#on what constitutes an indigenous perspective

[feralkwe]

i can think of one, maybe two, indigenous bloggers whose posts on native topics get any kind of notes or traction. i am far far more likely to see the topics about natives posted by non-natives get circulated, which is not at all frustrating

i genuinely wish there was more focus on amplifying indigenous voices (not just my own) because talking around us or about us but never to us sure does make a statement about how you think about us.

[militantinremission]

What does being 'Black' really mean?

I have thought about this for a long time. Over the years, I spoke w/ Moors, Israelites, Indigenous, & Pan Afrikans about 'Blackness' & what it means to them. I also looked at Separate but Equal (Jim Crow) Laws, The Black Codes, The Fugitive Slave Act, Dred Scott, & related documents dating back to the Colonial Era. Writing on this Subject was always in the back of My Mind, but now I feel compelled to give an opinion. Dane Calloway & Yvette Carnell don't agree on much, but they're both in agreement about 'Blackness in America'; their perspectives intrigued Me. Cam'ron's Declaration of Blackness, followed by responses from Marc Lamont Hill & Umar Johnson inspired Me to chime in on the Subject.

Recently, Dane Calloway & Yvette Carnell both went into detail about 'Blackness' on their individual Channels. Both have expressed their view in the past, but the timing of their latest opinions caught My attention. They essentially agree that this 'designation' refers to a Bottom Caste status that sets Us up for Social Inequality as a Collective. They also agree that identifying as 'Black American' only clouds Our identity as a Lineage Group. The denial of (promised) resources to 'Black' Farmers, & the repeal of Affirmative Action on College Campuses were both done in the name of 'Race Neutrality'. Apparently, Whitefolk & Brownfolk thought that these (long overdue) measures offered too much(?)

I was still digesting Dane & Yvette's perspective, when Cam'ron declared that he prefers being called 'Black' over Afrikan American, citing a schism between Black Americans & Continental Afrikans. This prompted Dr. Marc Lamont Hill & Dr. Umar Johnson to respond- in the name of Pan Afrikanism. Over the last 5Yrs, Pan Afrikans have been very vocal about Reparations & who should be entitled. Groups like N'COBRA, NAARC, The NAACP, & The Urban League have pushed for Trans Atlantic based Reparations; but they favor Social Programs over cash payments. Grassroots Organizations like the ADOS Advocacy Foundation, stress the need for cash payments to American Descendants Of Chattel Slavery.

It's curious how the same U.S. Constitution that used Our skin color to classify Us as 3/5ths of Humanity, still uses Our skin color as a 'Racial identity' to restrict Our access to resources. Somehow, this skin color classification doesn't stop 'Minority Groups' (i.e. White Women, White LGBTQ..., Azkenazis, People Of Color [POC/ BIPOC]) from getting the resources that They want & need. Maybe it's just Me, but I see a double standard playing out. Edward Blum & his 'Minority Coalition' are hell bent on weaponizing Race as a means of maintaining Black Oppression. He recently resorted to applying the Civil Rights Law of 1866 against Black Women; meanwhile, ADOS was unsuccessful in their attempt to apply the Same Law to (naively?) support Byron Allen's Case against Comcast Communications.

I understand where Family is coming from, when they refer to dictionary definitions of 'Black'. In a 'White' Society, Blackness is depicted as antithetical. It's not unusual, when we consider the way Afrikan Tribes associate 'Whiteness' w/ Death & Disease (i.e. Leprosy). Historically, this attitude towards Blackness goes back to Our 1st Contact w/ Northern/ Step Europeans (Vikings, Scandanavians, ect...) who traditionally burned their dead. Our mummification process spooked them! Those bodies took on a dark hue, & hardened into a crystal like structure; the Europeans called it a 'Crust'. From this, came the word 'Curse'. The Europeans migrated south into Western Asia & transported their ideology w/ them. This fear of Black Mummies was shared w/ Mongolians & other Indo- European Tribes, like the Turks & Huns. In the same way that Afrikans came to associate Whiteness negatively, the Asiatics came to associate Blackness similarly. Today, We STILL hear Koreans, Japanese, & Chinese refer to a 'Black Devil'.

The modern regard for Blackness is a Social Construct created by 15th Century Castilians & Portugese. These beliefs were sanctioned by the Catholic Church, by way of Papal Bulls & adopted by Dutch, English, & French Colonizers. That's not to say Anti Black sentiment didn't exist; Maimonides (Musa Ibn Maimon) wrote 'The Curse of Ham' centuries earlier... Spain, Portugal, & Italy appeared tired of Moorish Rule, & took advantage of the waning years of their influence. Current Reparations discussions have included the prominence of Afrikan Slave Trading, & how Afrikan Kingdoms, like Mali & Kongo actually traded Slaves w/ Europeans; until they were also Colonized. Afrikan Kingdoms became dependent on the profits, decadent lifestyle, & overall efficacy of trading away their 'enemies'. They didn't concern themselves w/ Europe's intentions for these people.

European Colonizers told themselves that they were 'On a Mission' to Christianize the heathens. I don't know what THAT had to do w/ raping & pillaging Societies in 'The Americas' (Amaru Ca/ Turtle Island/ Atlantis). In 'Capitalism & Slavery' Eric Williams explains how Europeans rationalized their barbarism to offset the guilt of violating fellow Human Beings. The Fruits of Exploration clouded the moral judgement of Many. Thinking Men, like Samuel George Morton began to concoct a number Theories (Religious & Scientific) to condone their actions. It wasn't limited to Afrika or The Americas; ANY non- Christian was a potential target. Truth be told, Latin America had more Slaves coming from The Pacific, than The Atlantic. Many of the Illegal Immigrants that (so called) Native Americans in The Dakotas are calling 'Indigenous People', are descendants of 'Negritos' transported from The Philippines & the South Pacific Islands. Spanish & Portugese Conquistadors adopted Colorism from the Arabs, & used it as a tool for Divide & Conquer (Blanqueamiento/ Branqueamiento).

The Portugese & Spanish brought Colorism to the (so called) New World, but it was The English who refined it into the System of Racism. Benjamin Franklin was credited w/ using the term 'White' in 1751, but Black Codes were already in play for decades. Bacon's Rebellion of 1675- 1676 resulted in 'Racial' (Chattel) Slavery in Virginia. White Indentured Servants that were treated no differently than their Black counterparts, were elevated to Overseers & Slave Hunters; later to become Militiamen & Police Officers. Legally, 'White' represented the Wealthy Class of Land Owners & Bankers (Gentlemen of Property & Standing). 'Black' represented Indigenous Americans- Free & Enslaved; Poor Whites were stuck in the middle. The Lessons of Bacon's Rebellion brought Laws that ensured that the average White Person had a better lifestyle than the average Black Person. This is the crux of 'White Privilege'.

Dictionaries define 'Whiteness' as: Fair & Pure. 'Blackness' is defined as: Ugly & Evil. All of this helped perpetuate Indigenous/ Aboriginal People as inferior to the European. The 1790 Census brought the first reclassification of American Indians to 'Negro' & 'Colored'. This reclassification continued w/ each subsequent Census. Census Enumerators were not just instructed, but encouraged to use their personal judgement when making Racial Assignments; particularly when making classifications of Negro & Colored. In 1924, Dr. Walter A. Plecker pushed 'The (Preservation of) Racial Integrity Act' in Virginia. This Act sought to reclassify ALL Indigenous People in Virginia as Colored or Negro, & penalized them (w/ violence or death). The 'One Drop Rule' was added in 1930. The Census completed it's reclassification w/ designations of 'Black' in 1970, & 'Afrikan American'(?) in 1990... Chris Rock once joked: "Have you ever seen an American Indian Family in an IHOP?" He probably didn't know that depending on which IHOP, he may have been SURROUNDED by them!

The U.S. Government has been persistent in their efforts to erase America's 'Copper- toned Aborigines'. In addition to Local, State, & Federal Laws designed to keep Us out of contention, they also used Anthropology to prove the inferiority of Indigenous People, compared to Europeans. W.E.B. Du Bois countered, w/ the help of Franz Boas & a new generation of Anthropologists. Melville Herskovits, like Boas contributed to the Anti Black counter narrative; playing a role in setting up the Harlem History Club at the 135th Street YMCA. This is the same Club that inspired Ho Chi Minh... Since 1990, (Indigenous) Black Americans have been on a Pan Afrikan Crusade that sought to embrace EVERY melanated individual as 'Black'. Haitians, Dominicans, Columbians, Somalis & Nigerians have been very vocal about NOT being Black; they're right! Family thinks that they either want to be White, or at least avoid the negativity associated w/ Blackness. Regardless of their reason, they have a Right Of Expression.

History has been purposely skewed, to prop up self righteous White Men & their Female cohorts (WASPs) over Everyone Else. Their advanced weaponry & barbarism has motivated many to fall in line w/ the Western Agenda over the last 500 Years, but Indigenous/ Black Americans have been fighting them every step of the way. Despite the effort to "Kill the Indian & keep The Man", We continued to search for Our Truth. 100Yrs ago, that led Us into an extensive search on the Afrikan Continent. DuBois, Boas, & Herskovits ALL espoused Out of Afrika Theory; & in some shape or form, molded the Minds of many of Our Master Teachers & Scholars. Their search for Roots in Afrika (Alkebu- Lan) was a noble & fruitful endeavor. As Students, We learned of glorious Civilizations that predated Europe, Rome, & Greece by several millennia. We learned that The Kamau, Nubian, & Kushite referred to themselves as 'Black People'. They were the 'Children of The Sun'- Blessed by The Most High w/ Blackness (Melanin/ Ka Nu). The 'Afu Ra Ka Nu' & 'Afu Rat Kat Nut' are the First Born of The Most High; molded out of Primordial Blackness (CERN calls it: The 'God Particle') & assigned as Caretakers of Planet Earth (Geb). In a Nation that marginalizes the very Concept of Blackness, We were inspired to shout: "I'm Black & I'm Proud!".

Today We live in The Information Age, & as such, Our Generation(s) have access to sources that few of Our Elders had. As We put the pieces together, We discover that:

North America had a population of roughly 100 Million Indigenous People when the Colonizers arrived 500Yrs ago.

These People had highly functional Matrilineal Societies that existed for millennia.

They traded w/ The Moors & other Afrikan Kingdoms for Centuries, & They spoke the Lingua Franca.

They have a Legacy of Brick Making & Mound Building. Billy Carson & Walter Williams both say that Our Indigenous Ancestors have a direct connection to the Kamau. Archeological digs in Southern Illinois & Ohio uncovered Kamitic Ritual material & Pre Phoenician 'Proto- Hebraic Script' among the artifacts. Quiet as it's kept, North America has a plethora of Mounds & Pyramids; St. Louis is nicknamed 'Mound City'.

ALL of the European visitors admitted the 'Copper- toned Aborigines' or Indios practiced a higher Culture than ANY Culture in Europe.

Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, et al were students of Indigenous American Culture. They adopted the Articles Of Confederacy & The U.S. Constitution from the existing Confederacy Of The 5 Nations (The Iroquois Constitution), written around 1200 A.C.E... The Iroquois are the True Founders of the 'American Democratic Experiment'. Remember, ALL of the European Colonizers hailed from Monarchies, so it stands to reason...

