assistance, nor does he seem to be economically suffering from the legacy of slavery.

First, it’s important to note that Lebron James, and others in his situation, have achieved in spiteof the statistical improbability of them doing so.

But second, this misallocation of resources seems like a small price to pay to ensure that history’s bad guys don’t just get away with it if everybody dies before their actions are reversed.

II

I think it’s probably more deserving of a separate post because this one’s getting long but I think this outlines a good claim for reparations for African Americans in America.

I think I’m especially in favor of a policy to reverse the effects of housing discrimination. As part of the legacy of redlining and housing discrimination, Black Americans are 45% less likely to own homes, and as a result, find it very difficult to accrue generational wealth. This has contributed to the fact that segregation of schools, unemployment, access to housing, and wage levels are the same for black Americans now as they were in 1963, and that the average black family has a net worth 6x lower than the average white family.

One promising way to fix this problem is to offer mortgage assistance to black families, in the form of subsidies or low-interest loans to increase black home ownership rates. One study found that equalizing homeownership rates for black and white families would cause average Black wealth to grow by $32,113 and the wealth gap between Black and white households to shrink by 31 percent.

[tipsycad147]

Scorpio October The Dance of the Devils

By shirleytwofeathers

The Dance of the Devils (La danza de los diablos) is a dance performed in Costa Chica, the Pacific coast of Guerrero and Oaxaca in Mexico. As part of the ‘Day of the Dead’ festivities celebrated on the last days of October and the first days of November in Mexico. Its purpose is not so much to terrify however as to amuse and draw the community together while paying reverence to the spirits of the dead on the Day of the Dead.

Men dressed in rags and high boots perform the Dance of the Devils in Afro-Mexican communities. During these celebrations young men dress up as cowboys or as dead people, in which case they wear dusty clothes covered with terrain (to represent the passage of time and the fact of being buried underground). Their faces are covered with masks made of leather or paper with long beards and hair. A black beard represents a young devil, a white beard represents an old one. A small pair of goat or deer horns crowns the mask.

The men dance through different villages on All Souls Day, making noise and playing with children and young people by flogging them with a whip.

An elder diablo called el Terron, and a female diabla called la Minga, who carries a baby doll, lead the dancers. The elder diablo plays and whips the other diablos into dancing and chases la Minga around with the whip because she interrupts the concentration of the devil dancers. One way that la Minga attempts to disrupt the other dancers is by seduction, the Minga also tries to give her doll, which is a symbol of her productive power, to the dancers or to anyone in the audience, seeking a father to her ‘baby’.

The face of the men performing the dance is covered with a leather deer mask with horns and An elder devil, called Tenango, whips the other devils during this performance. Groups of 24 dancers (the devils) stomp and twirl in rows or circles along the streets; eventually, they stop at the houses where the owner gives them money or food for dancing.

Origins of the Dance of the Devils:

The Dance of the Devils is part of the ceremonial commemoration of the dead. It is a celebration of colonial origin, which was introduced by the black people of the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca, who were brought there as slaves by the Spanish colonizers to work in mines, cotton plantations and cattle ranches.

From Río Grande, in the town of Tututepec, on the Oaxacan coast, to Tenango, in the municipality of Azoyú, to the north, this dance recalls the past times when ranchers or cowboys used the whip as well as trumpet to groups of wild cattle in order to force them to cross the Sierra Madre del Sur, to reach the plateau and sell the animals.

The Devils in the Mexican dance also use the whip, and behave according to the cowboy stereotype, that is, as brave and strong man. This performance, however, is also a historical memory, which becomes a ritual memory to the black population which was an intermediate caste, between the indigenous and the white land owners.

The black population who arrived in Mexico from very different lands such as Africa and the Antilles, bringing different languages and cultures, could not recreate a black culture of African traits, as could happen instead, to various degrees, in other Afro-American regions. These people therefore in their segregation from festivities and public celebrations organised by the masters of the haciendas, used to perform their own festivities secretly, by performing rituals to their African gods, playing drums and dancing.

At the same time, however, they borrowed elements of some indigenous and Catholic traditions and readopted them – with imagination and joy – to overcome the pain of domination and the humiliation of banishment.

It is no coincidence that the celebration of their ancestors is performed through the cowboy/devil figure. In this dance the ritual action harmonises gestures and words. Devils are the dead who revive to do mischief, to steal, to sow fear and laughter. The dance could also be called the ‘Devil’s Game’, a game designed to laugh at the forbidden: a capataz (a boss), a bad mother, or a violent and bossy father.

The function of the Dance of the Devils, from a social aspect, is to cleanse and protect the community from spirits that carry evil energy. It can be viewed a way to control evil. In a sense, the dance is used to call the tono spirits of the ancestors to heal the community similar to the way an individual might be healed; the masks and the boite drum call the spirits and the dance is the mode of healing. Trance possession, another traditional healing mode, is also part of these dances, as a means to form a connection between the spiritual and material.

The dancers use their bodies to bring the spirits and form a bond between them and the community. “As they dance, they create an aura, which begins to rise and cover everyone who is sitting there. ” Even the children will come and sit quietly and watch. The force, she says, starts in the dancers’ hands and continues through their feet, legs, hips, shoulders, and faces until they are entirely transformed. The wearing of the tono masks allows them to achieve a more powerful transformation.

