#stand with indigenous people

[chaithetics]

The Long Struggle of the Kanak People

Please read this to learn more about the oppression and colonisation that the Kanak people have suffered from the French government it is important that we learn and listen to lived experiences, indigenous voices are so rarely given this platform.

Nobody is truly free until we're all free and that includes all indigenous peoples in every corner of the world! If you stand with Palestine, you stand with the Kanak peoples as well!

[originalleftist]

(Content Warning: Self-Harm/S***ide).

The labeling of Nex Benedict's murder as a "suicide" by Oklahoma officials, and seemingly most media outlets' unthinking repetition of this, as well as of the narrative of a "fight" (implying equal guilt on both sides) has filled me with a specific kind of rage that I have seldom felt since Trump was in office. I genuinely feel the desire to do violence. I won't, and I know it would likely be worse than pointless, but the feeling is there.

And you know what, even if it was a "suicide", it wouldn't fucking matter. I know for most people it's probably just an excuse to victim-blame and let the murderers off the hook, but if a child commits suicide after being bullied and beaten by their classmates, THAT'S STILL A FUCKING MURDER.

Nex Benedict, trans indigenous child, was murdered by fellow students, with the indirect complicity of school staff, the State of Oklahoma, the Republican Fascist Party, and the Christian Right.

[soxiyy]

From Levantine_gay on insta

[nixieofthenorth]

Are really Saami or just pretending? Which country are you from? (Norway, Finland, Sweden or Russia)

Hi, I’m northern Saami and I live in Sweden.

My indigenous lineage goes back several generations in both Sweden and Finland.

Also the only pretendian when it comes to Saami culture is Freyja Nordling.

Btw, where are you from anon and do you have indigenous lineage?

[telekitnetic-art]

slightly late to this but happy Indigenous People’s Day!! I already made a whole thread of my formline art on Twitter, so instead I just wanted to share some of my favourite formline artwork I’ve made so far here!!

[naivety]

So long as the political and economic system remains intact, voter enfranchisement, though perhaps resisted by overt white supremacists, is still welcomed so long as nothing about the overall political arrangement fundamentally changes. The facade of political equality can occur under violent occupation, but liberation cannot be found in the occupier’s ballot box. In the context of settler colonialism voting is the “civic duty” of maintaining our own oppression. It is intrinsically bound to a strategy of extinguishing our cultural identities and autonomy.

[...]

Since we cannot expect those selected to rule in this system to make decisions that benefit our lands and peoples, we have to do it ourselves. Direct action, or the unmediated expression of individual or collective desire, has always been the most effective means by which we change the conditions of our communities. What do we get out of voting that we cannot directly provide for ourselves and our people? What ways can we organize and make decisions that are in harmony with our diverse lifeways? What ways can the immense amount of material resources and energy focused on persuading people to vote be redirected into services and support that we actually need? What ways can we direct our energy, individually and collectively, into efforts that have immediate impact in our lives and the lives of those around us? This is not only a moral but a practical position and so we embrace our contradictions. We’re not rallying for a perfect prescription for “decolonization” or a multitude of Indigenous Nationalisms, but for a great undoing of the settler colonial project that comprises the United States of America so that we may restore healthy and just relations with Mother Earth and all her beings. Our tendency is towards autonomous anti-colonial struggles that intervene and attack the critical infrastructure that the U.S. and its institutions rest on. Interestingly enough, these are the areas of our homelands under greatest threat by resource colonialism. This is where the system is most prone to rupture, it’s the fragility of colonial power. Our enemies are only as powerful as the infrastructure that sustains them. The brutal result of forced assimilation is that we know our enemies better than they know themselves. What strategies and actions can we devise to make it impossible for this system to govern on stolen land? We aren’t advocating for a state-based solution, redwashed European politic, or some other colonial fantasy of “utopia.” In our rejection of the abstraction of settler colonialism, we don’t aim to seize colonial state power but to abolish it. We seek nothing but total liberation.

