#indigenous thought

[solace-philosophy]

Our present view of government, our avoidance of allegiance to high spiritual powers, and our exclusively scientific understanding of our world will continue to guide our thoughts and activities in the future and bring us to a complete collapse

unless we achieve more mature understandings of our planet, its history, and the rest of the universe. Much of Western science must go, all of Western religion should go, and if we are in any way successful in ridding ourselves of these burdens, we will find that we can fundamentally change government so that it will function more sensibly and enable us to solve our problems.

— Red Earth White Lies, Vine Deloria, Jr.

[twotwotwospirit]

reminder that indigenous queer folks do not need to fit your colonial definitions or conceptions of queerness in order to be valid, worthy, and spectacular.

if your concept of what a lesbian looks like requires that all lesbians have shaved or short hair, then you’re excluding ntv lesbians who honour our ancestors by growing our hair long.

i’m no less of a butch for having hair that goes down to my tailbone. i’m no less of a butch for wearing my hair in a braid. i’m also still butch when i wear beaded earrings, a ribbon skirt, and moccasins.

if your idea of queerness is tied to whiteness, that’s just a shame. indigeneity and queerness go together like inhaling and exhaling. one cannot exist without the other.

[transjewdyke]

would you say the same to a white person living on the american continents? when a part of a community commits genocide, when a part of a community does harm, the whole is culpable—at least, that is what my o:wa taught me. a lot of western jews are wildly unaware of indigenous practice, which seems out of place when coupled with the claim of global community.

i get that a lot of you don’t/won’t agree, but this is my stance as a a:shiwi native and a jew, and i am free to live in that truth, just as you are free to neglect it

you’d punch a nazi but would you listen to a jew talk about antisemitism for even ten minutes

[woodsfae]

For usamericans who may not know how to support decolonization and indigenous people in their every-day lives, may I suggest checking this list of native-owned businesses, curated and maintained by indigenous folks. There's food, candles, cbd pre-rolls, clothes, jewelry, hats, baby things, handicrafts, art, and hundreds of other useful and wonderful things. I check this list before I buy non-native owned as often as I can.

Also check out the native-owned (pulitzer-prize winner Louise Erdrich started it!) bookstore and press Milkweed Editions (dot org) for an amazing selection of books by indigenous authors. I recommend Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (a collection of essays that will change your thinking if your mind is open at all) that's great for sitting down to read for bite-sized chunks. For book recommendations, check out this infographic!

Do you own property and want to support landback but still need a place to live? Odds are good that there's established precedence in your area to transfer its jurisduction to a local tribe and pay your land taxes and etc to them instead of the settler government!

Here is a list of charities and fundraisers for indigenous support.

Other ways to educate yourself and learn what indigenous people are working on nationally and locally is to follow indigenous people online! Many Native peoples on various social medias tag with #indigenous, #native, and by looking at those you will find many other tags and people to follow.

If you have extra cash, consider paying indigenous people's bail, donating to some of the causes linked above, or look for local initiatives to support in your own community!

[mademaciyapi]

Happy Native American Heritage Month

admittedly, when 'Indigenous People's Day' or 'Native American Heritage Month' come around, i can't help but feel a little angry. millions of my people suffered and died at the hands of this country - and they think one month of remembrance is enough to make up for it?

but as i've gotten older, i've started to feel more appreciative of the fact that i am even here to celebrate these holidays at all. because the truth is, i'm the survivor of a genocide. i think that i should try to celebrate the fact that i am alive today, rather than only being angry about moments in history that i can't change. not everyone is as lucky as me - especially right now, on the other side of the world where such horrendous things are happening all over again to someone else..

but i can't exactly stop the anger completely (especially with current events in mind) so maybe meeting halfway would be acceptable.

I lived, bitch!! they tried to kill us, but i'm still here! and that's worth celebrating.