About The Dance:

The dance itself is strikingly similar to the egungun dances of West Africa; the performance is a form of ancestor reverence, and similar dances that may be seen throughout the Diaspora (the dispersion of the people from their original homeland). While the Dance of the Devils occurs within a context that includes European and Native influences, the core of the dance, its meaning and specific elements, are African.

The Dance of the Devils can be traced to Europe during the Middle Ages, but according to an Afro-Mestizo elder, the devils are spirits of the dead and not devils in search of souls.  They are actually ancestral spirits whose presence is celebrated and encouraged. Similar to a dance performed by the Abakua in Cuba, dressing as a diablo (devil) symbolises the willingness to allow the spirit to possess your body.

The egungun masquerades of West Africa are, like the Dance of the Devils, performed as part of a feast of the dead. Masks are worn which represent the dead, symbolically, but not as individual persons; flogging with whips is intended to promote growth and maturity in young men and fertility in women. The egungun dances were a strong social force in the societies where they originated, especially in times of unrest or external threat.

Another similarity is that while only men generally perform the dances, there is often at least one woman who either participates on some level or teaches the dance.

It has been suggested that the presence of the whip is a reference to the relationship between the former slaves and their overseers. However, the presence of flogging in the egungun dances of West Africa, when compared to Nana Minga and her baby, suggests that flogging is another African retention and bears its original symbolic meaning of fertility and protection against evil spiritual energy.

The dance being performed on the Day of the Dead leads one to think that the dance relates to the supernatural world of the spirits. The fact that the dancers dress in cowboy clothes and wear masks made of horse hair may be interpreted to mean that the dance represents the spirits of dead cowboys, the employment of many of the Afro-Mestizos cimarron ancestors. However, the masks, which appear animal-like, may in fact represent the tono spirits of ancestors, an idea supported by the presence of the boite drum.

The boite or bute, is a large gourd with a goatskin head; the drum is played by moving a stick through a hole in the centre to create a vibration, not by striking. It is very similar to a drum used by the Abakua, an all-male secret society in Cuba, and is described in a similar fashion, as having the voice of a big cat, a leopard or jaguar, because of the roaring sound it makes.

When attempting to heal someone of sickness Afro-Mestizos call the animal tono of the sick person. Finding the person’s tono is a way to determine if the sickness is caused by the animal’s death. Healers in attempt to cure a person called the leopard, using the roaring sound of the boite drum to simulate the voice of the big cat.

Sources:

Southworld

Betty Morales

Pri.org

https://shirleytwofeathers.com/The_Blog/pagancalendar/category/october/

[bitchfromtheseventhhell]

The Problem with Dany

If I had to pick a character who was the most difficult to talk about in this series, it would probably be Daenerys Targaryen.  The intersection of every single conflict and perspective--in world and modern--about her is one that is almost impossible to address without sidelining one element of it.

That her arc relies intensely white saviorism; depictions of the Dothraki are laden with racist tropes; her experience in Slaver’s Bay harkens to (but does not perfectly mirror) white conquest in the 19th century.  This pairs uncomfortably with the fact that she is 13-16 years old (I’m focusing predominantly on book!Daenerys in this--if you are here for show!Daenerys proceed with that in mind), a child sold into sex slavery, a rape victim, and someone who believes firmly and acts upon the belief that any society that relies upon slavery is not society.  As a woman in Martin’s historically inaccurate misogynistic world, she confronts challenges that are designed by the creator of the series to confront her womanhood; as a Targaryen/Valyrian/Westerosi far from her home and without the resources of that home, she is left with little choice but to look forward.

Creator-Character-Consumer

Before even touching on the content of A Song of Ice and Fire, a point that causes trouble, right out of the gate, is where do “problems” with Daenerys arise?  When, for example, does responsibility lie with a character, and when with the architect of her story?  Add into that--when does the responsibility lie with neither character, nor creator, but with instead the fans who are discussing the media in question?

All this is not to absolve Daenerys of whatever sins exist within her storyline. There are choices that the character makes that are reprehensible and for which the ultimate responsibility does lie with her; however it is also to say that many of the things that Daenerys is loathed for are decisions that lie instead at Martin’s feet.

Creator: White Saviorism & Daenerys

Jon Snow has a “practice monarchy,” it is in the North at the Wall, where he is elected Lord Commander by his brothers in black.  Tyrion has a “practice monarchy,” it is in King’s Landing where he briefly serves as Hand of the King in his father’s stead and where, out of spite for his father and sister as much as out of his own idealism denied, he states, in response to Shae’s question of “So what will you do, m’lord, now that you’re the Hand of the King?”

“Something Cersei will never expect,” Tyrion murmured softly against her slender neck. “I’ll do... justice.”  (Tyrion I, ACOK)

In both cases, if their ultimate destiny is to save Westeros (and the world?) from an ice-demon apocalypse, then it is happening locally.  Jon is working with the Free Folk--the first victims of this impending apocalypse--and Tyrion is working with those who hold power in the society that’s about to be attacked.  Jon is working from the bottom-up, Tyrion is working from the top-down.  

Neither is true of Daenerys.

The word that I see thrown around frequently about Daenerys is that she is an imperialist.  The trouble with this argument is that imperialism is a technical term, and one with a specific definition based on the historical era it comes from.  It is the conquest and subjugation of a people in the name of an empire, justified primarily by god, gold, and/or glory.  This subjugation is seen as “for the good of the people” but the imperializer, and brought--without exception--the economic destruction of a colonized country’s livelihood in the name of the wealth of the colonizer.