The possibility of transporting 12 Million Afrikans to North America from 1619- 1865 is highly improbable. Dane Calloway already broke down the logistics of Trans Atlantic Shipping, & personally compelled The State of Virginia to reduce their 'Afrikan Slave' count by more than 90%. Depending on who you talk to, the number of 'Afrikans' transported to North America ranges from 90,000- 300,000 individuals. At best, this accounts for less than 10% of the 4 Million Individuals that were emancipated. The 20 Young Women that arrived at Point Comfort in 1619, were originally called 'Negresses', not Afrikans. American Indians were called Negroes almost interchangeably.

Dane Calloway, Kurimeo Ahau, & The Research Guy have all pointed out how Europeans transported North American Indians to 'Slave Seasoning' (Buck Breaking) Camps in The Caribbean. Afterwards, they were either shipped back to America, or transported to Europe, & later West Afrika; from Sierra Leone, to Angola. The English & French used Caribbean Maroons in their assault on Afrikan Kingdoms.

All of this new information about Our Ancestors has led many to revisit their Family Genealogy. Many of Us recall a Story or two about the Family connection to a particular Tribe. I personally can't remember hearing an Afrikan Origin Story, before the airing of Alex Haley's 'Roots'. My family taught Us about Our Indian Roots; We don't have a Slave Ship Story in Our History. Most of the Blackfolk claiming Afrikan Tribes, have taken so called Genetic Swab Tests that are advertised as 'Entertainment'. Black Historians & Genealogists, like Dr. Henry Louis Gates have refuted the accuracy of these 'Tests' for years. NO ONE can determine their ancestry from a mouth swab; you need the actual DNA of an Ancestor to make an accurate analysis. Most people don't know that their genetic material is being held (& utilized) by proponents of the [Mormon] Church Of Latter Day Saints. The largest Genealogy Library on Earth, is in Salt Lake City, Ut.

As We put the pieces together, We can clearly see the ongoing process of Colonization. AmeriKKKa cannot be as bold as Israel in their removal of Indigenous Black Americans, so The U.S. Government uses a trickbag of classifications & legislative measures to keep Blackfolk in a state of 'Arrested Development'. They hope that We 'migrate' to Afrika, but most of Us can't afford to visit; let alone relocate. Meanwhile, The Government continues to Flood the Zone w/ immigrants (for 175Yrs & counting). The Mainstream Media speaks about Venezuelan 'migrants' daily, but We hear nothing about the 100,000 Afghani & 100,000 Ukrainian immigrants they prepared for. These people are literally White on arrival. If illegal Venezuelans are getting 5 Star treatment, what are these folk getting?

I felt obligated to go in-depth on this topic, because so many cling to a definition created by Colonizers & Oppressors. How does someone define themselves using the language of their Oppressor? It's the same as someone saying: "A N-- like me", or "A B-- like me". We have been programmed into accepting a wretched (ratchet) image of Ourselves. Some of the people refusing to use the term 'Black', have No Problem referring to themselves as 'N--s' & 'B--s'. I question their logic. Richard Pryor said 40Yrs ago, in 'Here & Now' that he was wrong about using The N- Word. He went on to say that it was a Word that describes Our Wretchedness. He vowed never to use that Word again, but since his declaration, there has been an explosion of 'N-- Comics' over the last 40Yrs. Use of The N- Word is more prevalent than wearing that dress, but few talk about this particular assault on Our Culture. Is it just a coincidence that many of these N- Comics have 'funny looking Wives', as Katt Williams described them?

The lion's share of Our Master Teachers & Scholars were literally spoon-fed Out Of Afrika Theory, so We were primed for Pan Afrikanism. Marcus Garvey was actually 'fishing in a barrel' on those Harlem Streets. This isn't a bad thing in itself. Our Problem has been giving Our 'Cousins' too much access to Our Cultural Mores. Many of the Celebrities, Athletes, & Entertainers being spotlighted & engaging in miscegenation, are descendants of Black Immigrants. They're the Same Ones misrepresenting Our Culture, while telling Us that We're 'Culturally Lost'. Like Hindi/ Bangladeshi/ & Pakistani/ Americans, these folk are situational about their Blackness. They relish being 'Afrikan American' when it's profitable, but are quick to remind you of their Nationality (in a thick accent) when it isn't... It's time to delineate. EVERY melanated group has an identifiable lineage, except Black America. We had a clear identity, until We allowed Jesse Jackson to reclassify Us as 'Afrikan American'. To quote Dane Calloway: "We're named after 2 Continents". Now We're being amalgamated into an 'Afrikan/ Black Diaspora' that is looking to fleece Us like Everyone Else. Most of these folks are 'Black' Capitalists looking for a quick buck. The commercialization of Kwanzaa is a prime example. Our argument for Lineage Based Reparations has revealed this well kept secret.

The (current) Reparations discussion has brought important issues to the conversation. ADOS, FBA, Freemen, & Indigenous Family all agree that We're a specific Lineage Group w/ a specific Experience. No other group has endured what We have endured in America. Some Black Immigrants make a valid point that They have endured over 100Yrs of White Supremacy in America; few admit that They also had more autonomy & opportunity than We had. Many of the 'First Faces' that We tout, aren't Us, but Our Cousins. Colin Powell, Eric Holder, & Susan Rice aren't just descendants of Immigrants, they're also Cousins! Barack Obama was Harvard's 1st Black Law Review Editor & Claudine Gay was their 1st Black President, but NEITHER have Indigenous Black Roots. BOTH have more in common w/ the descendants of Slave Holders, than those Enslaved on Harvard's properties. We have far too many of their Faces in Our Spaces. 'Afrikan American' is not working for Us. It skews perspectives regarding Wealth & Inequality, while rewarding newcomers for their 'proximity to Blackness'.

I have to go back to The Black Power Movement, to get a clear understanding of what Blackness truly means. During that Era, 'Blackness' was an American Phenomenon that was Globally acknowledged. No One else said: 'I'm Black & I'm Proud' w/ as much authority. John Carlos & Tommie Smith proudly threw up their Black fists, knowing they would pay a price. Muhammad Ali lost his Prime Boxing Years to make a point. The Culture of Blackness permeated Music & Cinema; We were doing Our Thing, Our Way. The Culture was distinctly Ours. It WAS a Black Thang, & No One understood it; but EVERYONE respected it. As We travelled The World, We were called Soul Brothers & Soul Sisters, but most called Us Black American. We have a distinct Pedigree. The World knows WHO We are. If we're being honest, Black Culture & Music was generally more respectable before 1990, when We became 'Afrikan American'. Hollywood has been denigrating Us since 'Birth Of A Nation', but their images contradicted who We are. We're a Righteous & Noble People. Our Love of Our Collective progeny is unrivaled. The Slave Experience stripped Us of Our individual lineage, but it also eliminated any Tribalism. Indigenous Black Americans- from New York to Oakland, & from Detroit to Houston refer to each other as: 'Family from...' We compete against each other, & toss The Dozens; but when it's time to Put in The Work- We're ALL On Code.

I laugh at this notion of 'Race Neutrality'. What exactly is meant by Race? Chief Justice John Roberts & Justice Clarence Thomas both lean on this term pretty heavily, but how? Black, White, Asian, & Latinx aren't Racial Groups, they're Socio- Demographic Classifications. Every Middle School Student has learned by 8th Grade of 3 Races: Negroid, Mongoloid, & Caucasoid. This 'Racial Re- tread' only seems to affect Indigenous Black Americans/ Copper-toned Aborigines on the basis of Our skin color. Everyone Else, including Black Immigrants have a Right of Expression under the current demographic structure. This is the Same System that holds Black America stagnant at 13% of the population since Emancipation, while bringing Ethnic Europeans (Caucasians, Catholics) & Asians under the umbrella of Whiteness; to offset the declining birth rate in their demographic. The Biden Administration has implied the same thing is being done w/ Latinx. I STILL ask: What is a 'Latino/ Hispanic'- are they a specific Nationality? No, they're a Socially Engineered Group (Buffer Class) created to marginalize the Indigenous Black American Population. Our Collective, is not a grouping of different Ethnicities & Nationalities under a particular demographic- We're One Nationality. As We search for a uniform description of Our specific Lineage Group, 'Black American' is a No Brainer... Cam'ron is correct.

'Black American' actually describes a specific Ethnic Group w/ a specific Culture & Experience that NO OTHER GROUP can tout. It describes a Group of People in a specific Region, not a (Global) Racial Group. We are as distinct, as Australian Aborigines. Other than Our Cousins- the 'Black Brits', melanated People tend to describe themselves Tribally or Nationally. They only identify as 'Black', when they Come to America. Meanwhile, Native (Siberian) Americans have used the Dawes Rolls to appropriate Our Ancestral [Tribal] Identity, forcing Us to Collectively reestablish Ourselves from scratch. Indigenous, Aboriginal, or American Indian describes Our connection to The Land. The Blood & Bones of Our Ancestors are buried Here, not in Afrika. Black American, describes who We are today. It defines Us as a unique Nationality. This description makes it easier for Us to point out Centuries of legislative policy crafted & used against Us as a specific Lineage Group. Afrikan American, is a monolithic classification that ignores the diverse Cultural experiences & Tribalism of the Collective. Ultimately, Our Name may change, but The Culture stays the Same.

In a nutshell, Black American IS Our Tribal Identity. We're World renowned for Standing Out & Standing Our Ground, & NO ONE does it better. As Professor Black Truth puts it: 'We create Icons'.

-Just making My Case

[luthienebonyx]

I've seen some misinformation spreading around tumblr about the Australian Voice referendum to be held this Saturday, 14 October 2023, so here are some actual facts about what it is and why Australians should PLEASE vote YES.

So, what is the referendum question?

The referendum question is about recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, and setting up a body to be known as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, so that Indigenous representatives have the right to provide advice to government about decisions that affect Indigenous people.

Here’s the actual referendum question:

A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?

The new chapter and section to be added to the constitution are:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

S 129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

Source and more info

That’s it. That’s all it is.

The No campaign is spreading lies about the Voice, suggesting that it will somehow take rights or property away from non-Indigenous Australians. They’ve also been using social media - and some elements of mainstream media - to stir up fear and racism, using tactics with a vibe that will be all too familiar to our American friends who have lived through Trump, or our British friends who have been through Brexit.

Here are a few simple facts to counter some of the misinformation that's out there.

Why do we need a body like the Voice?

Indigenous people experience a level of disadvantage that applies to no other group of Australians. As the Prime Minister has said on numerous occasions, a young Indigenous man in this country today is more likely to go to jail than to go to university. Meanwhile, the periodic closing the gap reports show that Australian governments continue to fail in their aim for Indigenous Australians’ health and life expectancy to be equal to that of other Australians.

These sorts of outcomes are typical of a system that has always been about doing things to Indigenous people, rather than with them. Indigenous people need to be in the room when decisions are made about matters that affect them.

So yeah, we need an advisory body that has the ear of politicians. Seems simple enough, so why not just legislate it?

That’s the thing: we’ve already tried that.

