#and all the indigenous characters are voiced by white people while the bears are voiced by black people

[nickbutnodick]

brother bear is probably atleast kinda racist in two different ways but it did have the eagle squeak and thats really cool

[thatringboy]

A Body Built for an Undeserving Soul, A Boothill Theory

My definitely sober thoughts while grinding for the eventual Ruan Mei rerun and writing some robinhill have led me to a startling train of thought. I’ll do my best to sound sane as I say this, but the 18 minute discord voice memo I originally made is definitely anything but. Spoilers for Boothill’s backstory, character stories, and other lore, and no I’m not really gonna be citing things because it’s 3 in the morning and I’m high. If at any point I say something that isn’t really supported by canon, please be nice i’m a little silly boy

Anyways

I don’t think Boothill is a Pathstrider.

Let me cook, please. Here’s my reasons why:

The way he talks about Aeons and Paths

The way his body is designed

And 3.

Enjoy the madness below the cut

So, there’s not really a proper way to word any of this without it being an ADHD word vomit. Bear with me. Please.

Penacony has been a fantastic update for those of us waiting for worldbuilding. We’ve learned a LOT about the many factions in the cosmos, the true nature of the IPC, the powers of the Aeons, and that the Paths are tangible things in the universe. The Luofu arc opened up a bit about this, but since it was so focused on The Hunt and The Abundance and The Permanence, we sort of fell back into the same story beats as the Herta Station arc. Either way, Penacony has been amazing for little lore bugs like me.

So what does this have to do with the wild claim that Boothill somehow isn’t a Pathstrider?

Let’s touch some grass for a minute and consider our places in the irl universe. Hi, I’m Perseus, a young transmasculine white adult guy from South Texas who grew up reading too many Rick Riordan books and now has a complicated relationship with both the christian god and the greek gods. It’s an autism special interest of mine to learn about the greek pantheon and while I don’t know everything about it, I’m a silly little guy and can recite fun facts about dozens of gods. I can also recite fun facts about the christian bible and christian mythology because I was forced to study christianity when I was younger. Nice to meet y’all. Now, when I, Perseus, talk to people about the various religions I know a thing or two about, I infodump. A lot. I think I once ranted about Dionysus for 20 minutes before my sister told me to shut up. It happens.

Now focus back in on the important topic: the fictional cyborg with jiggle physics. I’m working purely on memory, but I’m pretty sure when he first meets Dan Heng and Pom-Pom, he does go on a spiel about the Aeons and Paths as he tries to prove his identity as a Galaxy Ranger and Acheron’s identity as Not a Galaxy Ranger. The way he describes The Hunt, The Nihility, Emanators, and Paths, it all just sounded… i don’t know, canned? It came across as very emotionally disconnected, even as he talked about The Hunt, but he was saying all the right words. Like someone who studied a religion but isn’t actually a part of the religion. 

On its own, this means absolutely nothing besides just reminding us of his home planet’s hostile takeover by Qlipoth-worshiping IPC workers. If you haven’t seen the post yet, I really recommend reading the So, Honkai: Star Rail made a cyborg cowboy... an INDIGENOUS cyborg cowboy. post by @ahworm I’ll link it here, please check it out because it recontextualized a lot of how I viewed Boothill’s actions and mannerisms

So the way Boothill talks about the Path he should be a Pathstrider of sounds more like an encyclopedia than a follower. Now, maybe this can be explained by the fact that Galaxy Rangers aren’t the most zealous bunch, especially when standing next to the Xianzhou Alliance who worship Lan as a deity more than The Hunt itself. The Galaxy rangers are the opposite, they are hunters first and last regardless of what Lan in THEIR “greatness” does.

But if Boothill is just a normal Galaxy ranger (whatever that means), then how does he recognize the Jade Abacus of Allying Oath instantaneously? Dan Heng’s barely put the damn thing on the table and Boothill’s already jaw on the floor amazed. One could make the argument that, well, Boothill’s a well-traveled guy, of course he’d know the most valuable artifact to his Path. To that, I say: there’s more to it.

Boothill’s main accusation against Acheron in the beginning is, what? “An Emanator that shouldn’t exist.” He talks about The Nihility and Device IX the same way he talks about The Hunt; learned and detached in an agnostic way. He’s aware these are real concepts and beings, he’s crossed paths with an Emanator of Elation before so he can’t deny the existence of literal gods in the universe

We also know that it’s canon in the star rail universe that there are planets who haven’t heard of the Aeons before, like Sigonia - Aventurine’s planet. Instead of Aeons, we know the Avgins worshiped the goddess Giathra Triclops. I’ve seen the argument that Giathra is just another name for Xipe since THEY have three faces, but Aventurine’s flashbacks are very clear in showing that the worship of Giathra was very different from the worship of Aeons. We don’t know much about Aeragan-Epharshel, but from how the IPC described the indigenous people as needing civilization and other disgusting things (not to mention how they forced a synesthesia beacon into boothill when he was maybe like a teenager? And then his brain nearly broke from the influx of information?), I think it’s safe to say that the tribes of Aeragan-Epharshel also didn’t follow any specific Aeon.

But Aventurine is now a Pathstrider of Preservation, so why can’t Boothill be a Hunter Pathstrider too? Well, dear reader, allow me to bash my head against the wall trying to form words. Aventurine doesn’t believe anything about the sovereignty of The Preservation, just like the rest of the Stonehearts. He has his agenda, and if he has to play Preservation to do so, then he will. I think Boothill is the same, which is also why I can’t wait to see what happens in the upcoming quests with the two of them in the same room. That being said, Aventurine’s Preservation powers only come from his Cornerstone, crafted by an Emanator of Preservation. It’s how he and Topaz and Jade can all be such different people but all be classified as Pathstriders of Preservation, the sheer proximity to an Emanator’s powers canonically give them powers equivalent to actual Pathstriders.

So… what about Boothil? This leads me into my next point: Boothill’s cyborg body. By looking at his Character Story Part 3, we learn that Boothill VOLUNTARILY became a cyborg to become stronger. He literally shed the skin and name from an ancient, dead tongue to become a real loaded gun. His voice lines in combat talk about death a lot, his name literally is in reference to a graveyard - this man cannot wait to finally die in some sort of blaze of glory and vengeance. I say that with a little bit of sarcasm, but Boothill designed his body to be a weapon. 

In a lot of parts of the USA, it’s illegal to even insinuate that you have a firearm as that constitutes as the crime of  “armed robbery”, even if you don’t even have a gun. The threat alone is enough to warrant a higher penalty. But Boothill is already a great shot with a gun, why does he also need augmented teeth and crosshair eyes and hips that can fold his body into any sinful shape he needs? Because the threat alone is enough to give him power over his prey. Almost as if he’s compensating for a lack of magic godly powers. He needs to be able to keep up with even the strongest IPC goons, to pierce their Preservation shields with his bullets so that he can get closer and closer to Oswaldo Schneider.

But how can I prove that Boothill doesn’t have any Path magic? Well, let’s take a spin around his character model. What’s that thing sitting snugly against his exposed asscheek? His pistol? But that’s not weird, Perseus, most cowboys hold their guns there!

But what other playable character has their weapon on their actual model like him?

There are so many in-game cutscenes showing that, canonically, the Pathstriders summon their weapon from some sort of unseen storage or hammerspace. I like the term hammerspace, let’s use that. The playable Pathstriders all use hammerspace to easily summon their weapons. None of them actually carry their weapons on their model. Even Welt Yang has scenes of him summoning his herrscher cane (I’ve never played hi3 please forgive me for using incorrect terms) from his hammerspace. But not Boothill. He has his arm gun and he has his trusty 9 millimeter pistol on his little slutty hip. His idle animations involve reloading his weapons and putting them back on his person. No particle effects, no vanishing tricks, just a man sticking his tongue out to catch a bullet for a snack.

So what have we learned?

Boothill doesn’t have an emotional connection to his Path, it most likely is just the Path he figured met his needs and decided the philosophy was good enough

Boothill’s body is designed to perform specifically to kill Pathstriders, especially sturdier Pathstriders of The Preservation

Boothill either can’t or won’t use the same hammerspace the other canonical Pathstriders use

Each point by themself means nothing, or can be chalked up to unique character designs. But together? My intoxicated mind theorizes that Boothill is not a Pathstrider, merely a broken man trying to play the game according to the rules of the oppressors that colonized his planet and bombed his tribe into reservations and the dirt. Thank you for your time.

[reanimatedcourier]

How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:

Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.

Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I'm a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.