The trouble is that Dany, herself, is not an imperialist.  She does not--as many around her do--consider the Dothraki “savages” who deserve to be ruled and bettered by her presence.  She grapples with her own perspectives on the matter, but it was with the Dothraki that she first experienced her own independence, and her own first leadership.  When she sets out to rid Slaver’s Bay of slavery, it is not for her own greater glory, for the improvement of her financial standing, or because she feels a holy motivation to do so.  She does so because she herself cannot abide by slavery.  Daenerys is a conqueror--with echoes down to the three dragons back to her ancestor Aegon the first--but she is not an imperialist.

Martin is the imperialist.

Martin took a top-down preparation for apocalypse for Tyrion, and a bottom-up preparation for apocalypse for Jon, and with Daenerys--no matter what--her “preparation” comes on the backs of those in a region that is inspired by the Middle East/Central Asia--areas that suffered intensely from imperialism.  Daenerys’ parallels to Aegon the Conqueror (also not an imperialist, for he conquered and stayed in Westeros as its new King, rather than sucking the power out of the region and sending it elsewhere) are for Westeros, not for Meereen, Yunkai, Astapor, or Vaes Dothrak.  They are “practice,” and whatever Daenerys’ intent in freeing the people enslaved in the region--whatever poetic parallel Martin may be trying to make of the Valyrians bringing slavery to the region and a Valyrian ending slavery in the region--it still requires an external “savior” figure to do so.  If imperialism is about removing the power from one area for the embetterment of another, Martin’s narrative imperialism removes the power from Essos and brings it to Westeros via Daenerys, even if Daenerys’ actions are at odds with the very definition of imperialism.  On top of that, it helps nothing that Daenerys--and Valyrians generally--are racially coded as being extremely pale white; and while the slaves themselves in Slaver’s Bay come from many different ethnic backgrounds (unlike what is depicted in Game of Thrones--a frustrating instance of taking something that is already racist and making it more-so because most of the extras on site in Morocco were non-white locals), those who hold power in the region, and whose power is ultimately being challenged are not white.  

For the Westerosi apocalypse, Daenerys’ being an external savior is not a bad thing.  Daenerys’ considers herself to be Westerosi, her ultimate goal is to create a home for herself in the place she was raised to believe was her rightful home.  The trope of the exiled prince returning to save the kingdom is a well-used and frequently enjoyable one, especially when there are dragons.  It would be well and lovely to have her fill this trope neatly, and her presence and dragons will ultimately make for good reading when she does return to Westeros.

That does not change the fact that her arrival and her preparation for Westeros will come ultimately from her actions in the a region halfway around the world, and that those who live there will have to grapple with her impact long after she is dead (whenever that may be, because they’ll be dealing with it for a long time).

The question gets stickier: frequently in critiques of Daenerys, one will see the argument “she shouldn’t have done anything in Slaver’s Bay,” and her age, gender, and history of abuse are frequently thrown out of the window--as well as all pretense that slavery of any kind is an abomination and that any society reliant on slavery is one that violates the personhood of millions of people in the name of the “freedoms” of the few.  

What subsequently arises from defenses of that argument is to say that Daenerys’ motivations were pure, were idealistic, but that she didn’t know what she was doing.  This is true; it is simplistic.  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” gets thrown around a fair amount, and we end up back where we start: unable to detach Daenerys from Martin, the object from the creator and allow the fact that Daenerys’ motivations were good and, having been sold as a sex slave, of course she was going to want to free slaves and destroy a mechanism that would further allow for slavery, and that it was Martin who created the scenario and path she would follow, in all its racism and white saviorism.

The truth of the matter is that, for Daenerys, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Her intent is good when she destroys the functioning government and working economy of Slaver’s Bay.  Millions of the residents of that area do not have bodily autonomy, much less economic equality, all thanks to the Valyrians who, blood-magic slave society that they were, brought slavery into the region when they conquered the Ghiscari.  The region will likely be unstable for many years to come because of that, and--as in the American South, among other regions in our world--it’s highly unlikely that those who suffered through bondage will know the economic or social equality they deserve because in all likelihood the white savior figure is going to leave before anything is finalized.  Daenerys’ final chapter in A Dance with Dragons is supposed to be a recentering for her, an internal and psychological reminder that she wants Westeros, and if it took Tyrion an entire book to get from King’s Landing to Meereen, chances are Dany’s going to have to move before the end of the next book in order to make it to Westeros for the impending ice apocalypse--which is definitely not enough time for her to leave Meereen and the rest of Slaver’s Bay stable.

Jon was killed by those he was leading; Tyrion, for all he was playing the political game well, ultimately was ousted from power because he was not either the King or truly the Hand, and then was framed for a murder he did not commit.  Daenerys will leave Slaver’s Bay of her own choice and her work there will never be finalized (best case scenario).  Her work to “fix” a region that was societally broken (slave societies are fundamentally broken; that slavery originated in Valyria) will be a failure that echoes back to the horrible ramifications of imperialism that the majority of countries are still working to undo even now, even if Daenerys herself was not an imperialist.  The simple fact that Martin arced her story this way is a child of our own imperialism, and to put that aside is an injustice to the realities of our world.