We need an advisory body like the Voice to be enshrined in the Constitution because we’ve HAD advisory bodies before – bodies like the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). ATSIC was abolished in 2005 by a government that was hostile to ATSIC’s aims – something that government could easily do since there was no obligation for a body like that to exist. Other similar bodies have gone the same way. 

Putting the Voice in the constitution means that it will always exist. The actual decision-making power continues to reside with our elected politicians, but having the Voice means that they will be obligated to listen to the perspective and suggestions of Indigenous representatives before they (the politicians) make decisions affecting Indigenous people.

The politicians will still have the power to legislate the details of how the Voice works, just like any other body set up under legislation - but once it's in the constitution, they don't get to decide whether it exists or not.

Where did the idea for the Voice come from?

Indigenous people have been calling for something like the Voice since the 1920s, but the current proposition originated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. This is a petition created by Indigenous delegates to the First Nations National Constitutional Convention held at Uluru in 2017. The Uluru statement from the heart is only 439 words, but they’re very powerful words. Read it here

So if you hear the No campaign trying to say that the idea for the Voice comes from Canberra or from politicians: no, it doesn’t. It comes from Uluru, in central Australia, and it comes from a request by representatives of a large number of Indigenous people. The government is responding to that request by holding this referendum.

Do all Indigenous Australians support the Voice?

Have you ever known any group of people that share 100% support for anything? Of course there isn’t agreement by every single Indigenous person that this is the right way to proceed. HOWEVER, that said, polling shows that around 80% of Indigenous Australians  support the Voice, and of the remaining approximately 20%, many don’t support the Voice because they believe it doesn’t go far enough. Some want a treaty before anything else.

But you wouldn’t know that by the way the Australian media has reported the campaign.

I’m not going to repeat that No campaign slogan. If you’ve watched or read any reporting about this issue, you know the one I mean. The one that panders to ignorance and fear.

Instead, I’m just going to say: if you don’t know, FIND OUT. And then VOTE YES.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Connecting Spinozan currents to Indigenous resurgence

While we hope some of the affinities between Spinozan currents and Indigenous worldviews are emergent throughout this chapter, we want to spend some time thinking about them directly, especially in light of the relational conceptions we have outlined above. We think the relational conceptions of anarchism and friendship are resonant with (though necessarily distinct from) the lifeways of Indigenous peoples and many other societies that ground their worlds in connectedness to each other and the places they inhabit. For instance, writer and facilitator Zainab Amadahy offers a “relationship framework” that sees all life as fundamentally interconnected:

We two-leggeds are inter-connected with each other and with other life on the planet — indeed, even to the planet itself and beyond. What we think, say, and do impacts, directly and indirectly, everything and everyone else, which also affect us. We are further impacted by ancestors and will impact generations to come. Some of us even believe the reverse; that we can impact our ancestors and that our descendants impact us. In any case, we are clearly “in relationship” whether we acknowledge, fully understand and respect the concept or not.[81]

In our conversation with Glen Coulthard, he elaborated on his notion of place-based Indigenous ethics, which he calls “grounded normativity.” Coulthard shows how Indigenous resistance and values are literally grounded in the ongoing renewal of reciprocal relationships with land:

I don’t think you come to these things on your own. We’re always kind of embedded and constituted by what’s around us. The whole book I wrote [Red Skin, White Masks] is based on this. I’m nothing; I’m just a product of the messy relationships that have formed me over time. And the point about the book is, we’ve tended to think of these relationships as anthropocentric. But we’re also shaped by the other-than-human relations that we’re thrown into, including relationships to place and land itself, and that can have an effect on our perspective; it can shape our normativities, or what we think is right or wrong.[82]

Red Skin, White Masks shows how these relational webs have been foundational for Indigenous resurgence against settler colonialism, and inexorably connected to the struggle over land:

The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms.[83]

From this perspective, settler colonialism is an attack on Indigenous bodies and lands, and on the grounded normativities that sustain them. It is an attack on Indigenous forms of life. For the same reason, Coulthard suggests that recovering, sustaining, and defending these forms of life becomes crucial to decolonization and resistance:

Repetition, doing things, shapes how you see things. And depending on what that practice is, it can double back and shape how you do things. And in a land-based context, that kind of cyclical, dual conditioning—how we produce the necessities of our lives shapes our spiritual understandings and those can, over time, double back and shape how we go about doing things in the material sense. What we’re seeing now to validate this is that Indigenous people have been dragged away from those practices violently, into other ones oriented around a different mode of production, a different way of producing the necessities of life, through resource extraction, and that is now shaping our normative worlds; what we see as right or wrong. And it’s because these long-standing practices are being disrupted. Now what we’re doing with Dechinta and other land-based practices is we’re re-establishing—in an impure form because we’re all learning again—these different normative practices and worlds. And an important part of that is our relationship with land and other-than-human kin. So prefiguration is that emphasis on the importance of practice, and shaping even what we think our ends should be … it’s a very practical ethics … That’s not to devalue it; I actually hold this more valuable than abstract normative traditions where you have to dissociate yourself from your relationships in order to come up with pure principles, and that just results in a never-ending, always-there gap between what our ideals are, and where our shitty world is at. It justifies that. In theory we have it nailed down, we just haven’t quite approximated that in our lives and institutions. In contrast, the grounded normativity, practical, prefigurative starting place is saying no, those ideals are formed by what we do with our lives—by the relationships that we sustain and renew.[84]

In a way that resonates with the relational conception of anarchism we explored above, Coulthard speaks to the importance of prefiguration: nurturing relationships informed by reciprocity with human and other-than-human kin. Similarly, in her book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, Leanne Simpson writes that she is “not so concerned with how we dismantle the master’s house, that is, which set of theories we use to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our own house, or our own houses.[85]

Recovering forms of life that have been subjugated or ruled out entails resistance and transgressing of laws or norms, but these negations are only what is visible from the perspective of Empire. It is clear that this is not resistance for its own sake, or (only) because Empire is monstrous: resurgent forms of life are also about values and connections worth defending and nurturing.

While there may be resonances with anarchism, Coulthard and Simpson are speaking about the resurgence of specific, Indigenous forms of life. Where we live, resonances and affinities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous forms of life are always marked by the violence of settler colonialism. Our lives are inextricably linked to structures bent on the eradication of Indigenous life and the exploitation of Indigenous land. Navigating these uncertain connections requires dealing with difficult ethical questions.

In our part of the world, it is clear that we are living in the midst of Indigenous resurgence. All over Turtle Island, Indigenous peoples are reasserting their ties and responsibilities to their lands, refusing the racist and heteropatriarchal divisions imposed by Empire, and recovering relationships based in care and consent. This is an intensification of what has been happening since colonization began.

For non-Indigenous people—and for white, European-descended settlers who live on Indigenous land, specifically—this can be profoundly unsettling. Can non-Indigenous people support Indigenous resurgence? Can alliances productively stretch across the colonial divide? Through messy, uneven processes, settlers and Indigenous peoples are answering these questions together. Many non-Indigenous people are beginning to see themselves as settlers, complicit in ongoing dispossession and colonization of Indigenous forms of life. Black and Indigenous communities are forging alliances to resist the intertwined violences of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. As Luam Kidane and Jarrett Martineau write,

These dreams of freedom mean that our acts of resistance are inextricably linked as Afrikan peoples and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. But fundamentally, what this means is that we need to seriously, purposefully and with urgency begin to look to each other—not to the state—for our self-determination.[86]

As Indigenous resurgence and Black uprising reshape life throughout North America, new affinities and new forms of co-resistance are emerging. It is increasingly clear that decolonization is fundamental to all struggles to dismantle Empire and live differently here and now in North America. Decolonization has fundamentally shifted the values, priorities, and organizing practices of many anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and other radicals. As Harsha Walia writes,

A growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. Indigenous peoples in Canada are the most impacted by the pillage of lands, experience disproportionate poverty and homelessness, are overrepresented in statistics of missing and murdered women and are the primary targets of repressive policing and prosecutions in the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated as a single issue within a laundry list of demands, Indigenous self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with struggles against racism, poverty, police violence, war and occupation, violence against women and environmental justice.[87]

Indigenous people have forged alliances with ranchers and farmers resisting pipelines, with migrants resisting border imperialism, and with Black communities resisting criminalization and the prison industrial complex. They have linked up with anarchists while challenging them to rethink colonial conceptions of nation, territory, tradition, and authority. Some settlers are learning to take responsibility for developing relationships with the people whose land they are on, and learning to support Indigenous leadership. Indigenous resurgence has pushed non-Indigenous people to learn the histories and protocols of the lands where they live, to ask what it means to honor treaties, and what it means to live on land where treaties were never signed. In our conversation with Coulthard, he spoke to the potential of recovering Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjugated knowledges and forms of life, and exploring affinities between them:

Coulthard: If those [Indigenous] relationships to land and place and those sustaining connections are destroyed, then our views change on what’s good, what’s just. So what we’re trying to do in terms of land-based decolonizing education is to ensure that those practical relationships that inform our philosophical systems and vice versa are maintained to the best of our ability, and that requires a struggle and conflict with the forces that are trying to destroy it. Nick and carla: It seems like white settlers are the ones who’ve allowed their own grounded normativities to be destroyed, or they have been destroyed, at least mostly. And we’ve been invited to participate in the destruction of Indigenous peoples’ grounded normativities. Coulthard: I think the point that’s important here is that we’re talking about hegemonies. So grounded normativities are being wiped out by a hegemonic system—a system of dominance. So when you say “the problem with settler life is that it’s doing this,” I would say, in my more generous moments, that the hegemonic settler form of life is destroying Indigenous forms of life, but settlers have a whole host of other grounded normativities that have themselves been violently ruled out of existence. Whether that’s radical ecological stuff to anarchist stuff to Marxist stuff—whatever: they’re subaltern knowledges and practices. And there are affinities between those that we can map out and explore. There’s a lot within non-Indigenous settler traditions that have suffered their own erasure that might be brought back to the fore. And that’s way better than the alternative, which is stealing what we’ve got. So what Foucault would refer to as a resurgence of subaltern knowledges. There’s a rich history of overlap and affinities that I think need to be drawn on, and crucial to avoid the violences of cultural appropriation and “becoming Indigenous.”[88]

Exploring affinities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions and forms of life raises a lot of questions. There is a deep ambivalence to the recovery of non-Indigenous traditions, or the creation of new alternatives, especially those that involve direct connections to land. Deepening these relationships—with seasons, territories, plants, and other-than-human forces where we live—can end up entrenching dispossession and colonization.

From conservation to farming to fishing, many settler (especially European) traditions have evolved or been sustained through Indigenous dispossession and an attack on Indigenous forms of life. Settler colonialism has always included a project of attaching white bodies to Indigenous land, and attempts to “reclaim the commons” can erase Indigenous presence.

At the same time, there are emergent alliances and relationships between settlers and Indigenous people, based in consent and shared responsibility. Settlers are critically revaluing some of their own traditions in ways that enable new affinities and solidarities. Settlers have been able to offer their own practical land-connected skills and knowledge like herbalism, bioremediation, cooking, carpentry, ecological gardening and more, alongside the skills and knowledges held by Indigenous people.