Let's get something out of the way first: Fallout's portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of "tribal" to the claims of them being "savage" and "uncivilized" mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas' narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House "rehabilitated" tribals to create New Vegas' Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you've got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn't too great, given that two Native characters are marked "Caucasian" despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn't accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)

As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.

Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.

Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian, American Indian/Native American, Inuit, Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant "half breed" so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)

As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.

Trouble figuring out whose land is where? No problem, check out this map.

Drawing

Don't draw us with red skin. It's offensive and stereotypical.

Tutorial for Native Skintones

Tutorial for Mixed Native Skintones

Why Many Natives Have Long Hair (this would technically fit better under another category, but give your Native men long hair!)

If You're Including Traditional Wear, Research! It's Out There

Languages

Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn't start dropping Cree words.

Here's a Site With a Map and Voice Clips

Here's an Extensive List of Amerindian Languages

Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we're at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.

Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).

Names

Surprisingly, we don't have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven't chosen a last name from another tribe.

Baby name sites aren't reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren't Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.

Here's a list of last names from the American census.

Indian Names

You may also hear "spirit names" because that's what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let's dive into that for a moment.

The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.

A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don't follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)

If you're not Indigenous: don't try this. You will be wrong.

Legal Terms

Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and "Sioux". How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.

For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.

Cowboys

And something the Fallout New Vegas fans might be interested in, cowboys! Here's a link to a post with several books about Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Wild West.

Representation: Stereotypes and Critical Thought

Now, you'll need to think critically about why you want to write your Indigenous character a certain way. Here is a comprehensive post about stereotypes versus nuance.

Familiarize yourself with tropes. The Magical Indian is a pretty prominent one, with lots of shaman-type characters in movies and television shows. This post touches on its sister tropes (The Magical Asian and The Magical Negro), but is primarily about the latter.

Say you want to write an Indigenous woman. Awesome! Characters I love to see. Just make sure you're aware of the stereotypes surrounding her and other Women of Color.

Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. "What, so they can't even drink?" You might be asking. That is not what I'm saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm's research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.

Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as "childlike" for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.

Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.

There's a stereotype where we all live off government handouts. Buddy, some of these long-term boil water advisories have been in place for over twenty years. The funding allocated to us as a percentage is 0.39%: less than half a percent to fight the coronavirus. They don't give us money.

"But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?" Cherokee don't and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves "defending their lands as the Indians did".

Also, don't make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.

Our lands are not cursed. We don't have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.

Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum

Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to "breed out the Indian" in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.

However, this isn't how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.

Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of "Indian" the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.

Here are two tumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.

However, if you aren't Indigenous, don't bring up blood quantum. Don't. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.

Cherokee Princess Myth

"Princess" was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.

Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a "Cherokee Princess" had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.

For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.

Religion

Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren't Indigenous, that's smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.

Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.

Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn't be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.

Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope

Now we've come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar's Legion and Joshua Graham.

(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to "civilize" tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)

Before we dive in, here is a post explaining the concept of cultural Christianity, if you are unfamiliar with it.

We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man's Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.

As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don't need to. People of Color can save themselves.

Now, cultural Christianity isn't alone on this side of the pond. Writer Teju Cole authored a piece on the White Savior Industrial Complex to describe mission trips undertaken by white missionaries to Africa to feed their egos.

Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: "Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others." (Positive, here, is referring to "benefits" for the colonizers. Indigenous people don't consider colonization beneficial.)

An example of a non-benefit, the Church Rock disaster had Diné children playing in radioactive water so the company involved could avoid bad publicity.

Moving on, don't sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent "undesirables" (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn't officially considered a crime.

The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.

It wasn't until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn't automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.

I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.

Topics to Avoid if You Aren't Indigenous

Child Separation. Just don't. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.

Assimilation schools. Do not bring up a tool for cultural genocide that has left lasting trauma in our communities.

W/ndigos. I don't care that they're in Fallout 76. They shouldn't be. Besides, you never get them right anyway.

Sk/nwalkers. Absolutely do not. Diné stories are not your playthings either.

I've already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm's research, remember that it isn't inherent to us.

For our final note: remember that we're complex, autonomous human beings. Don't use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don't reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.

Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.

This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.

[itswednesdaymesdudes]

4 (animated) movies/series you will probably enjoy if you liked the Artemis Fowl-series

The way the adaptation from earlier this year turned out had me so irked I unconsciously started looking for similar things to enjoy instead. So here are a few of them. Most of these are pretty well known, but oh well.

1. Cowboy Bebop

In a post-apocalyptic world where the Moon blew up and Earth is largely inhabitable, an ex-criminal with a knack for forming nemeses, an ex-police investigator, a cryogenics survivor, an eccentric hacker, and a dog endowed with human intelligence form an inter-galactic bounty-hunting team in order to escape their shitty pasts. (That was a mouthful.) Through a series of well-written action adventures, each of them is forced to come to terms with their old lifestyle and choices. This makes for complex, fleshed out characters and a surprising exploration of adult, environmental, and societal issues. Is enjoyable even if you generally don’t watch anime. Worth checking out for the amazing jazz soundtrack, spaceship design, and Western genre influences alone.

2. Die Hard (1988)

Eoin Colfer once described the plot of the first book as ‘Die Hard with fairies’. A pre-Christmas air of this action classic made me realise just to which extent this is the case. Like the book, it takes place on a Christmas Eve, it involves a heist (of its own Holly, not to mention, who btw packs a punch), ultimately to be solved by one (1) Irish-American police detective. It features a foul and remorseless villain, but a complex one at that (woohoo Alan Rickman). Its action sequences also seem to have influenced some events in the book (looking at you, c4 explosion and final fight). So yeah, great watch if you want to imagine what the action scenes could have looked like.

3. Zootopia

An at first glance surprising, but worthy mention. Apart from it being a kid-friendly exploration of implicit prejudices in society and the nature vs. nurture debate, it captures a first-of-her-kind police officer and a conman while they reluctantly pair up to solve a case that is about to cause permanent societal division. To top this off, it features a Russo-Italian polar bear maffia, an overly demanding police chief, a kleptomaniac weasel, and a seemingly innocent, power-hungry and manipulative villain (honestly I might be reading too much into this but idk if someone involved in production got inspired👀). Whenever this movie is mentioned, I cannot help but wonder how Disney got its elements so right without needing to try, while managing to get the actual thing so, so wrong? Sigh. Moving on.

4. Road to El Dorado

Last, but definitely not least (after Bebop probably my favourite on this list). An unhinged bard and a scheming rogue, with a respective appetite for adventure and gold, manage to find their way to a secret civilization and, through a combination of wit and dumb luck, almost con it out of a big chunk of its gold. ALMOST. Broken promises and the arrival of the real Bad guys, which threatens the exposure of the civilization, lead to a last-minute change of plans. What makes it even better is that the whole movie (courtesy of Dreamworks) seems to be a jab at 90s animated features from a company we all well know. It pokes fun at portrayals of white/male saviours and indigenous people/women in children’s animation of its time (including itself). Every so often, an Elton John track plays in the background (ngl “It’s Tough To Be A God” will always be a jam). The comedy is very character- and dialogue-based, and Kenneth Branagh redeems himself by lending his voice to Miguel. Overall, great fun.

Did I miss something? Pls comment, because it seems like it will take a while before the series gets an adaptation that will actually capture its worth (no pun intended)

[dweemeister]

The Stalking Moon (1968)

By the late 1960s, the American Western’s zenith had passed, and the genre was reinventing itself. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) unleashed a wave of films in all genres depicting violence more openly and graphically; meanwhile, the rise of the Revisionist Western (1962’s Ride the High Country, 1966’s The Professionals) led to the deglamorization of the genre’s protagonists and their sense of morality. Released by National General Pictures (NGC), The Stalking Moon reunites producer Alan J. Pakula, director Robert Mulligan, and Gregory Peck – no longer a dashing young man – a six years after To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Though the team is a throwback, the mindset of The Stalking Moon fits squarely within a Revisionist Western. Mulligan’s dialogue-light film incorporates elements of atmospheric thrillers and, in its tensest moments, seems to resemble a proto-slasher. As a hybrid thriller-Western, The Stalking Moon – once the narrative pieces are in place – is a sharp-edged, gorgeously-shot affair.