Character: Queen You Shall Be

I won’t be discussing whether or not Dany is the rightful queen of the seven kingdoms of Westeros.  I have my thoughts--many thoughts, indeed--about the question of “right” and “rightful” when it comes to this series, and it’s a tangent that is unrelated--or at least subsequent to everything I’m about to say.  

Here, instead, is where we get into Daenerys as a feminist figure within the series, and what sort of feminist she is, and what sort of patriarchy she confronts, given the fact that her arc is laden with racism and white saviorism.  The definition of feminism I’m using is an intersectional one: it looks at class and race in conjunction with gender when approaching what it means to be at a disadvantage in society.

Daenerys is one of the few characters in Martin’s world who becomes free to confront the patriarchy she experiences head on and with (almost) complete independence.  She does not begin that way.  Her story begins with her brother selling her into sex slavery, experiencing Stockholm Syndrome (aided and abetted by the fact that her rapist provides her with more autonomy than her brother), and ultimately, upon the death of her husband, being told that she must spend the rest of her days in a holy space of widowed khaleesis.  (Widowhood, ironically in this case, is one of the ways that women have historically emancipated themselves from patriarchy).  She engages in a blood magic ritual which leads to the rebirth of dragons in her world, and from there we’re off to the races with Daenerys and newfound power and autonomy.  

Daenerys stands as a threat to Martin’s patriarchy--and to the patriarchy in our own world.  She is (ostensibly) infertile, widowed, sexually active, young, beautiful--on top of holding power that is completely her own which she uses to upend multiple social mechanisms that place men above women and the powerful above the enslaved.  Even her marriage to Hizahr zo Loraq is one that she enters into on fairly equal footing: she is the queen and does not relinquish that right; he is the consort and is “bringing something to the table,” specifically the promise of swift and easy peace within her domain.  It’s a marriage of inversed historical norms, where the reverse might be true (and, indeed, is true in the case of Joffrey and Margaery).  Any attempt to subdue her after Khal Drogo dies is met with failure, and any attempt to claim her dragons (the affirmation of her power) is similar.  She exists as an empowered young woman in a world where women are rarely allowed to be empowered.

The patriarchy that Daenerys threatens is not simply a matter of men holding power over women, she threatens a class-based patriarchy as well.  She sees herself as--and acts as--a champion for those at the bottom of the food-chain.  She questions why institutions exist and who they serve and frequently the answer to that is wealthy, powerful men--an answer that Daenerys finds unsatisfying.  If patriarchy more broadly manifests as men being structurally prioritized over women, it exists in tandem with the wealthy few being prioritized over the numerous poor, and Daenerys stands as a shield for those who are maligned in both cases and wishes to create a society where no one’s life or livelihood is threatened based on sex or wealth.  This as a goal is one that fundamentally threatens the formerly-slave-holding status quo of Slaver’s Bay, and one that will threaten the patriarchal power structure of her homeland as well.  She is a symbol of challenge to the way the world has been in the name of what the world must be in order to save it from apocalypse.

If Martin has created fodder for comparison for leadership between Daenerys and Jon (and Robb) and Tyrion, he has specifically created a comparison for queenship between Daenerys and Cersei.  And what is most interesting about that comparison is the way the oppositions and parallels weave among each other.

In Cersei, you have a rape victim, a widow, a mother of three; you have a woman whose autonomy is constantly under threat by the men around her who seek to claim the power she gains from her regency from her with varying levels of success.  But where Cersei couldn’t even pretend to care about the people she rules, Daenerys actively does care about everyone she encounters (and the road to hell is paved with good intentions).  It is Daenerys caring for the Unsullied, the babies they kill during the training and the enslaved mothers of those babies, that catalyze her decision to sack Astapor and end slavery in the region.  One of Daenerys’ first empowered acts when Khal Drogo is still alive is to halt the rape of the Lhazarene that the Dothraki are enslaving, which is what first throws Mirri Maz Duur across her path.  Cersei cares neither for women (considering them weak and insipid) nor for the poor she has responsibility for as Queen Regent, while Daenerys cares so much for them that she derails her own quest to return to Westeros.  

But they do not exist to simply be contrasted, for both commit similar acts that are questionable at best and reprehensible at worst, though the context for each is different.  Both send innocent women to be tortured: Cersei sends Falena Stokeworth to Qyburn for his research largely because the woman annoys her, and Skahaz manipulates Daenerys into torturing the daughters of a treasonous wineseller.  In addition to that, both queens engage in sexual acts that span from dubious consent to downright rape.  Cersei rapes Lancel, a teenaged boy, to manipulate him into doing what she wants.  When Cersei is having sex with Taena Merryweather, her internal monologue is one that is scarred with Robert’s repeated rapes, but the monologue is not one of intimacy; instead it is one where Cersei is trying to process what happened to her for many years and in so doing layers her own voice with her abuser.  And while Taena is consenting to the act (whether because she wants to or because she is spying on Cersei and wants to have more power over her), Cersei’s mindset in the moment is one that is laced with her own internalized misogyny and her own negative views of women and femininity.   Meanwhile Irri’s consent in her sexual relationship with Daenerys is dubious at best.  She offers to take over when she awakens and finds Daenerys masturbating, though whether she wants to or she considers it duty/responsibility is questionable; and what that means for their later sexual relationship is unclear, and opens up a conversation of the nature of compulsory sex work and rape.  Daenerys certainly interprets it as a voluntary act--and her connections with her past relationship with Drogo are not ones of processing rape and aligning with her rapist so much as longing for emotional intimacy--but no voice is given to it from Irri’s perspective, making it impossible to know for sure.  