In our experience, it has been settlers rooted in their own traditions and values who are most capable of building strong relationships with Indigenous peoples, showing up in meaningful ways, and decentering themselves and staying on the sidelines when it is appropriate. It is people with strong friendships—their own webs of care and support—who are able to consistently support decolonization, whether that means supporting frontline land defense struggles or urban Indigenous initiatives, or cultivating meaningful, long-term relationships with local Indigenous folks where they live.

These capacities are not based on abstract morality, nor are they about having the most bang-on anticolonial analysis. They are based on a web of connectivity that enables people to think and act differently. One thing that is clear to us about Indigenous resurgence is that it is driven and sustained by these deep connections and relationships that colonization seeks to destroy. Rebuilding and sustaining these connections is clearly at the root of decolonization—for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, differently.

How can settlers and Indigenous people explore affinities between autonomous forms of life? What are the potentials and pitfalls of revitalizing non-Indigenous traditions (or inventing new ones) on stolen ground? These questions cannot be answered in the abstract, but are already being asked and answered collectively, over and over again, in multiple ways, across different territories, movements, and struggles. Hanging onto these as ethical questions, we think, helps get beyond the shame and guilt of moralism that can be so immobilizing (and counterproductive) for settlers—especially white settlers. Instead of the narcissistic shame that impels settlers to ask for and demand absolution from Indigenous peoples, ethical questions can shift people towards active responsibility that is rooted in consent, as Indigenous people often emphasize. For us, this means finding the wiggle room of freedom—the capacity to work on our relationships—and participate in new and old forms of nurturance and resistance.

[vanilla-cigarillos]

Voodoo and Hoodoo: What’s the Difference?

If you live in America, you have undoubtedly come across the terms of voodoo and hoodoo. What is the difference between the two, and how does African (umbrella term) culture play a role in each?

Voodoo

(A.K.A. Vodou, Voudou, Vodun) Voodoo is a religion that originated within Africa amidst the Atlantic slave trade. Its structure comes from a mix of traditional religions of West and Central enslaved Africans (Yoruba, Kongo, and Fon). Once brought to the Hispaniola island, Voodoo saw influences of the culture of the French colonialists who controlled the colony of Saint-Domingue (Freemasonry). 

Many Haitians who practice Voodoo also practice Roman Catholicism, not seeing a contradiction between the two systems existing simultaneously. Characterized as Haiti’s “national religion”, Voodoo is one of the most misunderstood religions in the world. Voodoo is monotheistic, giving the teachings of a single supreme God. Believed to have created the universe, this entity is called Bondye or Bonié. For Vodouists, Bondye is seen as the ultimate source of power. This perception of God is also seen as remote, not involving itself in human affairs. While Vodouists often equate Bondye with the Christian God, Vodou does not incorporate belief in a powerful antagonist that opposes the supreme being akin to the Christian notion of Satan. 

Vodou also holds the belief of many beings known as Iwa, a term that varies in its translation from “spirits” to “gods”. These beings can in many ways be equated to Christian angels in many of its cosmology. The lwa can offer help, protection, and counsel to humans, in return for ritual service. Each lwa has its own personality and individual correspondences. They can be either loyal or capricious in their dealings with their devotees, with many believing that the lwa are easily offended. When angered, the lwa are believed to remove their protection from their devotees, or to inflict harm. 

Vodou also teaches a perspective of the human soul, which is believed to be divided into two parts (both of which exist within the head of a person). One of these is the ti bonnanj ("little good angel"), and it is understood as the conscience that allows an individual to engage in self-reflection and self-criticism. The other part is the gwo bonnanj ("big good angel") and this constitutes the psyche, source of memory, intelligence, and personhood. Vodouists believe that every individual is intrinsically connected to a specific lwa. This lwa is their mèt tèt (master of the head). They believe that this lwa influences the individual's personality. At bodily death, the gwo bonnanj join the Ginen, or ancestral spirits, while the ti bonnanj proceeds to the afterlife to face judgement before Bondye.

Vodou does not promote a dualistic belief in a division between good and evil. It offers no prescriptive code of ethics. Rather than being rule-based, Vodou morality is deemed contextual to the situation.

It is very important to respect Vodou as the closed practice that it is. While misunderstood through various contextualizations, it is a religion felt deeply by a group of people who use it to guide their lives. Those outside do not have the right to infringe upon said spaces. 

Hoodoo

It is important to understand that Hoodoo does not describe a religion. Rather, Hoodoo is a set of mystical beliefs hailing from along the Mississippi River with influences from Indigenous herbalism, African spiritualities, and Christian influences. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure man or conjure woman, root doctors, Hoodoo doctors, and swampers.

Many Hoodoo traditions specifically draw from the beliefs of the Bakongo people of Central Africa during the Atlantic slave trade. After their contact with European slave traders and missionaries, some Africans converted to Christianity willingly, while other enslaved Africans were forced to become Christian which resulted in a syncretization of African spiritual practices and beliefs with the Christian faith. Enslaved and free Africans learned regional indigenous botanical knowledge after they arrived to the United States, including another influence to what would become known as Hoodoo. 

During the transatlantic slave trade a variety of African plants were brought from Africa to the United States for cultivation (okra, sorghum, yam, benneseed, watermelon, black-eyed peas, etc.). African Americans had their own herbal knowledge that was brought from West and Central Africa to the United States. When it came to the medicinal use of herbs, African Americans learned some medicinal knowledge of herbs from Indigenous peoples. However, the spiritual use of herbs and the practice of Hoodoo remained African in origin as enslaved African-Americans incorporated African religious rituals in the preparation of North American herbs and roots.

Hoodoo was also a key part in black revolution in the United States. Enslaved women would use their knowledge of herbs to induce miscarriages so white owners wouldn’t be able to take their children. There were also examples of hoodoo being used to poison and kill white slave owners. The Bible itself, in conjunction with Hoodoo, was used in slave liberation. Free and enslaved people could read the stories of the Hebrews in the Bible, and found them similar to their situation in the United States as slaves. The Hebrews in the Old Testament were freed from slavery in Egypt under the leadership of Moses (held to be a conjurer in the beliefs of many who practice Hoodoo).

Hoodoo is also a closed practice, requiring initiation for practitioners. 

[clarabosswald]

I've been reading your posts about the Israel-Palestine issue and I'm messaging you without going on anon to show that I have a genuine desire to understand. You've said you don't support apartheid and you're not a zionist so I want to ask why you believe the issue is that complicated, and get your genuine response. I'm from Pakistan, a country created in the name of religious protection and it has been at the helm of several genocides and displacements to this day. I lived in South Africa where the settler population coexists after the abolition of apartheid. I'm now a settler in Canada and I support the fight for land back and the dissolution of the colonial state even as I reside in it because I would prefer to be welcomed on this land after Indigenous sovereignty has been returned. I am just curious if you really do feel such an attachment to Israel's existence knowing that from its conception it has been a settler colonial apartheid state. Certainly Netanyahu has worsened it but the ethnic cleansing, ghettoization, displacement, imprisonment without grounds, and torture of Palestinians has been ongoing for decades. I do believe that most people currently advocating for Palestine's liberation and the dissolution of Israel as a state don't want to kill or even displace all Israelis, there is just an understanding that Israel's existence depends on the subjugation of Palestinians. And as for Hamas, most people would not want Hamas as a governing body but Israel has backed all Palestinian resistance efforts especially peaceful ones into such a corner that at this point Hamas is like any violent resistance force such as the ones in Ireland, Algeria, Haiti, Vietnam or elsewhere. Would you disagree that the violence they enact is rooted in Israeli violence? Decades of brutal oppression can only lead to radicalization in this way. I hope that you will understand I'm genuinely trying to gain your perspective on these issues and not trying to attack you. This situation is personal to me because the loss of lives is heartbreaking and I've lived in so many countries where violence not only paints the history but the present and I wish we lived in a world where borders and militaries did not exist. But I've come to learn that unfortunately peace is often achieved when there is violent resistance to oppression.

I already sent follow up direct messages so I'm SO SORRY for spamming you but I guess I'm nervous about you misreading my tone since it's easy to do that online and people have attacked you regarding all this. I just want to reiterate I make no claims to knowing everything and certainly not to knowing you and your allegiances or politics. I can tell you care about people and that's why I want to have a genuine conversation, if you'll engage with me

hi - first of all, you seem to be coming with good faith and nowadays that's not obvious at all, so thank you for that

the first thing i want to address is that yes, i'm not a zionist. at the same time i've got no fucking idea what constitutes "zionism" in western eyes at this point in time. but i don't believe jewish people have got some super special holy right of "owning" israeli lands or whatever, just because they're jewish and it's the people's ~promised land~. that's zionism how i understand it. and i don't believe in that because i'm a secular (non-believing) jew.

"why you believe the issue is that complicated" is a question that on the one hand seems extremely weird to me, and on the other hand... really makes complete sense. i say that it's complicated because there are literally decades upon decades at the very least of history behind the events that started on october 7th. and i've found that westerners seem to be desperate for some easy-to-digest, eli-5 version of it. they want fairytale morality where they can say that one side is 100% good and the other side is 100% evil. they don't want to think, to have mental/moral struggles. i think it's... naive at best, to expect something that involves decades/centuries of history and millions upon millions of people, to be that simple.

"I am just curious if you really do feel such an attachment to Israel's existence" - because it's where i was born, where my family was born, where my friends were born, the only place i've ever lived in. it's my home. it's hot and humid, the people are often rude and inconsiderate, every time it rains there's a stupid amount of flooding in the streets... and it's the only home i've ever known. is that really that hard to understand?

"I do believe that most people currently advocating for Palestine's liberation and the dissolution of Israel as a state don't want to kill or even displace all Israelis" - you know, i believe so too. that's why it's so flabbergasting to see many of the same people repeat the speaking points of different organizations that for many years have called for exactly the killing/displacement of all israelis (or at least all the jewish ones). the absolute lack of critical thinking and source-checking is infuriating. or just... the general ignorance. 99% of the people who are involved in the recent protests have probably never even heard of hamas before october 7th. honestly, considering what i've seen and heard, some of them probably still are ignorant of its existence. for fuck's sake, i've seen people think that the gaza strip is the west bank because it's located to the west.

"And as for Hamas, most people would not want Hamas as a governing body but Israel has backed all Palestinian resistance efforts especially peaceful ones into such a corner that at this point Hamas is like any violent resistance force such as the ones in Ireland, Algeria, Haiti, Vietnam or elsewhere." - can you give examples to the most recent peaceful palestinian efforts? the most recent attempt at the peace process i can think of off the top of my head is the oslo accords... possibly camp david? and i assume i don't need to explain what those were and what happened after them? but i might be missing something more recent. your mentions of other locations in the world are an excellent shout because i do believe the israeli-palestinian conflict is nothing like them. i do believe it's a unique conflict in global terms. i do think the ongoing comparisons in the west to other historical conflicts is part of the same western attempts to simplify it and make it more palatable (?) to the western audience.

"Would you disagree that the violence they enact is rooted in Israeli violence?" - to be as thorough about it as i can? no, i don't, because this (arab-jewish tensions/clashes/violence in the region of palestina/palstine/israel) goes way before the state of israel was declared. at the same time i think this is infantilizing towards palestinians. neither side's violence is just reactionary or devoid of responsibility and choice.