On Sam Varner’s (Peck) last day before retiring from the U.S. Cavalry, his regiment surrounds and arrests dozens of Apache warriors. Among the group is a white woman, Sarah Carver (Eva Marie Saint), and her half-Indian son (Noland Clay; Clay’s ethnicity/race is unclear). That afternoon, Sarah pleads for an immediate escort from the Cavalry’s camp instead of waiting for five days for an official military escort. The boy’s father, Salvaje (Nathaniel Narcisco in redface; Narcisco’s ethnicity/race is unclear), is a ruthless assassin and, according to Sarah, almost certainly in pursuit of their son. The Cavalry commander rejects Sarah’s request, but Sam agrees to take them to a remote train station. At the station, disaster strikes, and Sam invites Sarah and her son to stay with him at his rugged, mountainous ranch in New Mexico. Sarah and her son find the personal adjustments to live on Sam’s ranch difficult, but they have help thanks to ranch hands Ned (Russell Thorson) and Nick Tana (Robert Foster, whose character is a half-Indian scout). But even in this ranch, protected on three sides by treacherous rock formations, Sarah and her son have not yet eluded the violence to come.

Mulligan also appears to make comments on how the United States treated the American Indians of the West, but ultimately never does so. The Stalking Moon never highlights indigenous perspectives, declining to even give Sarah’s son a name or expressive space. These perspectives only exist through implication – the wars of the American West are going poorly for the tribes, and white settlers are moving ceaselessly westward and are cementing themselves in these lands. Sarah and Salvaje’s child, being of mixed race and approximately eight or nine years old, would almost certainly be the target of sociopolitical discrimination and the suspicious gazes of many a stranger. Never discussed by any of the characters is the possibility of such behavior towards the child; if Mulligan and screenwriters Wendell Mayes (1959’s Anatomy of a Murder, 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure) and Alvin Sargent (1977’s Julia, 2004’s Spider-Man 2) attempted to insert subtext regarding the child’s treatment, they do so far too subtly.

Salvaje himself is a largely faceless antagonist who never exchanges any dialogue, let alone a grunt, a cry of pain, a primal exclamation. Like numerous American Western movies too numerous to name, this is a reinforcement of stereotypical depictions of American Indians in Hollywood – anonymous, without specific bearing to the lead characters. Is he pursuing his son to reclaim him or the murder him? The movie never says. To Salvaje’s credit, he is a physical menace that could easily overtake an aging Sam Varner. More often than not during the Western’s heyday, indigenous Americans – whether individually or as part of a collective – would be all too easily slaughtered in a hail of protagonists’ gunfire or explosives (in part because of their antagonistic anonymity). Such developments would serve The Stalking Moon, which is partly a thriller, poorly. Thus, Salvaje is an aversion of the too-easily-killed Indian trope, but his complete lack of non-violent interaction with any character and empty characterization beyond his capacity for violence and vengeance uphold the trope of the anonymous indigenous menace. His physicality and obvious threat to the protagonists serve thriller genre; his nature as a blank slate killer is a legacy from American Western narrative traditions (and now largely a relic to that tradition’s contemporary practitioners).

Now in his 50s when he made The Stalking Moon, Gregory Peck – if only because of Hollywood’s obsession over age – was reaching a point in his career where opportunities for lead roles inevitably begin to decline (but not his influence, as Peck was currently serving as the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). The Stalking Moon will, on paper, appear to be typical material for Peck. His Sam Varner, when no one else will tend to Sarah and her son’s safety, will take the initiative even though this decision, at best, is an inconvenience or, at worst, might cost him his life. As it is so often with Peck, his screen presence – assuredness of posture, the timbre of his voice, and calming persona – engineers a great performance. Even with a screenplay that avoids providing dialogue-driven details about his character’s life, Peck makes Sam Varner another entry in his long filmography of upstanding heroes.

The screenplay also consigns Eva Marie Saint to playing her character as a trauma survivor whose apprehension is pervasive. If one is seeking a role where Saint is able to display the fullest breadth of her acting range, The Stalking Moon is certainly not that movie. But for how the screenplay portrays her character, this is a capable performance from Saint alongside child star Noland Clay as the boy (this film remains Clay’s only screen credit).

Cinematographer Charles Lang (1947’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1959’s Some Like It Hot) and editor Aaron Stell (1958’s Touch of Evil, To Kill a Mockingbird) pay lip service to the Western genre with luxurious takes of the mountains and rock formations that mark their landscape photography. With on-location filming in Red Rock Canyon and Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, the low-to-the-ground, slightly upward-angled camera shots suggest that Sarah and her son, while making Sam Varner’s ranch house their new home, have nowhere to escape to. Dry shrubs line this small, sloped canyon with somewhat steep angles that make even walking without ascending or descending hazardous. Yet Lang and Stell’s collaboration truly impresses during the action setpieces – most notably in a scene where Gregory Peck, in a darkened room, awaits the entrance of the man who has been hunting the people he has been protecting. Before the naming and identification of the slasher subgenre of horror film, The Stalking Moon – noting its selective cinematography and editing in its tensest moments – relies on numerous lighting and staging techniques that the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Friday the 13th (1980) would later adopt. Though shot and edited like a thriller, much of the film has scenes of people-watching: adults observing children, children observing adults, people noticing small behavioral details otherwise glossed over in a less patient movie. These moments of observation substitute for the dialogue and are as important as the most critical pieces of dialogue in the film.

An unconventional score from composer Fred Karlin (1970’s The Baby Maker, 1973’s Westworld) is a restrained effort, making use of a full orchestra but rarely employing the aural grandiosity that an orchestra is capable of. Repeated often throughout The Stalking Moon is the opening motif whistled in the main titles, with the sparse melodies – usually performed by the whistler or a limited number of woodwinds and/or brass – suggesting the vastness and emptiness of the American West, even in the days of westward expansion. Karlin’s music has an unsettling quality that permeates into The Stalking Moon’s most joyous scenes. When Sarah and her son arrive and Sam’s residence for the first time, the cue “Sarah’s New Home” opens with solo triangle before the entrance of a lone flute. The occasional dissonance from the triangle conflicts with the flute – a subliminal, harmonic message (in addition to the various string harmonics used throughout) that Sarah’s dangers have not passed. So often in modern film composing, a director will relegate the music as background noise or the composer themselves will dispense almost entirely of melody. In the latter, numerous modern film score composers have reasoned that melody cannot serve action films or thrillers, so they will compose a wall of amelodic texture instead. But, as Karlin so ably demonstrates in his score to The Stalking Moon, the juxtaposition of memorable melodies and effective action scoring is more interesting dramatically and musically.

Today, The Stalking Moon’s influence has been limited in part due to NGC’s dissolution and sale to Warner Bros. in 1974. For anyone willing to dive into this relatively undiscovered piece of American Western, few of the film’s immediate contemporaries adapted its thriller-influenced cues for their own purposes. Its depiction of American Indians is not as egregious as other Westerns and it appears to make some sort of attempt at commentary, but many of the damaging preconceptions of indigenous Americans make their way into the film’s screenplay. Yet considering the undemonstrative approach that Robert Mulligan takes for his film, The Stalking Moon is a serviceable Western torn between the passing of eras for the genre.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[12timetraveler]

David McTavish

So I did end up creating a second Red Dead Online character using a second email I had set up. 

Everyone, meet David. 

Below the cut is his story. But I will warn you, it makes Lilith look like she had an easy childhood. David has had a rough life. 

TW: Period Typical racism, murder of children.

I’m sure more will be added to his story as I get to know him more, but this is the start of his backstory. 

David McTavish has absolutely no idea about the first 4 years of his life. He doesn’t know where he was born, when he was born, doesn’t know who his parents were or what they looked like, or even what his real name was. 

The earliest memory David has is not a very good one. When he was about 4 years old, he and other children of his tribe were taken from their parents and sent to Indian Reform Schools. This was a government move to try to assimilate future generations of Indigenous peoples into white society. Well… that was the claim anyway. 

David has, fortunately, blocked most of his time at the reform school out of his mind. But judging by the scars he still carries, and the wounds he was found with, it wasn’t pretty. 

No, his first true memory is one of panic and fear, as one of the older boys carried him in his arms as a small group of children raced through the forest away from the horrible school. He remembers the bruises on the other children’s faces, and the pain of his own arm, broken when a nun beat him with a broom. 

He remembers the sounds of bloodhounds howling as they chased them down, of men yelling threats after them. He remembers the crying of some of the other children, and the voices of the older ones encouraging them to keep going. But eventually they had to admit that escape was futile. 

The children stopped in a clearing, out of breath, out of energy, unable to push on any further. The teenage boy who was carrying David tucked him into a hollowed out tree trunk, hidden in bushes, and told him not to make a sound, no matter what. David was the youngest child of the group of runaways. At least he thinks he was, he can't be sure.

The older teenagers instructed the others to run, to scatter and try to make it out of here while they tried to give them some time. The other children cried, and some protested, but the oldest boys were firm, telling them to run and hide. Some did, scattering into the trees, some refused, saying they’d stay and fight as well. 