Voting Is Not Harm Reduction - An Indigenous Perspective

[alternativeulster]

my heart is with all our trans siblings in the choctaw nation. ireland mourns with you, forever and always.

donate to nex's funeral expenses here

[bringherhome7]

Shani Gabay, 25, was a law school graduate who loved dogs, traveling, and singing. On October 7th, she escaped the Nova Music festival and took shelter in a bomb shelter nearby. After Hamas terrorists threw grenades into the shelter, she was severely injured but managed to escape. After being treated by a medic, she tried to take cover inside an ambulance with other festival-goers, but terrorists launched an RPG and burnt the ambulance down, killing everyone inside. Shani was initially considered missing, and her brother Aviel said "She knows everyone. We keep meeting people at the rallies who see her photo and know her from Costa Rica, or the army, or their studies. She cleans beaches and saves cats and dogs. I want to believe she’ll continue doing all of that."However, 48 days after October 7th, her DNA was found at another girl’s grave, as their bodies had melted together. The remains were separated as much as possible so she could be buried alone and in dignity.We will remember you as the beautiful soul you were.May Shani’s memory forever be a blessing.

[dejwrldarchived]

picture this, you’re a boy from guatemala standing outside a motel talking to your family on the phone until two cops approach you saying that you look suspicious. due to you barely knowing english, you most likely are confused as ever trying to figure out not only what they’re saying but what even is going on. the situation escalated even more to the point where these officers are now falsely detaining you which led to one officer having a heart attack and dying. now picture this, you’re now being charged with manslaughter for death of said officer.

that’s what happened to virgilio aguilar mendez.

please be sure to sign the petition also.

[mueritos]

happy indigenous peoples day ^-^ a year ago i found out my family is half indigenous, so ive made it a personal duty to try and reconnect in order to honor those ancestors and histories. it's not my fault that I may never know my tribal affiliation (we know they lived around Popocatépetl), but it is my responsibility to do my best to honor them. since starting grad school, i've made an effort to talk about my indigenous roots more often, and to be honest about the fact that i do consider myself mixed indigenous. I also talk about this taking into account that I have white privilege, and how this has complicated my relationship to indiginiety.

anyway, i went to an ipd event outside of boston today and was so happy!! i had to leave early for a health emergency (thank u random uti) but it was so fun and i experienced and learned a lot. loved the mexica dance group who danced for Huitzilopochtli (i love you Huitzilopochtli he was pulled for me during a tarot reading and he told me to be fucking strong!!!!), and i especially loved experiencing the seven sacred directions where the entire crowd moved as one. i talked to some lovely indigenous people and they gave me so much guidance and love! it made me feel so happy...I wish I was able to stay longer, but I enjoyed being in a space where I was so welcomed.

if you're detribalized like me or trying your best to reconnect, never be ashamed of the fact that you were forcibly removed from your tribal affiliation. never be ashamed of how you look like either! there were so many "white passing" indigenous folks there embracing and celebrating with those in full regalia, and so many people of many appearances joined in for ceremonial dance. even if you're 10% or 3% indigenous, I still think you deserve to know your ancestor's culture and history! i still think you deserve to honor those parts of you! they wanted us to forget about our indigenous roots for a reason, and i refuse to colonize my mind any longer. opening yourself up to indigineity, even if you don't know your affiliation or "how much" is in you, is far better than never learning a damn thing about indigenous folks.

i hope everyone had a lovely indigenous peoples day ^-^

[hussyknee]

Randomly googled what happened to the indigenous people of Haiti and it broke my heart. There's none of them left! Across the Carribbean, the Spanish alone killed 12 to 15 million indigenous people.

I also stumbled across a website called History Reclaimed on the first page of google results about "The Myth of New World Genocide". I thought, hmm, maybe liberals aren't worse than the right wing after all, but then I remembered that white liberals also don't believe that the 57 million indigenous people eradicated across the Americas count as a genocide because there's still some of them left. So now I think natives had the right idea from the start about scalping white people.

[soxiyy]

“Ashkenazi Jews are white” i can’t even count how many times people have thought I’m Iranian.

[cipher-the-sidhe]

I want to go to the fishermen’s market one morning, grab an urchin right out of the day’s catch, crack it open with my hands and just start suckin down the meat like a rabid seal while keeping direct eye contact with the fisherman.

[screambirdscreaming]

I used to like saying "gender is a social construct," but I stopped saying that because people didn't tend to react well - they thought that I was saying gender wasn't real, or didn't matter, or could be safely ignored without consequences. Which has always baffled me a bit as an interpretation, honestly, because many things are social constructs - like money, school, and the police - and they certainly have profound effects on your life whether or not you believe in them. And they sure don't go away if you ignore them.