"Decades of brutal oppression can only lead to radicalization in this way." - what's maddening to me about this specific argument point is that the exact same thing can be said of israelis in particular and jewish people worldwide in general. (my point being that i do not accept any kind of excuse for violence against civilians and innocents, anywhere.)

"This situation is personal to me because the loss of lives is heartbreaking and I've lived in so many countries where violence not only paints the history but the present" - i appreciate your sympathy and sense of personal connection. from my perspective i can tell that since october 7th i've had to start paying a lot less attention/ignoring western opinions, or i'd have gone mad weeks ago. (not just as a form of speech. i'm so thankful for going back to therapy a few months ago.) it probably started back when i started following the russian invasion of ukraine. i've seen western reactions to the suffering of the ukrainian people and there was something very... disconnected, about those reactions. i realized that you can't... just make someone understand what it's like to live under rocket/missle/drone fire. the sound of them hitting around you. or exploding overhead. feeling the shockwave hit your body while you hide in shelter and can only hope that the roulette won't land on you this time because it was, 100% directed at you and your family and friends, at civilians, openly and unapologetically. to live in war in your own home. it's the exact same now with the current war (which is far from being the first war i've lived through). i've reached the conclusion that the only opinion that really mattes is that of palestinians and israelis. the rest just cannot begin to comprehend.

"But I've come to learn that unfortunately peace is often achieved when there is violent resistance to oppression." - and after over 75 years of violence (if we're only counting since the establishment of israel, which, i repeat, is really not the starting point of any of this, neither is the current war since october 7th), where did that get us? what did that achieve?

to which i can segue to one of my main opinions: the whole reason this conflict has been going on for so long, and only gets worse, is because more importance is being given to the past than to the future. the heads of both israeli and palestinian leaderships are stuck in the past and up their own assholes (either alternatively or at the same time, it's a true biological miracle). the only thing that will truly make a change is when people will realize that the wheels can't be turned back and we can't replicate what used to be. the only way to create a sustainable and peaceful future for both israelis and palestinians would be to give up the glorification of the past. but to be clear, i'm well aware that i'm an idealist and the chances of my ideals actually happening are nonexistent.

this post is long enough as is but i want to touch on a few more points and attempt to paint a slightly more complete picture here.

the old yishuv (if you're interested, the hebrew version of this wiki article is a lot more comprehensive, and google translate should do a good enough job on it)

Expulsions and exoduses of Jews

Jewish exodus from the Muslim world

Mizrahi Jews in Israel

Ethiopian Jews in Israel

Arab citizens of Israel

The Hamas Networks in America: A Short History

fuck bibi, fuck ben gvir, fuck smotrich, fuck levin, fuck their coalition of religious nutjobs and rightwing extremists, fuck the west bank settlers, fuck jewish terrorism, fuck jewish supremacy.

[tieflingkisser]

'Israel has turned into a Nazi society': Haim Bresheeth-Žabner deplores the rot in Israeli society

The New Arab Meets: Son of Holocaust survivors, Haim Bresheeth-Žabner who believes majority of Israel has been taught to normalise the occupation of Palestine

Professor Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, a Jewish Israeli academic, comes from a family that survived the Holocaust. He is an author, film studies scholar and filmmaker, as well as a former IDF soldier. For the last few decades, Bresheeth-Žabner has been a vocal critic of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. In a recent interview with The New Arab, Professor Bresheeth-Žabner offered his insights into the dynamics within Israeli society since Hamas's attacks on October 7 and the subsequent genocide in Gaza. Since January 7, protests against Netanyahu have persisted, prompting some to interpret them as a sign of change. However, Professor Bresheeth-Žabner holds a different perspective. To him, Israel after October 7 went from fascism, as related to the rights of Palestinians, to something akin to Nazism — a controversial comparison but one that an increasing number of Jewish voices like him are starting to make, implicitly and explicitly. An excerpt of the Q&A below is shortened for brevity.

[...]

Is there no shift taking place then?

Only 3.2% of Israeli Jews believe their state uses too much force in Gaza, while 43% perceive the force as too little. 87.4% justify casualties on the Palestinian side. If you wish to understand why Israel has no future, just look at the results of this survey [conducted by Tel Aviv University]. The figure to highlight is 3.2%. That represents the true size of the opposition to the genocide. What future is there for such a society?” Israeli society is incapable of rational thinking, they have switched to a mode of behaviour akin to full genocide and show no inclination to reflect, question, or consider the human cost or legalities of their actions.

[...]

If reconciliation is not an option in your view, what then do you see as the path forward?

The path forward is to dismantle Zionism: to oppose Zionism in every possible way. I doubt peace is achievable after the events of the last seven months. There can be no reconciliation with Zionism, just as there can be no reconciliation with colonialism or Nazism. Zionism is inherently inhumane and fascist. I believe Israelis and Zionists need a process akin to denazification, similar to what the Nazis underwent. Until then, reconciliation is not possible.

Numerous instances of genocidal rhetoric broadcast on Israeli national TV have been cited. How influential has the Israeli media been in fuelling the flames of hatred?

Israeli media dehumanises Gazans. If you follow Israeli media, you'd be oblivious to the events in Gaza. They don't depict Palestinian suffering, nor do they acknowledge them as human beings. They outrightly ignore the atrocities being committed in Gaza. When they talk about Palestinians, they portray them as nonhuman. What they show is a heroic image of their soldiers; the Israeli army is actually seen as the victims. The media proudly showcase the bombings of buildings and soldiers walking in deserted and destroyed parts of Gaza, supposedly looking for hostages and such nonsense! They certainly do not show what these soldiers do to the Palestinians.

What do you make of Israel's assertion that its actions constitute self-defence?

This did not start on October 7; it began over 125 years ago. The objective was always to control the entirety of Palestine. In his diary, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism plans the ‘transfer’ or ‘transiting’ of what he calls ‘the paupers’ – a term he uses for the Palestinian indigenous population, to the countries around Palestine to make way for Jewish settlement.” If one wonders about the reasons for the genocide, it started in the 1890s as part of Herzl's plan to depopulate Palestine. In 1948, the approach was to kill people in a village and the surrounding ones would flee. What is happening in Gaza today is an extension of Herzl's plan to empty Palestine of Palestinians. However, we, the people, are now watching, and though they may not consider us to be important, we play a crucial role by collecting evidence for future trials and by bearing witness to their war crimes.”

[noddytheornithopod]

I really don't understand the 'vote no because sovereignty' thing. Surely acknowledging Indigenous peoples in the constitution strengthens sovereignty?

I'm not the best person to ask on the issue, but I guess to start, I'd suggest looking at the Blak Sovereignty Movement website.

I would also suggest watching anti-fascist activist Tom Tanuki talk to various Indigenous activists who each have different positions on the Voice referendum (I've yet to watch the Yes video, but I am hoping to to see what the case for voting this way is from a reliable activist source that isn't just mainstream media coverage, one that understands more needs to be done).

To summarise what I understand however: basically, the idea is that acknowledging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian constitution is at best a symbolic gesture that is functionally pointless, and at worst actively assimilationist, claiming that the First Nations on this continent were the first peoples of Australia when sovereignty was never ceded to the current nation state. Radical Aboriginal activists fear that doing this will also make it easier for the government to make laws against them, and like yeah they're already finding ways to do awful things to Indigenous people but to them it's basically saying "you belong to us, therefore you can't question the laws we make of you."

From what I've heard, apparently there have been calls for constitutional recognition that actually could've been worthwhile in the sense that it would enshrine inherent rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The amendment being proposed is not that. The idea for this modern idea of constitutional recognition is something that actually originated from the Howard government. Aka, the guy who began the Northern Territory Intervention, one of the gravest human rights abuses in Australia's recent history.

The current amendment being proposed is basically an extension of this (they tried to promote constitutional recognition with the Recognise campaign but that never took off), plus the gesture of creating an elected advisory body (the latest in many ineffective Indigenous advisory bodies) that can give advice on Indigenous policy proposals in parliament, but not have the power to actually approve or veto anything. Basically, it can give advice on policy, but the government can easily ignore it (which they almost certainly will given their track record). There's a reason mining companies feel they can support it despite their interest going directly against Indigenous land rights - because they aren't threatened by it.

Would I like to be proven wrong and the success of this referendum somehow actually improves policies for Indigenous people and the government actually listens to the Voice? Of course I would. But from my understanding of Australian history, I have no reason not to believe that this is going to be weaponised to create the illusion of progress and possibly even compromise discussion of Indigenous issues by treating the Voice as some ultimate authority (despite their lack of power) full of people elected that won't dare to challenge the colonialist status quo too much.

I guess I should put a disclaimer in that I don't follow mainstream political views, the closest you'd get to what I believe in are the socialist strains of anarchism. I have an inherent distrust of systems of power, and I believe the most radical voices for Indigenous sovereignty are the ones I agree with the most. You'll find that they're calling for things like treaties instead (and ones that will actually force Indigenous sovereignty to be acknowledged and pave the way to decolonisation, not just more symbolic hogwash that can be broken like all the other treaties with Indigenous people in other settler colonial states).

I'll begin to wrap up by saying this: I'm not expecting you or anyone to agree with me. I come from a very specific perspective, and I believe in supporting the most radical calls for Blak Sovereignty, because assimilating into the current Australian state isn't going to resolve the inherent systemic racism Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders face.

I should also say that despite how the media frames it, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are more divided on the Voice referendum than people recognise. Many different perspectives are out there, some supporting the proposal, others against it. The reasons for Yes, No or any other position that may come from it can have a whole host of reasons, whether it be someone reactionary like Jacinta Price pandering to racist conservatives who think any proposed improvement for Indigenous people is going to somehow create a reverse racist dystopia, or someone more radical like Lidia Thorpe who is a staunch advocate for Indigenous sovereignty who doesn't trust the government to implement this in a way that will truly benefit Indigenous people.

Finally... I've said it before, but I despise what the discourse around this referendum has become. The enforcement of a binary viewpoint of what Yes and No and its respective supporters mean, and the amount of racism Indigenous people have had to face. I don't think I need to bring up Lidia Thorpe receiving death threats from Neo-Nazis again.

Anyway, I hope this gives some clarity to what I believe. I'm just trying to listen to who I believe are the most reliable voices on Indigenous issues, and this is the conclusion I have come to.

[fatehbaz]

“We are all lichens.” The “shifting contours” of creatures. Entities are ”bound up” with each other and with environments. Lichen are composite creatures, partially built or defined by environmental and/or “social” relationships. “More-than-human sociality”.

---

[B]ioindication [observing lichen as indicator species for health of an ecosystem] [...] gives rise to more specualtive engagements. By speculative [...]: the distributive capacity of organisms and environments to generate new modes of encounter together with new propositions for ways of being. […] Subjects, relations and milieus all have the potential to shift and transform, and are not pre-given, although they can be in-formed by sedimentations and inheritances. This is also to say that what constitutes ‘human’ is not a fixed entity, and can shift in relation […]. Here and in relation to lichens […], speculation also extends to the shifting contours of what counts as an organism […].

---

Research focusing on the symbiotic characteristics of lichens suggests that even the notion of an organism as an individual is fraught with problems, and that a more ecological notion of subjects better characterises how entities are bound up with multiple other organisms and environments.