What fundamentally differs these two queens, both in their parallels and in their contrasts, is their capacity for sympathy and empathy with those around them.  Cersei has neither--not even Jaime when he returns from war without a hand.  Everyone around her is a function of her life--even her children whom she views as an extension of herself.  Daenerys, meanwhile, young and--yes--ignorant though she is, constantly seeks to serve those around her.  If Cersei’s desire to protect her power is to protect herself, Daenerys’ desire to protect her power comes hand in hand with the desire to protect those people she freed from slavery, to serve them better, to make their lives secure and to open doors for them.  The conflict for Daenerys arises in the fact that, no matter how much she loves and cares for her people, no matter how much she wants to protect them and expand their wellbeing, she will ultimately leave them, and that, as stated above, the people and the region are stepping stones to her arriving in Westeros as a queen returning home just in time to help save the world from devastation.

The deep way that Daenerys cares about her people is ultimately a double-edged sword: on the one hand, she cares for the lowest of the low and genuinely does what she can to improve their lives as a “good” ruler should, using her power to expand the lives of those without; on the other hand this deep caring will ultimately hurt the region and leave a vacuum of power when she does ultimately leave Meereen for good, because anyone she leaves to rule in her stead (in Game of Thrones it was, laughably, Daario Naharis) will be woefully unequal to the task, as Daenerys herself was unequal to it.  

Consumer: And Fandom

I’ve avoided up until now bringing fandom into it, except when mentioning arguments that I’ve seen (on reddit; on westeros.org; on tumblr; on facebook; in media outlets) about Daenerys.  Fandom is frequently a tricky thing to navigate because most arguments involving “what the fandom thinks” or “how the fandom behaves” makes such broad generalizations that it’s literally impossible for a fandom to agree on all the contradictory ideas attributed to it.  

What I see as the major dancers in fights about Daenerys are as follows:

That Daenerys is a woman, a rape victim, a feminist, and therefore we should ignore the white savior factor in her arc because she herself is someone who cares about women, about the enslaved, about those in greatest need and that is admirable.

Daenerys is a white savior, and therefore none of her human characterization matters.

Round and round and round they swirl and you get to the point where it becomes an either-or situation, rather than a both-and.  Daenerys Targaryen is a rape victim, a feminist, a well-fleshed-out character AND there is intense racism in the arc that Martin crafted for her.  One addresses a character issue, another addresses a systemic issue of race in media, which means that--far from being contradictory opinions, they exist in the same time in the same story in the same person.

They sit very uncomfortably together, especially given the tendency in modern mainstream feminism to focus on an assumed upper middle class white woman rather than grabbing the fact of racialized class structures around the world and saying that those matter intensely as well.  

Add into that that--this specifically in tumblr fandom--the usage of flat out racist imagery in gifsets (Daenerys’ being raised up on the shoulders of the emancipated slaves in her “Mhysa” scene at the end of season 3 specifically, among others), seemingly without any acknowledgement of the racism of the depiction, which undercuts a feminism that does acknowledge both race and class.  

It grows even more complicated when you have the contrasting book depiction of Daenerys as a sixteen year old girl who is learning and growing as best she can in an arc that has far more global (in our world and in hers) consequence than she is aware of and who is constantly trying to change in order to do the best she can with the image of mid-twenties Game of Thrones Daenerys who is seemingly confident in every action, making the visual racism of her arc in Slaver’s Bay even harder to stomach.  

And of course, ultimately, there exist fans who will make remarkably sexist and racist comments about both Daenerys and her arc, which ultimately can derail from any conversation about one, the other, or both.

Daenerys and her story suffer from challenges that do not exist elsewhere in the series.  She is a white woman whose travels and actions take her through one of the few areas in the story where the predominant population are people of color, and where frequently those cultures end up suffering from being written as racist caricatures drawn from racist tropes rooted in our reality.  This is an issue that exists for no other major character.  She is a white savior figure without imperialist motivation, even if there is structural imperialism within her arc; she is one of the only major characters who challenges power structures that damage those who aren’t empowered, championing changes in extant class structures--one of the few major characters to do so despite (or perhaps because of) how many noble point of view characters we have; and she is a female character who seeks to protect and enhance the lives of the women she rules.  All of these things are true, and all of them are important to the discussion of the series at large, given how Daenerys is one of the most important characters in it.

[bountyofbeads]

Am I an American?

President Trump’s tirade against four minority congresswomen prompts the question: Whom does he consider to be American?

11:15 AM ET

Ibram X. Kendi | Published July 16, 2019, 11:15 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted July 16, 2019 |

Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University

I live in envy. I envy the people who know their nationality. All the people whose nationality has never been a question in their mind.

I can imagine the woman staring at her reflection in the Volta River who knows she’s Ghanaian, like her ancestors who liberated their people in 1957 and chose the mighty pre-colonial Ghana as the name of their new nation. I can imagine the woman flying into Frankfurt who knows she’s German, who knows she’s arriving back home. I can imagine the man working on his antique car outside his home in Biloxi, forehead covered by the prized blood-red baseball cap he purchased at a rally back in November, a man who has never been told, “Go back to your country!” If somehow someone did tell him, it would confuse him as much as it would the Ghanaian or German woman. It would be like someone driving by his house and shouting at him, “Go back to your home!”