It wasn’t long before riders on horseback came into the clearing with their bloodhounds. The boys threw rocks at them, pulled them from their horses, anything they could to try to get the upper hand. Maybe they knew it was futile, and were just trying to give the others time. Maybe they were truly trying to overpower them. Its hard to say. But none of the children who stayed in that meadow made it out of there alive. 

David, obedient and scared out of his mind, stayed in the tree trunk like he’d been instructed. None of the hounds ever sniffed him out, none of the men ever spotted him. He could hear the screams echo through the forest as some of the others were captured. Maybe they were left alive and dragged back to the school, maybe not. 

From where David was hidden, he could see all the dead, bloodied bodies of the other children scattered around, left to rot or be picked apart by scavengers. His gaze was locked on the oldest of the children, the one who’d been carrying him. His dead eyes were staring straight at where David was hiding. The two were caught in a staring contest, only David would never win. 

David stayed in that tree stump. Long after the men and their hounds had returned to the school. Long after the sun had risen, and then set again. Through that second night, and most of that second day. He’d been told to stay, and not make a sound, so that’s what he was going to do. As coyotes and crows began picking at the bodies of his friends. As the sounds of bears came closer and closer. As the stench became unbearable, he did not move from that spot. He likely would have stayed there forever, if Mr. McTavish hadn’t come along. 

The lone man walked into the meadow carefully, pistol held in one hand while he held his other arm over his nose in a feeble attempt to protect himself from the smell. He surveyed the scene before him in horror, the brutally murdured bodies of children scattered in the grass. 

“Don’t come this way, love,” He called over his shoulder. “You dinna want to see this.” But his wife was already approaching the meadow. She gasped when she saw the bodies, and crossed herself, good catholic lady that she was. 

“The poor wee things,” she whimpered, tears brimming her eyes. “Who woulda done such a thing?” 

“Soldiers, maybe,” Her husband mused. “I havena heard heartwarmin’ tales of soldiers and Indians.” He said dryly. Mrs. McTavish knelt by the nearest body. 

“I’m sorry, lassie,” She murmured, looking down at the ten-year-old girl who lay dead in the grass. 

“Come on, Maggie. We shouldna stay long,” Mr. McTavish murmured, glancing around the woods, still on the alert. Neither had noticed the little boy hiding in the tree stump. They likely never would have, if David hadn’t coughed. 

Throat dry, stomach empty, and the stench of death in the air had David feeling very nauseous. As much as he’d tried to stay quiet, he couldn’t help himself. Maggie turned her head instantly, searching for the source of the sound. David let out a little whimper of fear and pain. 

Maggie scrambled across the meadow, but slowed as she approached the log, from which a terrified whimpering breathing was coming. Gently she parted the bushes that hid David away. He scrambled back in terror, trying to hide deeper into the log, but he’d already been spotted. 

“Oh, laddie,” She said sadly, eyes wet with tears. 

“There’s one alive?” her husband slowly came up behind her, peering over her shoulder as she crouched down. 

“It’s alright, sweetheart. I’m not gonna hurt you.” She murmured. Her voice was sweet and soft, Scottish brogue a beautiful song. “Fergus, hand me some of the biscuits from your bag.” She said gently, keeping her voice even and calm as she sat down in the grass. Fergus slowly sat down alongside her, casually reaching into his bag and pulling out a box of assorted biscuits 

“You hungry, lad?” She asked gently. David just stared back at her with wide eyes. Slowly she opened the box and reached out to hand him a biscuit. The frightened boy eyed the food warily, clutching his injured arm. 

“It’s alright,” Fergus said, his voice a gentle rumble. He took a biscuit from the box and ate it, showing him it was alright. Slowly David scooted forward. Gingerly he let go of his broken arm and snatched the biscuit with his good arm, nibbling at it hungrily. 

“Here, lad, drink some water,” Fergus said, taking a swig from his canteen to show, once again, that it was safe. The little boy carefully took the canteen and downed the water greedily. 

“Come here, sweet boy,” Maggie cooed, reaching opening her arms. “Lets get you out of here, aye? See if we canna find your mummy and daddy.” The little boy hesitated before he gingerly stood and approached the woman, plopping himself tiredly into his lap. He nuzzled up against her, thankful for a kind embrace after everything he’d been through. 

“There we are. Clever lad.” Fergus cooed as Maggie enveloped the little boy in her arms. Fergus stood and gently helped Maggie to her feet as well. “Lets get you out of here.” 

“What’s your name, we lamb?” Maggie asked. She was greeted with silence. A glanced down at the skinny little boy in her arms showed him to be fast asleep, exhausted from his ordeal. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maggie and Fergus were immigrants, fresh off the boat from Scotland. Fergus’ family had once worked with cotton, weaving and spinning cotton until the American Civil war caused the crash of the industry. After that, his father had been resigned to work in factories and had died from an affliction of the lung (unclear if it was TB or caused by the horrible factory conditions). 

Not wanting to suffer the same fate, he and Maggie had decided to try their luck as farmers in America. He’d managed to purchase a small plot of land to start their farm in the wild west. Or what was left of it. 

Maggie and Fergus took the little boy they’d found with them to their new farm. He hadn’t said a word, and wouldn’t/couldn’t tell them his name, so they started calling him David. They had a doctor help set his broken arm, and had taken care of him as he healed from his injuries. He didn’t speak for over a year after they found him, traumatized by the event. By the time he spoke again, he’d forgotten what his real name even was. So they continued calling him David. 

Maggie and Fergus did what they could to find the little boy's family. They were able to determine that he likely came from the Reform School, based on his uniform, and where they’d found him. They asked him if he wanted to go back, and he shook his head fervently and began crying. It wasn’t hard to figure out who’d broken his arm, and who’d killed the other children. 

Maggie eventually calmed David down by assuring him she wouldn’t let him go back there if he didn’t want to. So the search began for the little boy’s parents. They couldn’t just go to the authorities and say they’d found the little boy in the forest. They’d send him right back to the reform school. So they attempted to discreetly search. 

The problem is, they didn’t even know what tribe David came from. David was too young to remember either. He didn’t quite understand the difference between tribes. It was just… home. They started taking trips to reservations nearby to see if he recognized anyone, or if they recognized him. But they never quite found anyone. 

When David was about 6, he, Maggie and Fergus took a trip back east, to visit the Wapiti tribe. Chief Rains Fall had been welcoming, and was more than willing to help however he could. 

“It’s hard to say what tribe he could be from,” Rains Fall had explained. “The tribes have been shuffled around like playing cards. Combined and torn apart, moved from their ancestral lands to someone else's lands. It’s hard to say if any of us really have our tribes anymore, or if we’re just a collection of spirits.” He said sadly, watching as David played with his two children, Eagle Flies just barely a toddler, and his older son about 8 years old. 

“Is there anything we can do to find his family?” Fergus asked. Rains Fall shook his head. 

“Not without risking him going back to the reform school.” He sighed. He watched little David for a moment. “But I could adopt him into my tribe. He could grow up alongside my boys. It wouldn’t be his true tribe, but he’d have a home with us.” 

Maggie and Fergus hesitated. They’d be determined to give David to his parents, and no one else. But it had been two years, and it seemed they’d never find his real family. Shouldn’t they at least give the boy a chance to grow up with some knowledge of his culture? But they couldn’t deny they loved the sweet little boy. It would be hard to let him go. 

Rains Fall seemed to sense their hesitation, and he could only smile kindly. He had always been good at reading people, and he knew this kind couple only wanted what was best for the boy. Good people in a world where the lines between good and bad blurred so often. 

“What if we let him decide?” Rains Fall suggested. Maggie and Fergus nodded. “David, come here,” He called. The little boy obediently set down the little toy he’d been playing with and hurried over to where the grownups were talking. Without hesitation, he climbed up onto Maggie’s lap. 

“Yes, Chief Rains Fall?” He asked, peering up at the kind man with curious eyes. 

“I was wondering if you would like to stay here with me,” The chief asked. “You could play with my sons, and the other children every day. You could learn how to use a bow and arrow, and grow up with the tribe.” He explained, keeping his words friendly for the little boy, “We could keep looking for your mother and father, but in the meantime, you could grow up with other children like you.” He explained. 

David grew serious, pondering the chief’s words for a minute. He tilted his head up to look at Maggie and Fergus, and his little brow furrowed. 

“What about mummy and daddy?” He asked. Maggie let out a little strangled cry. He’d never referred to her as mummy before, but it seemed the little boy had come to accept the McTavishes as his parents. 