[gingerswagfreckles]

Not really loving how my post about the left's love affair with eugenics and blood and soil ideology framed as "decolonization" got coopted into another "wait it's all Christianity??" "It always has been" post." Y'all are sticking your heads in the sand if you think this is a problem with "cultural Christianity." This is the exact same pattern we saw play out in the 1979 Iranian revolution and much of this ideology was coopted from the Nazis by the Soviets and reframed as progressive. This is not an issue with Western "cultural Christianity" and it would be great if Jumblr could stop engaging in the same "there's actually one secret root cause of every problem in the world and if we get rid of it we will have utopia" thing that antisemites have been using against Jews for 2000 years.

[gayhenrycreel]

gotta say, theres something really weird about how online queer spaces pretend that intersex people dont exist. even american queer rights orgs seem to ignore us. and then i see kiwi sites on queer communities and theres comparatively a lot of intersex stuff. i go to a local nurses office and intersex people are included in a pamphlet on representation in books. every queer rights org has a link to to sites for intersex rights. am i crazy or is america falling behind? its quite... concerning

[skansennow-arghans]

dear fellow dragonkins: "queztel" is not a dragon species. He is a Mexica deity. Calling yourself a queztel is racist. Because he is not a dragon, but a very important deity from a people that have been genocided and colonised for hundreds of years. If you see someone calling themselves that, call it out.

also, the Amphithere is a historical winged heraldric dragon/serpent! It's much more realistic than calling yourself a mesoamerican god!

[ouroborosorder]

I think Arknights' Sami may be, outright, one of the coolest ideas I've ever seen in a piece of fiction. Most things would have said "The Collapsals are why Sami is like this!" But no, Arknights knows better. Sami is already a place where snow falls upwards, where you can see the ghosts of people who are not dead, where 4 story tall shadows pass by and block out the stars at night. Sami is strange, illogical, and hostile, but it is not Wrong. It's just a place where the natural order is different from anything else in the world, but you can come to comprehend it, come to an accord with Sami and the way it exists. But the Collapsals are Wrong. Their blood is poison, their bodies are corpses, their knowledge is a curse. You can't comprehend it. You can't come to an accord with it. You can only die. It is one form of strangeness, the comforting unsettling feeling of a different natural order, being intruded by one that is just outright Wrong, uncanny, broken, and evil.

[c-h4nn]

olrox nosferatu redraw

[solace-philosophy]

Religion, in any usual meaning of the term, ceased to exist in America long ago. Indeed, any higher deity exists for Americans only insofar as he or she can guarantee great sex, lots of money, social prestige (read celebrity), a winning football team, and someone to hate.

— Red Earth White Lies, Vine Deloria, Jr.

[twotwotwospirit]

creator free me from skinny masc propaganda and let me embrace beefy hunky butch love

[underwaterspiderbird]

order 66 was NOT a genocide. you can only genocide people & cultures, you can’t genocide a systemically deified super-religion that wants everyone in existence to either agree with them & exist their way or burn in hell for eternity. any decent ppl who went down with the purge forfeit their lives down the drain along with their family, home & very sense of self. they. had. it. fucking. coming.

from an indigenous person, fuck y’all for even comparing order 66 to genocide & talking all over survivors of real genocides to save face for your evangelical faith & the people you think are good guys. you are not about to disrespect the continent-sized OCEANS of blood that make up our ancestors & loved ones who were lost to real genocide. fuck off.

[clonerightsagenda]

I am not going to say TLT is about fossil fuels because it's about a lot of things and it's reductive to boil it down to anything, but a society fueled by necromancy/death magic/corpses is reminiscent of our society fueled by and built with petrochemicals (oil, natural gas, plastic), and given that within the necromancy framework the role of the cavalier is to be metaphorically, literally, and/or spiritually consumed, it's interesting that the first cavalier was the planet Earth. This new world is still based on devouring the planet.

Does this make Paul a metaphor for nuclear fusion I'm joking but I suppose the question Alecto must resolve is whether we can escape needing to consume to survive.* And maybe we can't - stop trying to make your carnivorous pets vegan - but can we find a method of consumption that's less destructive?

(Some people may see Paul as that answer but I am a Hater who isn't into ego death.)

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[batshikns]

some hetalia sketches i did during school today <3333