That he is at home, that he is in his country, is as much a fact of his existence as the tool clenched in his hand, as the sunrays shooting past the Mississippi trees hovering above his sweaty hat and its four beaming white words.

Nothing is more certain to him than that he is an American—and that I am not. My living here, being born here, and being a citizen here—none of those fine details matter. To him, to millions like him, to their white-nationalist father in the White House, I am not an American. They want me to prove, like all the Barack Obamas, that I’m really an American.

This blend of nativism, racism, and nationalism is central to Trumpism, to their worldview. They view me as, they disregard me as, an illegal alien, like those four progressive congresswomen of color. I am tolerated until I am not. I can dine on American soil until I demand a role in remaking the menu that is killing me, like those four progressive congresswomen of color.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to get in line to be a Democrat, in the way I’m told by moderates away from Capitol Hill to get in line to be an American. I hear the moderate message of compliance, of assimilation, of being happy just dining. And I hear the message from the man with the blood-red hat defending the moderate and giving me an ultimatum.

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” Donald Trump tweeted Sunday. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.”

But Pelosi and her moderate lieutenants do not desire this type of defense, this white-nationalist brand of American exceptionalism. They quickly and rightly stood up for the Americanness of these four women. “When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries,” Pelosi tweeted, “he affirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.” They quickly and rightly classified Trump’s MAGA attack as “a racist tweet from a racist president,” as the assistant speaker of the House, Ben Ray Luján, tweeted.

But their defenses and affirmations of my Americanness—that my black, Puerto Rican, Somalian, and Palestinian sisters are indeed Americans—did little to quiet the question screaming in my soul for an answer. And I suspect in the souls of millions more.

I can’t stop the screams. Am I an American? It is a question I have never been able to answer.

I can’t stop the shouts: “Go back to your country!” It is a statement I have never been able to answer.

Is this my country? Am I an American?

Ocasio-Cortez—like Trump, like me—was born in New York City. Tlaib was born in Detroit, and Pressley in Cincinnati. Omar’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Somalia when she was a child. They are all U.S. citizens, like me.

“WE are what democracy looks like,” Pressley tweeted. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

But they are not white like the Slovene-born Melania Trump. Is an American essentially white? I do not know. I do not know if I’m still three-fifths of an American, as my ancestors were written into the U.S. Constitution. Or fully American. Or not American at all.

What I do know is that historically, people like me have only truly been all-American—if all-American is not constantly being told to “go back to your country” or “act like an American”—when we did not resist enslavement on a plantation, or in poverty, or in a prison with or without bars shackling our human potential and cultural flowering. Perhaps we were Americans when we did not resist our bodies being traded, our wombs being assaulted, and our bent backs and our hands being bloodied picking and cleaning and manufacturing white America’s wealth.

Perhaps we were Americans when we did not resist how the self-identified white allies were trying to civilize us, telling us to slow down, telling us our anti-racist demands were impractical or impossible, instructing us how to get free. We were rarely told to go back to our country when we did kneel, when we did not kneel, when we did as told by the slaveholder and the abolitionist, by the segregator and racial reformer, by the American mentor telling us to pull up or pull down our pants.

Am I an American only when I act like a slave?

What Trump told those four congresswomen is hardly unorthodox for a U.S. president if we extend recent memory backwards. In 1787, the year the U.S. Constitution was drafted, was also the year that Thomas Jefferson published his influential Notes on the State of Virginia. Enslaved Africans should be emancipated, civilized, and “colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper,” he wrote.

Colonization emerged as the most popular solvent of the race problem before the Civil War, advocated by nearly every president from Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln. Slaveholders increasingly desired to rid the nation of the emancipated Negro. And moderate Americans increasingly advocated gradual emancipation and colonization, telling the anti-racists that immediate emancipation was impractical and impossible in the way that anti-racists are told immediate equality is impractical and impossible today.

At the founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816, Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky, the future presidential candidate and “Great Compromiser,” gave voice to what we now call Trumpism, the savaging of people of color and the countries of people of color to hold up white Americanness.

“Can there be a nobler cause that that which, whilst it proposes to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population, contemplates the spreading of the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe!”

The moderate strategized then, as the moderate still do now, based on what was required to soothe white sensibilities. As the clergyman Robert Finley wrote in Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks in 1816, through colonization, “the evil of slavery will be diminished and in a way so gradual as to prepare the whites for the happy and progressive change.”

Some black people advocated back-to-Africa campaigns or relocated there, convinced American racism was permanent, convinced they could create a better life for themselves alongside their African kin. But many, perhaps most, black people resisted colonization schemes from their beginning. This is “the land of our nativity,” thousands of black Philadelphians resolved in 1817. Still colonization recycled through time, on the basis that the black race could never “be placed on an equality with the white race,” as Lincoln lectured a delegation of black men on August 14, 1862. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison corrected Lincoln: “It is not their color, but their being free, that makes their presence here intolerable.”

President Andrew Johnson did everything he could to keep us slaves. His successor, Ulysses S. Grant, tired of alienating racist Americans from the Republican Party every time he sent federal troops to defend our right to live, vote, thrive, and hold political office from Ku Klux Klansmen led by men such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom Tennessee honored with his own day on Saturday.