Anyway. What I've taken to saying instead is, "gender is a cultural practice." This gives more of a sense of respect for the significance gender holds to many people. And it also opens the door to another couple layers of analysis.

Gender is cultural. It is not globally or historically homogeneous. It shifts over time, develops differently in different communities, and can be influenced by cross-cultural contact. Like many, many aspects of culture, the current status of gender is dramatically influenced by colonialism. Colonial gender norms are shaped by the hierarchical structure of imperialist society, and enforced onto colonized cultures as part of the project of imperial cultural hedgemony.

Gender is practiced. What constitutes a gender includes affects and behaviors, jobs or areas of work, skillsets, clothing, collective and individual practices of gender affiliation and affirmation. Any or all of these things, in any combination, depending on the gender, the culture, and the practitioner.

Gender encompasses shared cultural archetypes. These can include specific figures - gods and goddesses, mythic or fictional characters, etc - or they can be more abstract or general. The Wise Woman, Robin Hood, the Dyke, the Working Man, the Plucky Heroine, the Effete Gay Man, etc etc. The range of archetypes does not circumscribe a given gender, that is, they're not all there is to gender. But they provide frameworks and reference points by which people relate to gender. They may be guides for ways to inhabit or practice a gender. They may be stereotypes through which the gendered behavior of others is viewed.

Gender as a framework can be changed. Because it is created collectively, by shared acknowledgement and enforcement by members of society. Various movements have made significant shifts in how gender is structured at various times and places. The impact of these shifts has been widely variable - for example, depending on what city I'm in, even within my (fairly culturally homogeneous) home country, the way I am gendered and reacted to changes dramatically. Looping back to point one, we often speak of gender in very broad terms that obscure significant variability which exists on many scales.

Gender is structured recursively. This can be seen in the archetypes mentioned above, which range from extremely general (say, the Mother) to highly specific (the PTA Soccer Mom). Even people who claim to acknowledge only two genders will have many concepts of gendered-ways-of-being within each of them, which they may view and react to VERY differently.

Gender is experienced as an external cultural force. It cannot be opted out of, any more than living in a society can be opted out of. Regardless of the internal experience of gender, the external experience is also present. Operating within the shared cultural understanding of gender, one can aim to express a certain practice of gender - to make legible to other people how it is you interface with gender. This is always somewhat of a two-way process of communication. Other people may or may not perceive what you're going for - and they may or may not respect it. They may try to bring your expressed gender into alignment with a gender they know, or they might parcel you off into your own little box.

Gender is normative. Within the structure of the "cultural mainstream," there are allowable ways to practice gender. Any gendered behavior is considered relative to these standards. What behavior is allowed, rewarded, punished, or shunned is determined relative to what is gender normative for your perceived gender. Failure to have a clearly perceivable gender is also, generally, punished. So is having a perceivable gender which is in itself not normative.

Gender is taught by a combination of narratives, punishments, and encouragements. This teaching process is directed most strongly towards children but continues throughout adulthood. Practice of normatively-gendered behaviors and alignment with 'appropriate' archetypes is affirmed, encouraged, and rewarded. Likewise 'other'- gendered behavior and affinity to archetypes is scolded, punished, or shunned. This teaching process is inherently coercive, as social acceptance/rejection is a powerful force. However it can't be likened to programming, everyone experiences and reacts to it differently. Also, this process teaches the cultural roles and practices of both (normative) genders, even as it attempts to force conformity to only one.

Gender regulates access to certain levers of social power. This one is complicated by the fact that access to levers of social power is also affected by *many* other things, most notably race, class, and citizenship. I am not going to attempt to describe this in any general terms, I'm not equipped for that. I'll give a few examples to explain what I'm talking about though. (1) In a social situation, a man is able to imply authority, which is implicitly backed by his ability to intimidate by yelling, looming, or threatening physical violence. How much authority he is perceived to have in response to this display is a function of his race and class. It is also modified by how strongly he appears to conform to a masculine ideal. Whether or not he will receive social backlash for this behavior (as a separate consideration to how effective it will be) is again a function of race/class/other forms of social standing. (2) In a social situation, a woman is able to invoke moral judgment, and attempt to modify the behavior of others by shame. The strength of her perceived moral authority depends not just on her conformity to ideal womanhood, but especially on if she can invoke certain archetypes - such as an Innocent, a Mother, or better yet a Grandmother. Whether her moral authority is considered a relevant consideration to influence the behavior of others (vs whether she will be belittled or ignored) strongly depends on her relative social standing to those she is addressing, on basis of gender/race/class/other.