In this way, one group of researchers working on symbiosis has suggested […] that ‘we are all lichens’. […]

Although there are approximately 13,500 ‘formally described’ lichen species (and an anticipated 25,000 actual lichens), the contours of lichens as distinct ‘species’ are also shifting, since they are organisms made up of a fungus, alga or cyanobacteria, and even a third entity in the form of yeast. The fungal partner provides the structure and protection for the lichen, while the alga produces food in the form of chlorophyll that the fungus taps for sustenance. As composite organisms and relationships situated across multiple kingdoms, lichens are further entangled with vegetation since they both live on vegetation and make substrates available to vegetations by breaking down and weathering rocks and soils. […]

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One could encounter such a lichen garden in-the-making in the Arctic, for instance, where these organisms are not only pervasive but are also key to the ecologies found there. […] Lichens, for instance, provide sustenance for reindeer and by extension Indigenous people in the Arctic, an environment where considerable changes are underway due to resource extraction in the form of mining and logging. The disruption of lichens captures the emergence of environmental justice issues […]. In Kilpisjarvi, a location in the Finnish Arctic, a debate has unfolded over time about land use conflicts which encompass biologists, reindeer herders, lichens, conservation areas, and rare flowers […]. Extractive industries, recreational housing, as well as conservation areas and biological field stations, contribute to the shifting landscape of lichens and its relations to other entities. 

In this way, Tsing has discussed the ways in which organisms can be productive of forms of ‘more-than-human sociality’. A forest, for instance, encompasses not just […] individual organisms, but also materialises and sustains the more-than-human social worlds that are made through these organisms. […] The shared ‘phytosociological associations’ and ‘multidimensional relationships’ of indicator organisms are an area of speculative possibility […].

---

The notion of engaging with organisms through their ‘point of view’ is one that now populates a wide range of environmental theory and practice. In her work on matsutake mushrooms, Tsing considers how to take into account perspective from fungal points of view, which might recast encounters with forests, where multiple overlooked ‘participants’ begin to have more marked roles in constituting ‘social relations with other beings’. […] A lichen point of view, in this case, would take seriously the ways in which this environmental subject is taking account of, and forming experiences of, its world. […] This has further consequences for how we encounter ‘the ends of the world’ as an environmental event, as well as a remaking of the worlds that we might cultivate and care for. […]

---

Text by: Jennifer Gabrys. “Sensing Lichens: From Ecological Microcosms to Environmental Subjects.” Third Text 32. 2018. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jewish Institute for Liberal Values

Published: Apr 1, 2024

A Guide to Left-wing Antisemitism 🧵

Left-wing antisemitism entails prejudice, discrimination, or hostility against Jews, based on leftist ideologies. It's especially insidious, as it often masquerades as part of a broader "Social Justice" movement.

How does antisemitism on the left compare to the far-right?

Political horseshoe theory illustrates similarities between far-left and far-right antisemitism. Despite ideological differences, both extremes view Jews as a singular malevolent group with excessive power.

Far-right antisemitism is often overt and easily identifiable, while left-wing antisemitism is typically more subtle, making it more prevalent and socially acceptable among progressives.

What does left-wing antisemitism look like?

Labeling Jews as 'Oppressors': Jews are framed as “privileged” and “oppressors” within an “intersectional” academic framework, disregarding their diverse experiences and history of persecution.

Anti-Zionism: While criticizing Israeli policies is not inherently antisemitic, denying Jewish self-determination or deeming Israel illegitimate can be.

Collective Guilt: Holding all Jews accountable for Israel's actions constitutes a form of antisemitism.

Selective Outrage: Disproportionate criticism of Israel while overlooking similar or worse actions by other countries reflects a bias against Jews.

Holocaust Revisionism: Denying or downplaying the Holocaust, often disguised as questioning historical narratives or criticizing Israel, is a form of antisemitism sometimes found on the left.

Where does left-wing antisemitism come from?

While there have been various influences, one significant contributor stems from an academic framework that emerged around the 1970s: Postcolonial Theory.

This theoretical framework was pioneered by Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, who framed Zionism as a “colonial project.”

Postcolonial Theory, like other Critical Theories, operates as a form of activist scholarship. While presenting itself as legitimate and rigorous, it prioritizes its political goals over the genuine production of knowledge.

Postcolonial Theory doesn't aim for historical accuracy. Instead, it seeks to "reenvision history" from the "perspective of the oppressed."

Within Postcolonial Theory, Israel is portrayed as a colonial, imperialist, oppressive power, while Palestinians are depicted as helpless victims without agency—even those that commit the October 7 atrocities.

This portrayal has significantly influenced perceptions, particularly in activist circles, turning the cause of "Free Palestine" into a trendy "Social Justice" issue. 

How did left-wing antisemitism spread?

Middle-eastern Funding of Universities: Undisclosed billions from the Middle East to U.S. universities have influenced academic discourse, framing the Israel-Palestine conflict as a struggle for “indigenous rights” against “colonialism.”

Social Media Activism: Social media has helped propel what was once an obscure academic field mostly confined to college campuses into an international post-colonialist movement.

DEI: Through corporate diversity programs, post-colonial concepts have become a dominant ideology in mainstream institutions, including many Jewish organizations.

Underestimating the problem: Many Jewish organizations dedicated to combating Jew hatred chose to focus on far-right antisemitism, allowing left-wing antisemitism to proliferate. 

Why the focus on left-wing antisemitism?

Many Jewish organizations already exist to tackle antisemitism associated with the far-right. While there is concern about threats on both sides of the aisle, the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV) focuses on the left.

JILV was formed in 2021 to address a specific ideology emerging on the left that has become embedded into our institutions and propagates antisemitic ideas and tropes.

Visit to learn more.

[coolasakuhncumber]

2023 in review

This has been harder than expected to pull together. I know social media is the 'glossy' version of everyone's life but in the last couple of days of the year, in the seeing of people posting about buying houses and getting married and having babies, I feel lost. I feel a great sense of emptiness. A year ago I had a sense of what 2023 would look like and what my future beyond that may be and now I don't. I feel like I'm just holding space. I need more novelty and difference in my life to separate the days from blurring into each other.

Work I started a new job I was excited about. I learnt pretty quickly that implementation is maybe not quite where I want to be, I'd rather be doing the strategic influencing work. Big reform work. I suspected this already, but it was good to have it confirmed. I liked the work travel though. The going to Brisbane and Cairns and Sydney and getting out of the national office, getting a bit more perspective.

I moved to the role to follow a senior manager and that senior manager left 5 months into me being there. Two weeks later I was approached to go back to my previous work area and they committed to meeting the requests I had. I worked two jobs for a month and a half and that was HARD. Do not recommend. It's good to be back in this policy area (for the third time!!!) and working with the manager I have. I've had some really great opportunities to step up take the lead and have senior people see what I've done. The Melbourne trip was a highlight, despite the associated difficulties.

I managed a couple of underperformers this year and was forced to grow as a manager to address the issues. I learnt that the attitude of my staff really matters, and it's ok to have the expectations I have and that I'm actually a pretty good and empathetic manager. I dealt with a situation that looked like underperformance and had a strong element of fraud to it. What a time. Not.

I showed signs of burnout for a large portion of the year. It's not ok.

Travel I meant to do Perth -> Broome this year but it fell apart and I instead spent a week in Perth, a few days in Canberra with my friend who was recovering from knee surgery, a long weekend down the south coast, a few days in Cairns, and a few days in Sydney for my step-brother's wedding. It was all good, though if I were to do it again, I'd spend less time in transit and more time in one place.

Referendum Australia had its first Referendum this century, calling for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to be enshrined in the constitution. It failed and I am still smad about it. I don't know yet how to not be angry about the misinformation and disinformation that was spread through the 'No' campaign. I truly believe Peter Dutton and other significant figures of the no campaign have blood on their hands.

I started getting undercuts as a dopamine hit to lift me out of my feelings.

Health I'm pretty damn sick hey. I need heart surgery but my lungs are too bad to allow it so we're just hanging out deteriorating. Some days are just really tough. But I did start a new medication that has helped me breathe just a little bit better and we're all holding out hope I'll continue to improve. I'm going to do what I can to improve my lungs and yeah, I might not live to be 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, but God has a plan for me and I can rest easy in that knowledge.

Relationships The thing that has probably changed the most in the last year is that Duc and I are no longer together. We haven't been since late Jan. We had talked about getting engaged in 2023, getting married not too long after. I was thinking of buying an investment property with the thought that he could live in it for a bit, then it would become a shared asset when we were committed for life.

Instead, we're no longer together. We haven't been together for a while. It's absolutely the right thing for us to not be together but man did I get used to regular companionship the almost 4 years we were a thing.

Dating sucks. Trying to date as a woman in your early 30s with a visible disability really sucks. My friends and family are fantastic and fill so many of my social and emotional needs that I'm feeling a strong sense of why bother? The desire for domesticity with one I love is why.

Jay

I love Jay. I think I have loved him for years and I let myself love him this year. I know we're not end game. I will need to let go at some point but I remain not yet ready to.

Whiskey Club

This remains one of my favourite friendship things. It's Paul and I. We eat fried chicken, drink whiskey, and talk about our feelings. It's the best. It's a form of therapy, though I sometimes suspect a professional would be good.

Disability

I have become more 'disabled' over the last couple of years and it really became more pronounced over the last 12 months. I feel limited in my life in many ways. I can't travel internationally at the moment, pending how things go I might not be able to again.

Some days I just can't breathe. When things were bad there were weeks of impromptu crying because this body sucks. Sometimes it feels like things can only go downhill from here. I don't like that. I resent it, even.

This year I became the Co-chair of my workplace's Disability Network and I've been taking action to improve policy and procedures for staff living with disability. I've been on panels, talking about some of my experiences. But I'm not 'disability proud'. If I could not have this particular set of challenges based on genetic markers, I would choose that every single time.

There's probably more work I need to do on myself here.

Some good

I did say 2023 would be the year of natural fibres and I did predominantly wear less polyester and more linen. I bought a few more dresses and I do really love the collection I have now.

2024

This year I want to continue growing. My housemate is looking to purchase property and move out with their partner and I really don't know how I'll go living alone.

I'd like to maybe go on a nice date or two? Maybe?

I want to be stronger with my boundaries.

My Mum is going to start working with me and that's equal parts exciting and worrying. I want it to work and not impact the good dynamic we have in a negative way.

Bring it on hey.

[alienscumbag]

This is such a narrow perspective it's almost insane how much it requires you to only see certain people as human to come to this conclusion (or at the very least be very ignorant about history)

Mind you Europe has quite literally decimated entire cultures off this planet and continues to exploit off of the remaining ones today so to downplay Europe's past, current and probably future actions of white supremacy as an "average colonial" behaviour and somehow not correlated to genocide is such a bad take. WW2 Germany was quite literally doing colonization... That's what that was. They were invading other countries and perpetuating white supremacy by mass murder. And what this person in the tweet is trying to say is that event was unique to nazi Germany as if any other country in Europe was not capable of (and also doing) similar actions to other people. But they were and we know they were.