In the so-called Compromise of 1877, northerners retained the White House in exchange for allowing racist southerners to treat us like anything but Americans over the next century. Or were we Americans all along, despite what the lynchings and pogroms did to our bodies, and what Jim Crow did to our political economy? Or did we become Americans through court rulings and congressional acts in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s? Or were we still not Americans in 1968, when the Kerner Commission’s study of America’s racial landscape concluded, “Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

Were the two societies—instead of black and white—the American society of legal patriots and the un-American society of illegal aliens? Did the Latinx, Muslim, Asian, and black immigrants who arrived in the United States since the 1960s join the people of color and anti-racist whites in the un-American society? Have people of color been allowed to enter American society and become Americans when they submitted to racist power and policy and inequality and injustice—when they became “my African American”? Have rebellious “un-Americans” of color been demonized as criminals and deported back to our countries or to more and more prisons like Angola in Louisiana?

AM I AN AMERICAN?

Blood-red-hatted segregationists say no, never, unless we submit to slavery. Assimilationists say we can be Americans if we stop speaking Spanish, stop wearing hijabs, cut our long hair, stop acting out against them—if we follow their gradual lead.

Anti-racist blacks have divided over this question as fiercely as segregationists and assimilationists. I am an American, and because I’m an American, I deserve to be free. I am not an American, because if I were an American, I’d be free.

“I, too, am America,” Langston Hughes wrote in perhaps his most famous poem, first published in 1926.

“I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American—and got sense enough to know it,” Malcolm X orated at a Detroit church on April 12, 1964.

Both ring true to me. I do not know whether I’m an American. But I do know it is up to me to answer this question based on how I define American, based on how I am treated by America. I don’t care whether or not anyone thinks I am an American. I am not about persuading anyone to see how American I am. I do not write stories that show white people all the ways people of color contributed to America. I will not battle with anyone over who is an American. There is a greater battle for America.

Maybe that is the point. Maybe I had the question wrong all along. Maybe I should not live in envy; I should live in struggle. Maybe I should have been asking, “Who controls America?” instead of “Am I an American?” Because who controls America determines who is an American.

[english240groupa]

Indigenous Peoples’ Day - Paying Respect to those Brutalized by Columbus

By Ariel Dolen

https://www.denverpost.com/2016/01/20/legislation-would-replace-columbus-day-state-holiday-in-colorado/

     Growing up, many of us were taught that Christopher Columbus was the valiant explorer who discovered America and befriended the Indigenous Peoples of the land. We were taught to praise him for his supposed heroism while coloring in a 5th grade stencil of him holding hands with Native American tribes - smiles on all of their faces. It is becoming more prevalent, however, that this is proven to be a terribly false narrative.

     Whether you idolize Columbus or not, it is impossible to ignore the uprising resistance against Columbus Day. From social media posts to protests to cities such as Los Angeles “re-imagining” the infamous holiday, the push back is significant, and understandably so. For Native Americans, this is a day of mourning. Columbus can very well be the physical representation of colonization to some. Especially to those whose ancestors were directly affected by European colonization, disease, and slave-trade. 

      “This historically problematic holiday has made an increasing number of people wince, given the enslavement and genocide of Native American people that followed in the wake of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria,”  Yvonne Zipp writes.

     There are people, though, who claim to have important reason to celebrate Columbus Day - Italian-Americans. The Italian explorer, in their eyes, paved the way for immigration and the search for the “American Dream.” But there still is an enormous problem with this argument - it is tone deaf. Was the genocide and extinction of tribes across stolen land worth the “American Dream”? A dream that in and of itself is as false a narrative as the concept of Columbus being best friends with Indigenous Peoples?

     Understandably, everyone wants to celebrate their background and heritage, it is important to know where your family has come from. So, perhaps, Italian-Americans should consider focusing their celebration on themselves, on their ancestors. Sure, Columbus may have been part of the reason as to why Italians were able to immigrate, but why not just instead focus on those who made the plight? Don’t let a colonizing murderer represent your culture, your ancestors are the brave ones that deserve the praise. Councilman Mike Bonin, at the Los Angeles City Council’s public hearing, perfectly sums this up:

“I’ve thought about my ancestors and their history. And to me, celebrating Columbus Day does not honor their story and their struggle and their history; it insults it, and it besmirches it. They came here to build something, not to destroy something. They came here to earn something and not to steal something. They came here to make life better for their children, and not to take away something for someone else’s children.”

[elizabethleslie7654]

Why 3rd World “Immigration” Is Actually Colonization Against Us

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When people ask me what is the #1 problem the West is facing, I always have a simple answer to give. They may be a little surprised to hear it at first, but after I explain it to them, they instinctually know at a gut level that my answer is 100% correct.

What is the simple but hard hitting answer?

“Immigration” Is A Nice Word That Conceals The Truth

What do you think of when you hear the words immigration and immigrant?

I’ll tell you I used to think; false ideas based on an agenda put into my head via public school indoctrination, the  Corporate Media, and Hollywood. 

What used to pop into my head was: A person who comes to America for a ‘better life’; who wants to work hard, loves freedom and democracy, and who wants to become an American. Someone that once they touch our ‘magic soil’ is just as American as someone whose family has been here generations and can trace their ancestry back to the first English settlers.

Unsurprisingly, I don’t think such silly things anymore. 

Yes, it is true that people with similar backgrounds can accomplish that American Dream scenario above, such as Europeans immigrating to the United States.

    Just your typical Dutch traditional outfit

But that’s not how this all works.