“They wouldn’t be staying with us,” Rains Fall explained. There was a knowing twinkle in his eye. He could already see what choice the little boy was going to make. But he was going to let him do it anyway. 

“We could move closer, though.” Fergus suggested. “Get a farm near here. We wouldna be far away.” He said. He didn’t even have to consult with his wife to know that she’d be fine with the decision. He’d come to love the little boy as much as she had. They’d both be in David’s life however he let them. But this didn’t quite seem to satisfy him.

“But I wanna live with you,” He said with a sweet little frown on his face, looking between Maggie and Fergus. Maggie hugged the little boy tight. 

“Are you sure, my wee lamb?” She asked gently. “Wouldn’t you rather grow up with your people, like you should have?” she asked. David scrunched up his face. 

“I don’t ken who my real mummy is,” He said. Rains Fall had to suppress a smile at the strange little accent the boy was developing, already knowing English before he’d met the McTavishes, and having a more American accent, but with little scottish phrases slipping in. “But if we can’t find her, then I want you to be my mummy and daddy,” He said. 

“If that is what you prefer,” Rains Fall said with a smile. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So the McTavish family sold their farm and bought another one closer to the Wapiti reservation. A place called Carmody Dell. David grew up as their son, as they weren’t able to have any kids of their own. He’d spend a few weeks at the reservation here and there, learning about his culture as best as he could, and spend the rest of his time with his adopted parents. 

David obviously had some trouble fitting in. His skin was too dark for other children at Emerald Ranch or Valentine to accept him as one of them. But he never really fit in with the kids on the Wapiti reservation either, seeing as he wasn’t suffering from the mistreatment from the army that they were suffering. 

David found friends in the animals on his parents farm. Particularly the horses (as he didn't’ have to worry about his friends being turned into food) and he became known locally as a sort of Horse Whisperer. He could train even the most stubborn, unruly horses (though if you abused your horse and brought it to him to be trained. It would likely “run away” and never be seen again). 

Even if he didn’t fit in with most of society, he fit in with his parents, who never treated him any differently than they would have treated any children they could have had themselves. They just loved him. 

David was a very happy-go-lucky boy. He was a free-spirit, going with the flow. He wasn’t necessarily wild, but he wasn’t overly concerned with planning his future or worrying about things out of his control. He was just happy to exist.

When David was 17 his parents went on a trip to MacFarlane Ranch. They were vague as to why they were going, but told David to watch the ranch. On their way home, they were ambushed by The Skinner Brothers and a week later their bodies were found mangled and bloody. 

David was devastated. He never left the house. Hardly even left his bed. The only times he could force himself up was when he felt bad that the animals weren’t being taken care of. He’d drag himself out of bed long enough to drag hay bales out to the cows and horses and toss grains to the chickens, then stumble back to his bed. 

About a month after their death, a man shows up at David's door with a brand new horse. His parents had bought it for him from MacFarlane Ranch for his 18th birthday (which they would just celebrate the day they'd found him in the forest, since they didn't know his real birthdate. 

David tried for a year to run the ranch, but he was heartbroken and depressed. He couldn't force himself to do anything. It nearly killed him, but he knew what he had to do. He sold Carmody Dell and started wandering the country, trying to figure out who he was, what he was, what he wanted to do. He would use his archery skills, learned from his time with the Wapiti tribe, and would hunt and trade pelts. 

He lived this nomadic lifestyle for more than a decade, until he was 31. As he traveled, he did seem to settle into himself. He returned to the happy-go-lucky person that he’d been before his parents death. He was happy once more. Even when he was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit in Blackwater, and sent to Sisika, he wasn’t all that bothered. He knew he was innocent, and if the moron judges wanted to say it was him, well that was their problem. 

He still misses his adopted parents terribly, but he lives every day trying to make them proud. 

(side note, Fergus McTavish may or may not have made his own whiskey to sell tax free.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some years after his parents had died, but before his arrest in Blackwater, David came upon something that gave him some hint into his origins. 

As he was riding along from Strawberry, to Valentine, he decided to take the long route, wanting to see some new sights. What he saw was the ruins of Fort Riggs. 

The moment the fort came into view, David’s heart stopped. He began sweating, breathing heavily, he had to dismount because he thought he was going to faint. He remembered the fort. He remembered what it looked like before it was falling apart. 

Remembered being packed into the small fort with a couple hundred others of his tribe and others. Starving, freezing, many growing sick and dying. 

He remembered being pulled from his mothers arms and dragged away with the other children, to be sent to the reform school. The last time he ever saw his birth mother. 

David curled up in the grass near all the grave markers and sobbed. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened to his birth family. 

[sophygurl]

Dance Apocalyptic: Dystopian Fiction and Media In a Dystopian Age - WisCon 41 panel write-up

These tend to be long to click the clicky to read.

Disclaimers:

I hand write these notes and am prone to missing things, skipping things, writing things down wrong, misreading my own handwriting, and making other mistakes. So this is by no means a full transcript.

Corrections, additions, and clarifications are most welcome. I’ve done my best to get people’s pronouns and other identifiers correct, but please do let me know if I’ve messed any up. Corrections and such can be made publicly or privately on any of the sites I’m sharing these write-ups on(tumblr and dreamwidth for full writings, facebook and twitter for links), and I will correct ASAP.

My policy is to identify panelists by the names written in the programming book since that’s what they’ve chosen to be publicly known as. If you’re one of the panelists and would prefer something else - let me know and I’ll change it right away.

For audience comments, I will only say general “audience member” kind of identifier unless the individual requests to be named.

Any personal notes or comments I make will be added in like this [I disagree because blah] - showing this was not part of the panel vs. something like “and then I spoke up and said blah” to show I actually added to the panel at the time.

Dance Apocalyptic: Dystopian Fiction and Media In a Dystopian Age

Moderator: The Rotund. Panelists: Amal El-Mohtar, E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman, Lauren Lacey

#ReadingDystopiaInDystopia - for the livetweets and comments 

(I think I missed jotting down some introductory stuff as my notes just dig right in - sorry about that!)

Amal talked about how dystopia crosses over into issues of immigration, and Cabell posed the question - “dystopia for whom?”

Lauren discussed teaching Octavia Butler’s Parable series during the November election and then teaching Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale this spring. 

Rotund asked the panelists to define dystopia and mentioned the twitter quote about current generations not being promised a future of flying cars, but rather a cyberpunk dystopia. 

Amal talked about conflating dystopia with post-apocalyptic, but that the two function differently. They can intersect, however. Dystopia is allied with ideas of oppression - the severe marginalization of a large swath of the population.

Cabell added that this kind of dystopia is somebody else’s utopia. People with privilege don’t want to lose it - that’s dystopic for them.

Lauren discussed anti-utopias, such as 1984, where the audience identifies with the people being marginalized. Compared that with a critical dystopia where there is a horizon of hopefulness - such as Parable.

Rotund brought up the positioning of Firefly as allegorical confederacy and asked how do we deal with that?

Cabell answered - fanfiction.

Amal discussed how she had not connected Firefly to the confederacy due to the lack of themes of slavery, particularly child slavery. As a Canadian, that just wasn’t her first go-to when watching it. There were so many other examples of imperial or hegemonic control without the slavery aspect in her mind - specifically Lebanon, where her own parents had fled from civil war.

Amal talked about playing with this iconography of rebellion without the ugly context of the confederacy. There’s something interesting to play with about these heroes who were on the losing side, but she acknowledges that her perspective is different than those from the U.S.

Cabell stepped in and said “hashtag socialist killjoy” but, the themes of colonization in Firefly were there even without the confederacy angle. For example, the heavy Chinese influence of the culture but we don’t actually see any Chinese people. What are the implications of that?

Lauren said that one interesting part of dystopias is getting to identify with the rebels. This can lead to an unthinking identification with resistance - the idea that all power is bad, all government is bad. This constant identification with outsiders can be dangerous. She added that Octavia Butler does a good job with the complexities of these themes in her works.

Cabell brought up prepatory vs. cautionary dystopias. Putting the spotlight on collaborators. 

Amal discussed some of Canada’s issues with how it’s dealt with it’s Indigenous cultures with truth and reconciliation commissions. An issue in Firefly is that we have no idea of any Indigenous life on the planets that are taken over and terraformed. 

In some ways, Firefly reflects America’s colonialism with the frontier themes, but what does that look like without any Indigenous populations? Canada’s attitude for a long time was “well, our treatment of Indigenous people wasn’t as bad as what the US was doing...” and that was a fantasy to make themselves feel better about it.

Rotund pointed out that people like to feel like rebels.This was the foundation of Trump’s campaign. It’s a distressing use of the dystopian narrative.