There were genocides that lasted longer and killed more than those in the holocaust that are swept under the rug because it happened to poc. This take is so baffling..... And then to follow it up with "leave Belgium alone!!!" And saying the only other country that came close to Germany's depravity is Japan like.... Indigenous people all over the world are treated like second class citizens on their own land. It's common for Native Americans to be placed purely as "others" on anything related to statistics on their own land. Australia just voted no on a referendum to their constitution that would allow indigenous Australians their own body to accurately represent themselves in the government on Aboriginal matters because they're GROSSLY under-represented. These are the effects of genocides that happened because of "average colonial empires". To pretend like genocide that bad is unique to one country so you can absolve every other country's past and current actions as not genocide is horrid.

You can't be the decider that somehow some genocides are worse than others.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Magical World Of The Mayans: Leonora Carrington

* * * *

Leonora Carrington. “The Magical World of the Mayans” (1963/64) WORLD ARTS / ART LEARNING06 oct. 2021

Isabel García Trócoli

LLEGEIX-LO EN CATALÀ

Very often, when we read about the lives of creative women, we find that they are described as the muses of some male artist. But the reality was that this was the only way for them to get started in the art world for them: as someone’s muse, a fact that is repeated over and over again when we talk about the artists of Surrealism, a movement characterized by freedom of action and thought.

The same Surrealists who preached this freedom regarded their female companions as appendages of themselves: muses, helpers and lovers. Being recognised in this world was hard for female artists who, seen in perspective, were every bit as good as them. Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) claimed that she did not have time to be anyone’s muse, as busy as she was with freeing herself from her father and with her artistic learning. She paid dearly for her independence, but the difficulties of the journey brought to light an exciting inner world that she knew how to translate into an abundant and mysterious oeuvre.

Leonora Carrington was born in England and was educated in the exclusive world of high society. Her father, a businessman, presented her to the royal court after her debutante ball at the Ritz. He wanted to distance her from the Irish fantasies and myths that had populated her childhood through her mother and grandmother’s tales, in the old family neo-Gothic mansion. It was too late: Leonora’s spirit was flying high, and her supernatural visions was were compounded by her disinterest in the superficial world of the ladies’ academies. Her rebellious nature led her to run away from home after meeting Max Ernst, 46, married, one of the most prominent Surrealist artists. Immune to scandal, Leonora went to live with him in France, where she joined the group of Surrealist artists formed by Paul Éluard, Joan Miró, André Breton, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, who called her ‘the bride of the wind.

The war separated the group and also the couple: Max Ernst, a German, was arrested in France and Leonora had to escape to Spain due to the Nazi invasion. In Spain she suffered major mental imbalances that led her to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Santander. In the hands of fascist doctors, she was subjected to treatments that today we would consider inhumane, a fact that would later be decisive for her work and for her life. On the way to another hospital, this in time South Africa, that her father had found to hospitalise her in, she escaped, and in Lisbon she contacted a Mexican poet friend, Renato Leduc, who married her in order to get her out of wartime Europe. Lázaro Cárdenas’ Mexico then became her adopted country, where she would live for seventy years. The work that we will analyse next was a commission from the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico, where it is still exhibited.

The magical world of the Maya is the product of her six-month stay in Chiapas, at the home of an anthropologist friend. The Mayans in the area, fearful of Leonora’s camera, made her decide to document what she saw only with drawings and sketches. She became interested in flora and fauna, as well as in traditional medicine, medicinal herbs, and reading the Popol Vuh, the great Mayan holy book. The result is a four-meter-long painting that captures a worldview of contemporary Mayan reality, with a tripartite structure of Heaven, Earth and Underworld, where indigenous ancestral traditions are mixed with the Catholic religion. Leonora Carrington captures a symbolic landscape that constitutes a mixture of visible reality and hidden reality, an inseparable dichotomy in the Mayan conception of the world.

The central representation is a colonial-style temple, similar to the church of Santo Domingo de San Cristóbal de las Casas, with the convent on the left. Peasants work in the area and some people carry a Virgin in procession. Nearby is a calvary of twenty-two crosses that look like swords, with others rising towards a large cross/totem created from corn plants. This is the pantheon of Romerillo, in San Juan Chamula, where the crosses mark the funeral space of each family. The cross, for today’s Mayans, is an axis of the world that connects Heaven, Earth and Underworld. In the church, the two stone eagles, reminiscent of the coat of arms of the king of the conquerors, Emperor Charles I, are contrasted by a large quetzal that flies over the building, the sacred Mayan bird syncretised with the dove of the Holy Spirit. Leonora draws a parallel with the Celtic culture of Ireland, where ancient pagan ideas are mixed with the new sacred figures brought by Christianity.

In Heaven, from left to right, we have the Moon, the goddess Ixchel, and, below, three small female figures with bird legs climbing up the rainbow. They are related to Ixchel, the most important female deity in the Mayan pantheon, who presides over childbirth, pregnancy, fertility of the land and women, and healing. The Sun is in charge of giving strength to men, but the painter represents it as obscured by a black cloud. There is also the planet Venus, a large bright star also symbolised by the great green snake, crossed by the rainbow and the quetzal. Kukulcán (or Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent) is the combination of these two animals, which personify Heaven and Earth. This is a creative god, as explained in the Popol Vuh, who also presides over the processes of renewal and transformation, the eternal return of the cosmos. At the far right is a bright being, Totilmeil, a hummingbird, the bird the ancestors chose to manifest themselves. The mountains complete the picture, with a multitude of animals flying over them, perhaps the nahuales. The Mayans believed that each person has a supernatural protector, the nahuatl, who is embodied in an animal, and usually lives near the mountain trails that connect the different villages.

A white ceiba, Yaxché (“first, the tree”), is the Mayan cosmic tree, the vertical axial element that holds this tripartite cosmos together. A flock of owls, funerary animals and a bad omen, flies towards the ceiba. Perhaps related to this, on the other side of the tree, inside a hut, a man lying in bed is mourned by a woman with long black braids, while a shaman performs his healing rituals with candles, and another woman, at the bottom of the hut, grinds the corn into a metate, the manual stone mill. Around the hut are three large bats, animals associated with medicine among the native Mesoamerican peoples. They symbolise the ritual death of shamanic healing, which helps people leave their diseases behind and be reborn in health. The bat is alive, upside down, in the same way we are born through the womb.

Pines, closely associated with candles among the Maya (due to torches), appear surrounding the huts of the painting. Candles and torches are considered the food of the gods. At the foot of the pines, a face—perhaps Jesus Christ—seems to have been projected from the nearby chapel. In front of the chapel, there is a huge white horse, an animal that is often featured in works by Leonora Carrington and that is supposed to be her alter ego (in England she had been an experienced horsewoman). The horse is also the manifestation of the Celtic goddess Epona, protector of nature and life as well as of healing and death. Underground, the head of a jaguar with a spiral-shaped eye recalls one of the gods of Xibalbà, the Mayan Hell, populated by demonic beings specialised in the torment of human souls.

In Mexico, Leonora Carrington was able to develop her oeuvre exercising her freedom by creating paintings, sculptures, furniture, literature and scenery, along with her second husband, Emérico Csiki Weisz, an emigrated Hungarian photographer, assistant to Robert Capa, and the mastermind of the rescue of the famous Mexican suitcase with thousands of negatives from the Spanish Civil War. In the kitchen of her house on Chihuahua Street in the Roma neighbourhood of Mexico City, now a museum, Leonora shared memorable evenings with Catalan painter Remedios Varo and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna, all three united by the anti-fascist struggle of their youth and by Surrealism. No muses among them. In one of the few interviews she gave, when asked who Leonora Carrington was, she said: “someone who has survived so far with a lot of “cabrón” (effing) work, as they say in Mexico. That’s why I don’t like being called a muse either”.

[blautitlewave]

One of the thousands of frustrating things about this Israel v. Palestine thing is how brainwashed Zionists are. Cuz that's what it is. Brainwashing. If they lived in Israel they were given the same indoctrination spiel that every American had up until very recently. If they were raised anywhere else and then traveled to Israel they were also hit with brainwashing about why it's so important and vital that Jews have Israel, why all the meanies surrounding them just want to see the extinction of the Jewish people, why it's necessary and right to have a military as brutal as it is. It's predicated on this fear of extinction that was very much a real threat 80 years ago with the Holocaust, but it wasn't Muslims who organized the whole thing, it was Christians. Christians have probably been the most prolific threat to Jewish existence over the centuries.

And what is so fucking frustrating is that the arguments and beliefs that Zionists have are the exact, exact, exact same beliefs that Europeans had when colonizing and terrorizing indigenous peoples. "They're not using the land right." "It's in God's plan." "This land was destined for us." It does not fucking matter that you were once persecuted to the point of genocide, it does not matter if the people you are targeting are lobbing shit back at you, and it doesn't matter even IF they supposedly also plan to exterminate you. You don't get to commit genocide, no one does, not for any reason or with any historical argument or in any context. And no, just because you experienced one of the most extreme forms of genocide does not mean that you can turn around and say that anything less than the Holocaust is 'not a genocide'. That logic is how genocides go unchecked and manifest in the future. And by the by, the word "genocide" was coined in 1944 by the Jewish Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the horrific crimes committed during the Nazi occupation of Poland against both Jews and non-Jews, so using the genocide of Jews as the sterling example of genocide feels like a deliberate overshadowing and monopolization of trauma, terror, and destruction that vulnerable underprivileged groups have faced and continue to face by a State. Genocides happen because one group has the power to destroy another people and thus do it. It does not matter if the group doing it is doing it out of "self-defense".

All this does is remind me of how Whites in the South were terrified of black slave uprisings because 1) They constituted a sizeable population in the region, and 2) Despite all the religion and pseudoscience and economic justifications for slavery, Whites knew exactly what they'd done to slaves and were terrified of what retribution would look like from those who had been mistreated for so long.

That is the position that the Zionist Israeli government is in. Even if they believe Palestinians to be inferior, even if they believe Palestinians to be a thorn in their side that should vamoose, they know that all of their policies are, from the most emotionally intelligent perspective, more than enough to inspire terrorism. But the enduring issue, and the heart of this genocide, is that they don't recognize Palestinians as innately possessing the full faculties that they would otherwise recognize in other human beings. Because they are Palestinian, they are not fully people in part because of what they represent (a people that existed before Israel's founding), and the only way to fully solidify Israel's sense of self is to erase all traces of "Before the Nation". That's what it is at the end of the day. It's just European-derived genocidal state-making right AFTER a genocide had just occurred on another continent. The Jews that helped found Israel deliberately copied the Western blueprints for colonization because they were inundated with European ideas to "re-transplant" themselves into a land that has been dealing with Western incursion for centuries to fast-track them into creating a nation state that then turned around and labelled Palestinians as non-citizens, or people that were not to receive full rights because that's how the state functions, as a purveyor of violence through legal bullshit. The Jews that founded Israel took the pain and suffering they experienced and decided that their desire for a new nation outweighed the pain and suffering that other people would experience because of it, because borders are always stained with blood.

But oh we can't say that because for some reason being victims of a genocide means you're given carte blanche to inflict similar pain onto other people so long as the numbers aren't too high and you have the "anti-semitism!" card to pull out whenever someone criticizes your policies. Policies which are apartheid in nature at best.