How is actually goes is more like this:

More and more non-European foreigners start coming into your nation. They start creating little enclaves (also known as colonies) in your cities. The vast majority of them are on some form of public aid. They can’t speak your language, nor are very interested in your culture at all.

Although none of them have paid into the school systems (your ancestors have been paying into the public funds for generations), they get to send their 4+ children to schools that you paid for at no cost to themselves. Not only that, but taxes must go up in order to hire more teachers to accommodate these students, who generally can’t speak your language well/at all and can’t keep up academically.

What exactly do you and your people get out of these foreigners from the 3rd world entering and occupying your territory and nation?

-Loss of space: you can’t enter certain areas because they are literal 3rd world colonies

-Higher crime: “Poverty causes crime” is a myth. Certain people, cultures, and IQ levels are the ones that cause the vast majority of crime.

-Less say in your own nation: These imported 3rd world people vote against your interests at every chance they get. They will vote for a bigger government (raise your taxes), open borders (more of their cohorts coming in), and restrictions on free speech (silence you)

  We Must Call It What It Actually Is

By not calling things by what they actually are, we are actually helping those that wish to harm us.

Purposefully flooding our nation with 3rd world people is not “immigration,” and those 3rd world people coming here are not “immigrants.”

We must speak the truth of what is going on in order for people to actually realize what the dangers and consequences of what is happening really are.

To put it bluntly, mass 3rd world migration is really an invasion, colonization, and conquest of our nations. 

Those that come here are colonizers who wish to take from us our wealth, our culture, and ultimately our nation.

The mass flow of foreign people into our nations is nothing short of a form of warfare against us, our families, and our people.

Those that scoff at, dismiss, or refuse to see it for what it really is are either benefiting from the colonization of our nations or cannot put together simple data on demographic trends and changes happening to us.

Let’s look at an example of how this colonial warfare actually plays out in Britain.

Muslim growth world wide is exploding, while at the same time the White European population is quickly shrinking.

  Britain has a large (and growing) Pakistani population, with somewhere around 3% of the population of Britain now made up of Pakistanis.

Assuming the rest of the population is actually British (it’s not), the British people now control 97% of their own nation, while Pakistanis control not only 3% of Britain but still 100% of Pakistan.

Why must we die off and be replaced, while non-Europeans must be allowed to keep expanding their population and territory?

If nothing changes in the next 50 years, the British are expected to be less than 50% of the population of Britain. What this means is that the British people only control 49% or less of Britain, while the Nigerians, Pakistanis, Indians, Afghanis, and others control 51%+ of Britain, but while also still retaining 100% control of Nigeria, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan.

What does this mean?

It means Britain becomes less and less British, while also becoming more and more Pakistani, Indian, Nigerian, and Afghani. Essentially, these nations and people are expanding their territory and influence, while the British people keep losing more and more territory and influence.

Ask yourself: How is demographic replacement via third world migration any different than any other take-over by foreigners?

Let’s look at another example to see this even more clearly.

Note: This is from 2012. It has only gone up in the past 6 years.

  First off, what do you think of when you see such a map such as this one?

I’ll tell you what I think of.

Territory of the First Mexican Empire

The colonization and demographic warfare by Mexico of sending its people into our nation to re-take its supposed ‘lost land’ is so blatantly obvious that all you need is 2 maps to know its true.

There is no ‘magic dirt’ that transforms Mexicans into Americans just by crossing a line on a map and entering into American territory.

In the future if nothing is done to stop this demographic replacement, the states that are majority Mexican can simply vote to leave the U.S. and join Mexico, as they will de facto be Mexican territory anyways.

As stated above, what is happening is that the American people lose land and influence to Mexican colonists, while Mexico and its people gain land and influence in its new territories.

To sum up how this works: We LOSE and gain NOTHING from millions of foreigners colonizing our lands, while they WIN and take OUR nation from us. 

What is conquest?

– a territory that has been gained by the use of subjugation and military force.

  What is subjugation?

  –  the action of bringing someone or something under domination or control.

  What is domination?

  –  the exercise of control or influence over someone or something, or the state of being so controlled.

  What is having foreigners numerically outnumber you and your people, losing your homeland, and becoming a hated minority in your now conquered nation?

–  Istanbul Pogrom

At least the Greeks who were attacked, discriminated against, and kicked out had a homeland to go to.

If this happens in the United States, Britain, France, and other European states, we will have no where to go.

It Is Not Too Late to Fix This

I don’t see what is happening to our nations as the inevitable destruction of our way of life. Rather, I see it as a test by nature and by God; to make our people struggle, so that we will come out the other side stronger than we have ever been before.

This whole ‘let’s flood every White European nation with 3rd world non-Europeans’ is not something our people and our society have ever faced. This is a new threat and challenge that we are facing.

We just happened to be the ones born into this mess. 

I don’t really like too many modern day movies, but my favorite movie as a child was the Lord of the Rings movies, especially the second one, The Two Towers.

Who else didn’t imagine themselves at Helms Deep; on the walls with all of your brothers, looking down at the vast hordes who were hell bent on wiping you and your people off the face of the Earth?

We are at that point in time now.

We are the ones on the wall. We are the ones standing between total annihilation of our people, our culture, and everything we hold dear, and saving everything we cherish and love on this planet.

This task was given to us; and we will either rise to the challenge and save ourselves, or our people and culture will forever be a footnote in the book of human history.

We only live once; we might as well be known as the heroes that saved our people and saved the West. Let’s go.

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