Lauren brought up Handmaid’s Tale and how despite the complexity of it’s historical notes, there were still problems in the ways many marginalizations were ignored.

Amal talked about the appropriation of resistance terms and used MRA’s use of feminist language as an example. Just as a group is gaining a voice against the powers over them, their language is taken from them and used against them. Then the people in power get to have this fantasy of being the oppressed ones.

She brought up Mad Max as this lone man trying to survive the apocalypse and how unrealistic this trope is - we need community to survive. 

(I have in my notes in the sidebar for the next page or so that I missed a lot that was said so bear with me if some of this seems extra jumpy from topic to topic)

Cabell discussed the Wisconsin cocaine mom laws that sprang up during the 90′s paranoia about crack babies (which it turns out is not even a thing, the affects were due to poverty not drugs). This was highly racialized. In 2014, California was found to be forcibly sterilizing female inmates - mostly women of color. 

The point of this discussion is that we’re already living in the reproductive dystopia. People are in situations where they’re needing to ask themselves how to stay safe in a system that is unsafe for them.

Amal brought up a conversation she’d had that day with a taxi driver when he found out she was Canadian and he immediately started talking about how badly we need socialized medicine here in the U.S. To Amal - the idea that everyone deserves health care as being radical is dystopic! She gets worked up and apologizes and Rotund says - don’t apologize for being mad at dystopias.

Lauren talked about Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as an example where it’s not just about the privileged suddenly being in a dystopia. There’s a theme of complacency, of not paying attention to what’s happening to others. It’s a cautionary dystopia. 

Cabell brought up the SNL video of white people just in a constant state of screaming until finally there’s 2 black people and one asks what’s happening and the other answers - oh they’ve been this way since the election. 

Amal replied that she noticed a lot of people feeling sort of apocalyptic after the election, but many people of color were more like “oh, it’s Tuesday. Maybe a little more Tuesday than usual but...”

She also talked about how she saw a lot of people from the U.S. saying online that they needed to leave the country, while other people were angry at this notion saying - how dare you leave when we have work to do? Amal, coming from the perspective of her own parents having fled their country, acknowledges that the people in that first group are thinking more about survival. 

Amal found herself agreeing to let friends from the US come and stay with her as needed, while also members of her family were working on taking Syrian refugees in. “You think you’re safe until you’re not” - in Handmaid’s Tale, the main character waited too long to leave. 

[My own thoughts on the anger about people fleeing is that this is primarily directed at people who do have quite a bit of privilege choosing to leave instead of staying to fight for the people who really can’t make that choice. Example: the whole Amanda Palmer thing ugh]

An audience member asked about the common video game trope of going alone into the woods to survive after a dystopic or apocalyptic event. None of the panelists like that type of game. 

Amal really wants a game like that, but about community building. Cabell would pay lots of money for an MMO in that style.

An audience member recommends the game This War of Mine as doing community building well, and asks the question of if the panelists have noticed the need to upgrade security recently.

Amal discussed how she was detained on her way to the states this time and how horrifying of an experience it was. No one did anything particularly bad to her, but it was still awful and invasive. It did make her think both about the idea of state security and “what am putting out online?” 

She talked about how she has always self-censored, and the investment her family has put into respectability politics as a means of survival. She’s now opening up more, and finds that she’s angry all the time “that’s my secret - I’m always angry”. And yet she still tempers her rage and fury because she doesn’t want to lose the support of white liberals. 

Cabell replied to Amal’s experience about being detained and said - sure they all felt bad but they did it anyway. The idea of collaboration and following orders. When laws are unjust, the moral thing can be to break the law. 

She added that the best person to hide undocumented immigrants is someone who has never publicly said that we should be hiding undocumented immigrants, which makes it tricky. The need for networks and cells for this kind of thing.

Amal addressed that the reason the people involved with her detainment were so embarrassed had a lot to do with how she passes, has lighter skin, etc. 

(I have a whole chunk of something I wrote down that Lauren said that I added a bunch of question marks to, so not sure I got it down correctly but it was about how increased need for security has affected academia and the sense of witch hunt-ness involved in people speaking their minds freely.)

An audience member asked about examples in dystopian fiction of that use of appropriated language of the oppression.

Lauren brought up that in Parable, published in 93, the president really used the slogan “make America great again”. Also the Aunts in Handmaid’s Tale use appropriated language.

Cabell talked about another real life example, which was the laws created to protect fetuses and how proponents of it said it would never be used against pregnant women, but it ended up doing just that - specifically against women of color.

Amal talked about the idea of needing to protect men from women’s temptation and said that her story Seasons of Glass and Iron has an example of this. She also talked about how in The Hunger Games, punishment becomes entertainment.

An audience member asked about the appropriation of dystopian language and does this happen because the stories are too vague? How do we protect against this?

Amal answered that you can’t stop people in power from appropriating narratives. But you can become aware of it and try to check it when it happens. (and then a whole thing I sadly missed about exogenous settlers/immigrants)

The panelists wrapped up with some recommendations. 

Lauren: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett, and Kate Wilhem’s early stuff.

Cabell: Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott, and a title I did not catch ... something Chronicles by Barbara something (real helpful I know, sorry)  [Edited to add from Cabell: "Darwath Chronicles by Barbara Hambly! Very fantasy alternate universe; not a "realistic" dystopia/post-apocalypse."]

Amal: the song Miami 2017 by Billy Joel and the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

[eirinizp-blog]

The Best Movies of 2019 (So Far)

The cinematic dry season (post–awards season, but before the good spring months have arrived) has officially ended, and the summer blockbusters are upon us. Will we remember any of them by the end of the year? Hard to say, but we can point to a few gems among the more conventional genre releases of 2019 so far: a politicized zombie slasher, a documentary about two nights at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, a Mary Kay Place vehicle, two Swintons for the price of one. Here are the best movies of the year that Vulture has reviewed, according to critics David Edelstein and Emily Yoshida, and frequent contributor Bilge Ebiri.

Arctic

Enjoyable and excruciating. In Joe Penna’s survival drama, the riveting Mads Mikkelsen plays a man whose plane has gone down in the frozen wilderness. That’s all we know about him and all we really need to — it’s what he does and keeps doing that defines him. Thrown together with a grievously wounded, non–compos mentis woman, he tugs her well-swaddled form on a sled into the unknown, trudging and grunting and falling and trudging and heeeaving and trudging and heeeaving — and just when we think it can’t get more horrible, we realize that up until then he’d had it easy. The movie really takes your mind off your own troubles. —D.E.

Birds of Passage Set in the north of Colombia among the indigenous Wayuu, Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s knockout film is part ethnographic documentary, part The Godfather. Over 20 years (from 1960 to 1980), people whose ways first seem strange metamorphose into a familiar breed of narcos, moving tons of marijuana and become avid materialists. As in Guerra’s last film, Embrace of the Serpent, the disjunction between ancient ways and modern, ephemeral fashions and technology, is not just jarring but toxic, a shock to the system that will almost certainly kill the host. The drive toward revenge kills the characters long before anyone dies — it kills their souls. —D.E.

Escape Room Escape Room didn’t need to be good, and its release during the very first week of the year seemed destined to make it a 2019 B-movie footnote. But the ensemble thriller from Insidious and Paranormal Activity vet Adam Robitel is a whole lot of fun, throwing a group of strangers together into a hyperbolically lethal version of the titular team-building game. It’s much more of a puzzler than it is a horror film, and Robitel doesn’t need gore or jump scares to keep the whole thing tightly wound. The grand finale is so audacious that you’ll be ready to buy a ticket for the sequel before the lights come up. —E.Y.

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Fighting With My Family The unlikely collaboration between writer-director Stephen Merchant and executive producer the Rock is an unexpected joy — a true story that skips along its inspirational sports-movie template while finding real pathos and tough truths under all that sparkly spandex. As WWE champion Paige, Florence Pugh is equal parts ferocious and tender, a misfit struggling to find the right way to share her talents with the world. It’s a WWE production, but if it’s propaganda for the sport, it’s the kind you’ll gladly let win you over to the joyful absurdities of the sport. —E.Y.

Transit Director Christian Petzold (Barbara, Phoenix) changes the time of Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel, in which refugees from the Nazis stuck in Lyons wait for ships to North America: It’s still Lyons, but the period trappings are gone and they’re now fleeing all-purpose “fascists.” At the heart of the story is a slow-motion mistaken-identity farce in which a concentration-camp escapee, Georg (the charismatic Franz Rogowski, who bears a resemblance to Joaquin Phoenix), assumes the identity of a famous writer whom only Georg knows committed suicide — and then falls madly for the writer’s discombobulated wife (Paula Beer). The physical, temporal, and emotional geography is very confusing, but the film is still potent. Petzold is part acrid realist, part romantic: His protagonists lose everything but their passion, emotion being the last refuge. 