Zionist Jews are no different from the Manifest Destiny Christians of yore, who now exist in the more palatable and marketable guise of missionaries. Gag me with this 'oh it's different this time because X, Y, Z" bullshit. It's the same song played in a different time signature, that's all it fucking is.

[adrianodiprato]

+ “We have our eye on the same destination – a sustainable future where Indigenous people are recognised for their wisdom and honoured for their culture.” – Kirstie Parker 

Whose Voice is Missing?

In a world filled with noise, sometimes it's the voices we don't hear that matter the most. The power of listening, truly listening, goes far beyond mere hearing; it's about acknowledging the stories left untold, the perspectives left unspoken, and the lives left unrecognised. In this blog post, I want to explore the profound significance of listening to the missing voices, especially in the context of Australia's rich tapestry of cultures and histories.

The Need for Indigenous Voices

Australia is a nation with a complex past, where Indigenous peoples have endured centuries of struggle and resilience. As we stand on the precipice of an important referendum on Saturday 14 October 2023, we must confront a fundamental question: Whose voice is missing?

For too long, Indigenous voices have been marginalised and silenced in the broader narrative of our nation. It's a narrative marked by historical injustices, discrimination, and a failure to genuinely engage with Indigenous communities in shaping their own destinies.

In 2016 and 2017, the Referendum Council led a series of Regional Dialogues to discuss options for constitutional recognition with First Nations people from all corners of the country. The purpose of these First Nations Regional Dialogues was not only to ensure that Aboriginal voices were heard but also to place Indigenous decision-making at the heart of the process.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart

The stories that were shared in those Dialogues were collected, and, along with the Records of Meetings, presented to the First Nations Constitutional Convention at Uluru in May 2017. The Convention endorsed the work of the Dialogues, and approximately 250 First Nations delegates came together to issue the Uluru Statement from the Heart to the Australian people.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a resounding call by First Nations people for genuine and practical change in Australia. It seeks to deliver constitutional recognition through a Voice to Parliament and the establishment of a Makarrata Commission, which will oversee processes of treaty-making and truth-telling.

Within the Uluru Statement from the Heart lies a powerful passage:

"With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood."

This statement is a profound testament to the vision and generosity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples toward the Australian nation. It offers the promise that, if we enact these reforms correctly, it will not only benefit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but will also enrich our shared sense of identity and nationhood. It will strengthen our collective humanity, our collective sense of belonging, and our collective story.

Personal Journey and the Impact of Michael Tuhanuku

My journey of understanding and embracing the stories and struggles of Indigenous Australians has been deeply transformative. I've come to realise that for Indigenous Australians, as for all peoples who have suffered from discrimination and exclusion, history is not just a distant past; it's a living, breathing part of their identity. It's a history marked by painful and often murderous accounts of being driven off the land they had called home for thousands of years. So much more than land was stolen from them after the arrival of European settlers—camping grounds, sacred sites, access to food, culture, their rightful place among Australians, and their inherent dignity. This loss became crystal clear to me, particularly when I delved into the heartbreaking story of the stolen generations—the historic forced removal of children from their families under cruelly racist assumptions about what was best for them.

However, my education on these matters didn't solely come from books and documentaries. It came from my encounters with First Nations students and their families, particularly one student who left an indelible mark on my perspective—Michael Tuhanuku. Michael's heritage was part Australian and part Solomon Islander, and he identified very closely with his Solomon Island roots. He joined the school I was working at several years ago, entering Year 10, and quickly seized opportunities to engage with all aspects of his learning and the life of the school.

Through the school's rugby program, ministry, and community outreach, as well as comprehensive academic and creative offerings, including his participation in a three-week Visual Arts tour of Italy, Michael quickly established his voice and shared his unique story. Michael was, and still is, a renaissance man, a young individual of genuine integrity, character, and broad leadership attributes. In his final year, when he was appointed as College Captain in 2015, the entire school community, especially his peers, welcomed this decision with enthusiasm.

I distinctly remember our conversation when I asked him about his goals as Captain. One of the first things he expressed was his desire for our community to find a more authentic way to recognise Indigenous Australians. For Michael, authentic recognition meant going beyond mere words; it meant tangible actions.

Throughout 2015, in his characteristic subtle leadership style, Michael continued to challenge our school community regarding what we were doing in this space. One notable initiative was his collaboration with students, staff, and local Elders to craft an appropriate Acknowledgment of Country for the school. For Michael, having a voice wasn't sufficient; that voice needed to lead to agency through advocacy for others. While he himself was not Aboriginal, his unwavering passion for justice and genuine reconciliation inspired all of us, including myself, to reevaluate our roles and responsibilities.

I had previously considered myself a person with great empathy for our Indigenous brothers and sisters. Still, through my conversations with Michael, I came to realise that there was so much more I needed to learn and do in response to what I was discovering. His challenge prompted me to ask myself, "What are we, what am I, doing at our school to truly animate the rich and remarkable story of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples? What was missing?"

I felt compelled to take action and educate myself further on this issue. I formed the belief that it was essential for all Australians not to keep the history of First Nations people a mystery. As a Christian, I saw parallels in the mystery of God's action in our world, drawing us beyond what we can comprehend or hope for. Similarly, I believed that we are invited to allow history to be a mystery in the fullest sense of the word. It's more than a dry recital of dates, places, and events. It's a story of humanity that makes a claim on us all—a story of good and evil, suffering and resilience, crime and reconciliation, contempt and respect. It transcends history to become the power of storytelling and education—a power that can heal and build true reconciliation.

And as Peter Malinauskas, Premier of South Australia, aptly puts it,

“If our forefathers and mothers can say yes to universal franchise, if our great grandparents can say yes to waves of migration, if our grandparents can say yes in 1967, if our parents can say yes to land rights, then this generation is capable of saying yes to an advisory committee.”

This quote reminds us that change is a generational endeavour, and it serves as a bridge to the profound message of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Reconciliation and the Power of Storytelling

National Reconciliation Week, with its poignant milestones like National Sorry Day and the 1967 Referendum anniversary, serves as a powerful reminder of the shared history that binds us all. It's a history that carries the marks of suffering, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for recognition and dignity.

The stories we tell and the stories we listen to have the power to shape our understanding of the world. They serve as bridges to empathy and bridges toward reconciliation. In this context, Michael's story and the stories of countless others challenge us to ask: Whose voices have been absent from our narratives of history and reconciliation?

Dadirri and Deep Listening

Dadirri—an Indigenous practice rooted in deep listening, quiet awareness, and waiting—is a concept that resonates with the very heart of reconciliation. It's an invitation to attune ourselves to a deeper understanding of the beauty of nature, the power of healing, and the voices that often go unheard.

As Australians, we're called to do more than simply acknowledge history; we're invited to embrace it as a mystery that reveals both our flaws and our potential for growth. Dadirri, with its emphasis on reflection, contemplation, and respect, offers a path toward understanding and healing.

Conclusion: The Voice is an Invitation to Listen

In 1967, Australians voted to allow Indigenous Australians to be counted in the Census. In 2023, I'm voting yes to do more than count Indigenous Australians; I'm voting yes to give them a voice and a deep sense of belonging.

Dadirri reminds us that deep listening is an act of respect—for ourselves, our fellow humans, and the Earth we share. It's a practice that can guide us toward a better way of educating, living in society, and understanding one another. As you read this, remember the Australian Aboriginal proverb:

"We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home."

This ancient wisdom teaches us that our time here is limited, but our impact can be profound when we open our ears and hearts to others.

I challenge you to join me on this profound journey of listening, learning, and love by embracing the missing voices that can shape a brighter future for us all.

Adriano Di Prato is a best-selling author, broadcaster and the Academic Operations Manager at LCI Melbourne, a progressive art, design & enterprise private higher education institute.

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The Writing of History in Ancient Egypt (II)

Roberto B. Gozzoli The Writing of History in Ancient Egypt during the First Millennium BC (ca. 1070-180 BC). Trends and Perspectives, Golden House Publications, 2006, GHP Egyptology 5 (excerpts from the Introduction)

“Annals and royal list occupy two precise spots in any discussions of Egyptian history. While the term has been already encountered for Thutmose III’s accounts of his military achievements, by annals I here intend a recollection with a lengthy description of events relative to the various spheres of royal activity (cultic, military, and civil), placed in chronological order. In ancient Egypt, the first known  example is the Palermo Stone, while the other instance is the Sixth Dynasty Annals recently published by Dobrev and Baud. 31 Both of them limit any information to the name of the king, cattle census, height of the inundation and the most relevant events. Such a mention however, is very often reduced to what can be called the label of an event and finally the level of the Nile: “’Following of Horus; creating (an image of) Min, 2 cubits, 3 palms, two-and-three-quarters”.32 Most of the king’s lists are essentially cultic. They come from temples -Thutmose III’s Room of the Ancestors at Karnak, Sethi I and Ramesses II from Abydos, Ramesses II’s Ramesseum and Ramesses III’s Medinet Habu- and are celebrative: the ruling pharaoh is represented as offering to his predecessors, who are distant temporally, or venerable for fame or antiquity.33 In effect, the reverence to illustrious ancestors was probably dependent from the legitimacy they cried for: Thutmose III wanted to reassert his rights after stepmother Hatshepsut disappeared from the scene. In the case of the Ramessides (Sethi I and Ramesses II, Ramesses III), they feared to be considered as parvenus. Therefore, a desire to create links with legitimate kings was at the base of this appropriation of the past.34

Amongst the royal material, I have mentioned the archives. The only survived royal archive is constituted by the cuneiform letters from Amarna, which I have earlier introduced. Their value in order to reconstruct the political map of Levant during the fourteenth century BC and the ideology permeating them is self evident.The main problem however, is that the documentation is unidirectional: most of the tablets come from abroad, but very few are from the pharaohs to the foreign kings.Therefore, sequences of events and reactions to single letters can be only guesswork.

The only documentary king-list survived from ancient Egypt is the so-called Royal Canon of Turin.35 Its precise origin and scope are open to discussion, as it is  written on a reverse of papyrus reporting a discarded tax-list of Ramesside age. It is essentially a compilation of partial king-lists of different historical periods, giving royal names and regnal years, sometimes detailed to the day. Like the annals, the Royal Canon is fundamental in order to reconstruct Egyptian chronology; but no other historical flesh is inserted.

The same point done for the royal inscriptions is substantially valid for the private biographies.36 They are fundamental to reconstruct careers and genealogies, but only in few cases give precise and detailed information about events the officials directly participated.37

About histories composed by indigenous writers, Manetho wrote his Aegyptiaca at the beginnings of the third century BC during the early stages of the Ptolemaic rule. His historical work is just survived in later works, but his dynastic divisions are still in use by Egyptologists.38 Anticipating here some of the conclusion to this work, when the historical material preserved by later excerptors is considered, his history looks like much more a sequence of mirabilia or memorabilia. And as it will be seen in chapter six, Manetho follows the pattern of Egyptian history already used by Herodotus a couple of centuries earlier.”

On line source with the entirety of the thesis https://href.li/?https://www.academia.edu/359798/The_Writing_of_History_in_Ancient_Egypt_during_the_First_Millennium_BC_ca_1070_180_BC_Trends_and_Perspectives