[Again, these examples are *not* meant to be exhaustive, nor to pass judgment on employing any social power in any situation. Only to illustrate what "gendered access to social power" might mean. And to illustrate that types of power are not uniform and may play out according to complex factors.]

Gender is not based in physical traits, but physical traits are ascribed gendered value. Earlier, I described gender as practiced, citing almost entirely things a person can do or change. And I firmly believe this is the core of gender as it exists culturally - and not just aspirationally. After the moment when a gender is "assigned" based on infant physical characteristics, they are raised into that gender regardless of the physical traits they go on to develop (in most circumstances, and unless/until they denounce that gender.) The range of physical traits like height, facial shape, body hair, ability to put on muscle mass - is distributed so that there is complete overlap between the range of possible traits for people assigned male and people assigned female. Much is made of slight trends in things that are "more common" for one binary sex or the other, but it's statistically quite minor once you get over selection bias. However, these traits are ascribed gendered connotations, often extremely strongly so. As such, the experience of presented and perceived gender is strongly effected by physical traits. The practice of gender therefore naturally expands to include modification of physical traits. Meanwhile, the social movements to change how gender is constructed can include pushing to decrease or change the gendered association of physical traits - although this does not seem to consistently be a priority.

Gender roles are related to the hypothetical ability to bear children, but more obliquely than is often claimed. It is popular to say that the types of work considered feminine derive from things it is possible to do while pregnant or tending small children. However, research on the broader span of human history does not hold this up. It may be true of the cultures that gave immediate rise to the colonial gender roles we are familiar with - secondary to the fact that childcare was designated as women's work. (Which it does not have to be, even a nursing infant doesn't need to be with the person who feeds it 24 hours a day.) More directly, gender roles have been influenced by structures of social control aiming for reproductive control. In the direct precursors of colonial society, attempts to track paternal lineage led to extreme degrees of social control over women, which we still see reflected in normative gender today. Many struggles for women's liberation have attempted to push back these forms of social control. It is my firm opinion that any attempt to re-emphasize childbearing as a touchstone of womanhood is frankly sick. We are at a time where solidarity in struggle for gender liberation, and for reproductive rights, is crucial. We need to cast off shackles of control in both fights. Trying to tie childbearing back to womanhood hobbles both fights and demeans us all.

Gender is baked deeply enough into our culture that it is unlikely to ever go away. Many people feel strongly about the practice of gender, in one way or another, and would not want it to. However we have the power to change how gender is structured and enforced. We can push open the doors of what is allowable, and reduce the pain of social punishment and isolation. We can dismantle another of the tools of colonial hedgemony and social control. We can change the culture!

[telekitnetic-art]

Also a friendly reminder that not only is it pride month, but it is also National Indigenous History Month in Canada!! There are lots of LGBTQ Indigenous people out there, and lots of indigenous culture-aligned identities and traditions that could 100% be seen as queer were deemed “sinful” by colonizers and attempts to wipe them out from culture and history were made. Lots of Indigenous people and nations are still working to reignite and recover traditions, practices, and teachings that colonizers attempted to destroy, and there are also lots of 2-spirit and LGBTQ indigenous people just trying to get by overall.

Remember to give them your support as well; I am proud of being LGBTQ but I find that pride month sometimes overshadows National Indigenous History Month and lots of LGBTQ BIPOC voices are drowned out by white LGBTQ people. We are all deserving of the same respect and opportunities that non-BIPOC people get, so remember to be respectful to Indigenous people this month as well (this should be true all year but sometimes people need a reminder). There are lots of charities you can find online focused on supporting LGBTQ Indigenous people and revitalizing queer Indigenous culture, and there are also lots of individual LGBTQ Indigenous people with open commissions online or with donation links that you can help out, and you could change someone’s day entirely by ensuring they have enough money for food or rent or medicine.

Overall, to my fellow Indigenous LGBTQ+ people, I hope this month is kind to you <3 remember to take pride in who you are.

[11oh1]