Climax It’s Step Up crossed with Battle Royale, a house-music Suspiria, and exactly as fun and harrowing as that description would suggest. French adulte terrible Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void, Love) brings together a vibrant ensemble of dancers led by dynamo Sofia Boutella for a party gone horribly awry thanks to some no-good sangria. In what feels like more or less real time, we watch a cohesive, unified group of very-much-alive young people devolve into screaming, hallucinatory chaos, all set to an incredible disco-techno soundtrack. Noé’s desire to shock is still ever-present, and all trigger warnings still apply. But the dizzying, acrobatic camerawork and the impressive physical and emotional work of Boutella and the rest of the cast make this his most crowd-pleasing — dare I say, even sentimental? — work yet.

Diane A stunning platform for Mary Kay Place as a compulsive do-gooder out to expiate her sins as everyone around her is either dying (a first cousin with end-stage cervical cancer) or on the brink (her addict son and a slew of elderly friends and relatives). Kent Jones’s drama—mostly naturalistic, but with the odd expressionist flourish — is generally regarded as one of the most depressing ever made, but once you accept its un-transcendent, death-centric baseline the movie is strangely exhilarating. In between scenes are shots through a windshield of rural landscapes passing in every season, with soft, haunting music by Jeremiah Bornfield, the film’s protagonist (like all of us) going from someplace to someplace on the road to who-knows-where. In its mundane way, Diane shows you glimmers of the sublime. —D.E.

The Brink Alison Klayman’s On the Road With Steve Bannon doc is essential, sad to say, given that Bannon is not a fringe hate-monger but a man with the ears of protofascist, xenophobic movement leaders in the U.S., France, Belgium, Hungary, Germany, and the U.K., as well as sundry billionaires. Why would Bannon let Klayman be a fly on his wall — or in his ointment? He has faith in his message. He already has “a solid enough minority that’s immoveable.” He just needs to sway an increasingly susceptible 15 percent of the rest, and he’s excellent at making people feel as if they’re being marginalized by a dark (in all senses) cabal — while he denies and denies and denies that he’s saying what he in fact is. Klayman doesn’t have to editorialize to make the point that Bannon is one of the most dangerous people alive.

Ash Is Purest White Jia Zhangke’s epic revisits many of the themes he’s explored throughout his past few films (Mountains May Depart, A Touch of Sin) particularly the near-absurdities of a rapidly changing modern China, and its as profoundly wrought as ever. With Ash, however, there’s a genre twist; a sort of pulp gangster romance shot through Jia’s patient, wide lens. A deceptively steely Zhao Tao stars as a woman separated from the man who, for better or worse, is the love of her life, and sets out to find her way back to him over two and half decades. It’s as much a story of a country rebuilding itself as it is of one woman doing the same, and by its gutting resolution you’ll feel as if you’ve walked those miles and years in Zhao’s shoes. 

Us A politicized zombie-slasher film in which subterranean doppelgängers — separate but mystically “tethered” to their aboveground analogs — swarm our world with scissors and the message, “We exist.” Once you get over the disappointment that Jordan Peele’s second feature isn’t as trim or impish in its satire as his marvelous debut, Get Out, you can settle back and salute what it is: the most inspiring kind of miss. It’s what you want an artist of Peele’s sensibility and stature to attempt — to broaden his canvas, deepen his psychological insight, and add new cinematic tools to his kit. Fans will rewatch the film to savor the fillips, the purposeful echoes, and the “Easter eggs,” as well as a dual performance by Lupita Nyong’o that’s otherworldly in its brilliance. As the double, “Red,” her voice is the whistle of someone whose throat has been cut, with a gap between the start of a word in the diaphragm and its finish in the head. It’s like a rush of acrid air from a tomb.

Amazing Grace Over two nights in 1972, Aretha Franklin, then at the height of her fame, came to Los Angeles’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church to record a selection of gospel classics. The resulting album, Amazing Grace, was one of the most acclaimed of her career. Director Sydney Pollack documented both nights with a small array of 16 mm cameras, but the footage languished for decades until producer Alan Elliott bought it and put together this concert documentary, which was then further delayed by Franklin’s own, somewhat surprising refusal to let it be shown. But now it’s here, and it is transcendent. Resplendent in her caftans but otherwise humble, Franklin gives off no diva or rock-star airs. But as soon as she starts singing, she’s in — eyes closed, head up, half-grins turning into flights of ecstatic joy. So is her audience, shouting their support, cheering her along, dancing in the aisles. And so are we. The movie itself feels like a church service, and it’s enough to make you get religion. —Bilge Ebiri

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote Terry Gilliam’s notorious film maudit, three decades in the unmaking and already the subject of a 17-year-old documentary about the collapse of its production, is, uh, here. And it’s surprisingly light on its feet. The story follows a slick commercial director (played by Adam Driver, an inspired choice) who returns to the Spanish village where he made his thesis film ten years ago, an adaptation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and discovers that the lives there were ruined by his production. Reuniting with the aging cobbler who played his Quixote (Jonathan Pryce), he discovers that the man still imagines himself to be the 17th-century knight-errant. Their ensuing journey mixes medieval gallantry, contemporary topicality, and typically Gilliamesque chaos — a swirling vortex of disguises, dream visions, broad humor, and a delightfully disorienting look at both the creative and destructive power of imagination. —B.E.

Trial by Fire Murderously hard to sit through, which is not something you’ll see on top of an ad. Maybe that’s why the film had been a commercial bust. But this portrait of Cameron Todd Willingham (Jack O’Connell), a Texas ne’er-do-well executed for burning his three little girls to death, is painstakingly well-made and important. The director, Ed Zwick, isn’t cynical about the motives of the investigators who allegedly screwed up so badly in interpreting the evidence. The lie of most police dramas isn’t that they’re on the side of the angels — it’s that they’re always competent at what they do and that there are fail-safe mechanisms to keep innocent people from the death chamber. Laura Dern plays the divorced mother who volunteers to be a pen pal to someone on death row and gets sucked in when she reads the trial transcript. Dern is a great detective actress — she externalizes thought. 

Souvenir A coolly intelligent autobiographical film by the British writer-director Joanna Hogg, who doesn’t often give you your narrative bearings — and spoils you for over-shapers, the spoon-feeders. Her protagonist (Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda, who plays her mother onscreen) is a well-off, socially conscious 24-year-old film student who wants to make a movie about a boy growing up by the grotty docks near Newcastle but is thrown off course by her foppish, madly pretentious, and (as it turns out) heroin-addicted boyfriend (Tom Burke). At times the film seems too distanced, but it’s never obvious or banal. Hogg convinces you that incoherence is the only honest way to tell a story with any emotional complexity. 

[beforeward]

RaaaaaaaaNT

I think that I may be driving my friends up the wall a tad right now, with all of these thoughts ruminating in my head, and all the time they want to echo and transpire. Idle time and good conversations set loose a slew of ideas and hypothesis, philosophical yammering, and I think it might be best to just slam them against a keyboard before I get sick of my own voice and half-formed rhetorical questions. We’ve spent some good days here, out of service, doing most thinks in the buff including practising ninja stars, cooking, and stretching, and all the while, having conversations that at once fill me up, and offer no out. I’m going try for an ‘out’ here.

We open the leather flap covering the mind and pull out string after string of topics, each bound together with transectionality, paradox, and common denominators. Topics surrounding humanism and feminism (one in the same, really);  magik; psychology and sociology (though never in such textbook terminology); matters concerning different indigenous groups and the matrix of  topics around these issues; sex; astrology; childhood and the strangeness of experiences; politics; poetry; and pretty much anything else we can think of. We usually do this in various stages of undress, sitting around the wood stove, which seems a perfect setting in which to try to untangle it all.

We talk of ambition and its dual nature. We present the nature of the negative toll of which we see around us; the defeating feeling of “not-enoughness” is prevalent in our generation and society (speaking from a white, middle-class perspective). Certainly there are links here to dominant Western society; definitions and parameters of success, value, and progress; capitalism; and many forms of oppression. 

We toss the strand around, trying to differentiate between ambition in a competitive or self-gratifying sense, and personal goals, which we all agree are healthy, as long as one isn’t made to feel like shit for not accomplishing them. The last part is key. What is the harm in having dreams, as long as we can take failure with a grain of salt? But generally, in this society hell-bent on perfection, we don’t. We don’t know how to make mistakes. When dreams become standardized, and thus, expectations imposed on us as children, we’re fucked right from the start. 

Now, there is a real problem with living simply and retreating from it all, living self-sufficiently and in a way that is symbiotic and respectful of the land. The privilege of turning our backs on the ugliness comes at a price paid by many.

In the short story, “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas,” the faceless characters who walk away from the town Omelas, which is a regular paradise, do so because they see the circumstance that breeds such unabated joy, and cannot bear to live there anymore. They cannot enjoy the fruits of sacrifice after seeing the squalor and inhumane conditions of a child locked in an unfinished basement, with no relation to speak of, and to whom no one has even even spoken.

Not to victimize oppressed and marginalized folks here by implying that they are one-dimensional and devoid of joy, but there is a definite allusion of a sacrifice made by society of the few for the many. The spirits of those who walk away from a system that institutionalizes such brutality are undoubtedly represented by those who choose to make good in this world, or at least, reduce the hurt. But again, is it enough to walk away in silent protest? Conditions borne of this system, one that rides the steady crescendo of disparity, makes me think that it isn't. For me, at least.

A good friend noted how he would love to buy some land somewhere (but from who?) and hide away from the world to which he belongs, yet loathes; and yet, the cities are the biggest messes, ones that we and those before us have made, and it is up to us to clean it up, and so he stayed. 

This isn’t the path for everyone. To be certain it is imperative to coming generations and times that people are practising the life that we’re fighting for, to learn and unlearn as much as they can about that world. We need people on front lines, -figurative and literal- to be certain, but equally as important are people learning to grow food, survive in the bush, rework the system rom the inside out, create new ritual and revive old, tell stories, create technology to bring us out of this dystopian gutter. 

Waxing a little extreme here, but we get riled up. 

I think that what I am desperately grappling at, this rambling digression, was put so simply and beautifully by a warrior named Sakej Ward.  

He drew a spectrum on the beige paper that showed legal protest, petitioning, etc. on one side, and warriors on the other. The spectrum depicted a movement. He said that it isn’t right for one part of the movement to look down on another for being too complacent or, conversely, too extreme or radical. Down the road, there may be points where parts separate based on different values. such as the use of violence as a tool, but until and especially then, we are all for the same thing and in the same lane (or trying to be).  

We need fast-paced change and the slow wearing down of a current. We need good listeners and humour, and such things require time off.

I think the most counterintuitive aspects of movements, or ‘activism’, are finger pointing, comparison, and ego. It seems sometimes that certain people who belong to the demographic of the ‘oppressors’ are often more likely to ‘call out’ rather than ‘call in’ , keep points, or create new points of prejudice born from the ricochet of old ones. 

This really is a rant. I don’t even know if I want to read or post this, since ideas stand skeletal and unformed. 

(decided to, after all, now that I found it!

[nyklifsondiviiportfolio-blog]

Deliberate Race Dehumanization in America

Nyk Lifson

Rachel Rubinstein

Myths of America

March 5, 2015

Currently a major rift in lower class America is racism, which keeps the lower class from having workforce unity and political unity within a singular party, and this did not come about by accident (PBS). For example, Owsley County, Kentucky “has the the lowest median household income of any U.S. county outside Puerto Rico,” thus it relies heavily on SNAP food stamps (Barrouquere). Yet this more than 99% white community votes for Republican party representation that in turn favors policies for cutting income-based benefits. Ironic voting trends similar to this are common across Kentucky, the South, and other areas of the of the United States (Barrouquere). The question then is, why would citizens living in third-world conditions affiliate with a political party that does not vote in their best interest? Further, why is racism towards people of color remain an issue today? Marginalization based on race was implemented purposefully by slaveholders, including politicians, who needed a cheap labor force who worked for life, originating with the distinction made between indentured servitude and slavery. The economic and cultural repercussions continue today. Sophisticated varieties of instilled racism are embraced by an economically elite minority, to keep the working class splintered and unwilling to band together to gain equity.

Originally in the 17th century, Africans that labored under a master were considered servants (Ballagh). While their skin color was recognized, it was not the quintessential defining characteristic for a life in bondage. Examples of this status can be found in many texts including Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon [sic] where Hammon both is referred to and refers to himself as a ‘Servant to General Winslow’(Hammon) and this is still apart of the period up until the early 1700s, when the definition of servitude was still not a clear line. With indentured servitude still common in communities of the colonies, race was a known difference that black people of the time were proud of as opposed to a different skin tone being a an instant signifier for inferiority, that was mainly based on religious beliefs. Native Americans and people of color were considered culturally inferior as a group due to not being Christian, however, their status changed to one of more equally if religious allegiances changed. But where christianity could be changed the color of someone’s skin could not, and that became a segregating distinction made by Virginia landowners (Breen).

Captured Africans first landed in Jamestown in 1619, influenced by the Spanish and Portuguese use of slave labor. By 1629,  the first slave law had been created to distinguish white female servants from black female laborers (Ballagh). “IT is thought fitt that all those that worke in the ground of what qualitie or condition soever, shall pay tithes to the ministers” [sic] (Hening 144). A tithe, meaning a property tax to be paid to the government for the labor of a woman of African descent. This was the beginning of African American women being treated as property. And it continued with the treatment of women of color as chattel, specifically  by the law encouraging breeding slaves as equivalent to livestock “Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother.”(Hening 177). Different distinctions were created bit by bit to dehumanize the person of color in the white mindset. For example, losing the right to own and bear firearms, except in attacks from indigenous people.

From the  mid to late 18th century referring to someone as “negroe” was used as an insult and seen as degrading. A full change of mindset developed due to economic dependence on slave trade and labor in the South. Instances can be found in literature from this time period such as in the play The Contrast where the character Jonathan is referred to as a “servant” and replies with, “Servant! Sir, do you take me for a neger — I am Colonel Manly’s waiter”(Tyler 1419). Being thought of as a person of color was equated as a slur. Early laws legalizing the definition of race and ‘mulattos’ in 1785 spurred the dehumanization process further, into all aspects of day to day life. Legislation attacked intermarriage, it linked slavery to heredity, curtailed voting rights, and limited access to education (Henning).  

The instillation of racism began with a need for cheap tobacco and hemp labor in the colonies (PBS). Slavery was a tool used to to stamp out class based rebellions, such as Nathaniel Bacon’s revolt (Breen). Racism snowballed when allowed to germinate south of the Mason and Dixon, justified in interpretation of Christian scripture. In an excerpt from Reverend Armstrong’s The Christian Doctrine on Slavery he refers to a generalized belief that African’s were the descendants of Ham, “the first slave sentence was pronounced by Noah”(Armstrong 138). Armstrong is referring to Genesis 9 where Noah curses his son, Ham, to be a “servant of servants.” Common belief during the mid-19th century based on very loose evidence tracing the lineage of African’s as the descendants of Ham and Canaan. This was preached by Armstrong and many others at the time leading up to the Civil War (Browne).

The upper class in America over the years have manipulated the poor to vote for leaders whose interests don’t actually aline with them because they would rather be republican than vote democratic. There is a rift in lower class america brought about by racism, it sustains itself through economic elitism. The roots of structurally implanted teachings of inferiority into the minds of white Americans created to separate the lower class’s repercussions can still be seen today. Uncovering the truth about our past is a way to build a better future for everyone.

Works Cited

Armstrong ,George D. “The Christian Doctrine on Slavery.” New York: Charles Scribner, 1857, p.111-113 Online Archive, Library of Congress.

Barrouquere, Lovan. "Food Stamp Cut Hits Ky. County Harder Than Most." The New York Times 12 Jan. 2014. The Associated Press. Web. 4 Mar. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/01/12/us/ap-us-food-stamps-poorest-county-.html>.

Ballagh, James Curtis. White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia: A Study of the System of

Indentured Labor in the American Colonies. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1973.

Breen, T. H., Stephen Innes. Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640 - 1676. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Browne, Ray B., and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. Voices of Civil War America: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011. 137-138. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

Hening, William Waller. The United States. The General Assembly of Virginia. THE Statutes at Large; Being A Collection Of All The Laws Of Virginia From The First Session Of The Legislature In The Year 1619. Vol. 1. N.p.: R. & W. & G. BARTOW, 1619. Hening's Statutes at Large. 19 July 2009. Web. 04 Mar. 2015.

PBS Online, . " From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery." PBS Africans in America. WGBH, n.d. Web. 6 Mar 2015. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1narr3.html>.

Royall, Tyler. "The Contrast." New York, Ny: 1790. Trans. Array The Heath Anthology of Liter. 7th. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2014. 1419. Print.