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A dance that never ends

[Prints available here]

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love her. get his ass kiyohime

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(via)

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Man trapped at the bottom of an old well has been declared largely uninteresting, will not be rescued

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Birdcage Paper Dolls by Nurd Design (Diego Gómez) at Etsy.

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So I don't know if I've pulled this post together entirely as I would like to, it's not perfect, but I don't want to linger on it all day so just getting it down was more important to me.

Something I think about often, as an Indigenous person, is the contrast between how people online, especially settlers, or folks with distant Indigenous ancestry but no real connection to their nation, talk about things like the Wendigo, versus how our actual cultures relate to sacred stories, taboos, and the act of carrying those teachings forward.

There’s a modern trend where people treat words like “Wendigo” as inherently cursed or dangerous, almost in a superstitious, horror movie way. You’ll see posts that say “don’t say the word,” “don’t include it in media,” “white people shouldn’t touch this,” "Make sure you censor it," and so on. And while I get that it’s often coming from a place of wanting to protect something, it’s also deeply disconnected from any living cultural framework.

It becomes performance. The loudest voices are usually not people grounded in community teachings, but people trying to wield indigenous people as a kind of online moral weapon.

In many Indigenous cultures, there are story taboos. There are stories that are only told in winter, or only told to certain people, or in certain contexts.

There are stories that are sacred, and not meant for entertainment or casual consumption.

But those taboos are not about silence for silence’s sake, they’re about context, relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility. And crucially: they are ours. They are not content warnings for the internet to enforce. They are part of a living culture that knows when and how to speak its truths.

One example I always return to is the historical taboo against painting sacred stories and beings, a taboo that was challenged by Norval Morrisseau (Copper Thunderbird), an Indigenous artist whose work was, at least to me, absolutely revolutionary. He painted sacred forms to reclaim story and identity for people who had been cut off by colonialism, residential schools, and systemic erasure.

His work wasn’t sacrilege. It was art. And he was criticized, extremely so, by the Elders, but in the end he changed the way we hold those taboos. He made it possible to talk again, to see again. He is one of my heroes.

So when I see people online say things like “don’t even say Wendigo,” it doesn’t feel like protection, it feels like fear. Not fear rooted in spiritual protocol, but fear rooted in settler guilt and internet moralism.

If you're not part of a nation, or you’re not grounded in those teachings, it's not your job to police sacred boundaries based on someone else’s cosmology. Your job is to listen. To understand why a taboo exists, who it protects, and how it lives. Because not everything sacred is forbidden, and not everything forbidden is yours to defend, and not everything you think is forbidden is actually forbidden, and not everything actually forbidden should stay forbidden.

We preserve culture by carrying it, not by locking it away, not by mimicking silence, but by understanding the weight of what we choose to speak.

And part of why this matters so deeply to me, why I feel so strongly about the difference between performance and lived tradition, is because art is not just a hobby or a pastime for me. It is sacred. It is divine.

Art is not just what I do; it is who I am. It is how I connect with the world, with spirit, with others, with grief and joy alike. I create because it is a form of prayer. Because it is a way to breathe. Because when I write, draw, create, speak, I am reaching through time, not just as myself, but as part of something old, wounded, and despite that, still alive.

I believe deeply in artistic freedom, not just in principle, but in practice. I do not believe art should be censored to appease the comfort of those who do not share in its context. I believe in the right to speak, even when the subject is painful. Especially when the subject is painful. Because if we cannot speak pain, we cannot heal it.

And that’s why, when it comes to the Wendigo, I will not take part in the moral panic around its name or its depiction.

I carry the teachings and fears of my people in my body. I know the stories, not because I read them in a horror anthology or watched them on TV, but because they are part of the world I come from.

And I carry that weight into the choices I make as an artist.

I do not treat it as a cursed word that must never be uttered, never depicted, never grappled with. I treat it as a truth, ugly, dangerous, hungry, starving even, that deserves to be met with eyes open.

The art taboos of my ancestors were real. There was a time when sacred stories were not to be painted, not to be shared in certain ways. And yet that taboo was not the end of the story.

I believe I and others too, have that right, just as Copper Thunderbird did.

Yes, some people, many of them strangers to the culture they claim to protect, may find my stance uncomfortable. But I can live with that. I have to. Because I live with far worse. I live with the ghosts and absences colonialism has left behind. And frankly, the living memory of that spirit what it means, and what it consumes is far more real to me than online discourse.

I am more concerned with preserving the power of art than I am with preserving a silence that was already fraying under the weight of history. I honor my elders, and I honor the stories. But I do not mistake the past for a cage. I will carry what I have inherited into the future, with care, but not with absolutist reverence.

Let me create. Let me speak. Let me offer the truth of what lives in me, even if it is hard to look at. Especially then.

That is what I believe art is for.

And as long as I'm being honest;

I’m not particularly concerned with whether white people use the Wendigo in horror movies.

I understand why some folks feel protective, especially in diaspora or reconnecting contexts, when so much has been taken, the scraps feel like they matter. But I don't think this is the battleground we should die on. The Wendigo is not some uniquely special, sacred figure immune to horror depiction. It’s not a god, not a story reserved only for ceremony. It’s a warning. A lesson. A spirit of consumption and decay and hunger and greed and myriad other things, and those are things everyone relates to I'm sure, so I can see why it happened, also they're fucking scary so yeah no shit it happened.

I’m not saying “anyone SHOULD do anything they want forever.” I think Native people should be involved in these stories. Should be paid, should be credited, should be listened to. I think if you want to write a Wendigo story, you should at the very least try to understand what it meant to the people who believed in it first. Because that's just respect.

But I’m also saying that I have watched my people die from real hunger. From real poverty, overdose, housing loss, despair. I have seen firsthand, just what it means to be devoured by something much larger than yourself.

And that, not some dumb horror movie monster is where my fear and my grief lies.

If a white person misuses a story, I might sigh, I might roll my eyes. But if someone uses a story well, if someone takes the myth and reshapes it with care, with horror, with beauty, and with craft, I’m not going to chase them down screaming about "misuse." Because frankly, we have bigger problems.

And we have bigger, scarier monsters.

I don’t want “representation” that amounts to gatekeeping scraps.

I want sovereignty.

I want land back.

I want our languages and waters and children safe.

I want Native artists to be funded, housed, heard.

We are not fragile. Our stories are not fragile.

Let them be shared.

I’m sure there are fellow Native people, from my nation and from adjacent ones, who disagree with me on all this. That’s okay. We are not a monolith. We were never meant to be. Our cultures are living, breathing, and full of contradictions, just like any other people.

But I also know that my opinion is not unique, and it is certainly not unpopular within our circles. I support my fellow Indigenous people, always. I want safety and sovereignty and self-expression for us all. But on this? On this one? We’ll just have to disagree.

And I can live with that.

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at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

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"You can say that [orangutans] are not dependent on social support and approval, and if you admire this in them, that an orang is irredeemably his own person, 'the most poetic of the apes', researcher Lynn Miles told me once in an unguarded moments. What she had in mind was the difference between orangs and chimps in the way they carry on their discourse with the world.

Chimps are much admired for their tool use and for their problem-solving relationship with things as they find them...the orang is, let us say, not so replete with enterprise. Give an orangutan the hexagonal peg and the several shapes of hole, and then hide behind the two-way mirror and watch how he engages with the problem.

And watch and watch and watch--because he does not engage with the problem. He uses the peg to scratch his back, has a look-see at his right wrist, makes a half-hearted and soon abandoned attempt to use his fur as a macramé project, stares dreamily out the window if there is one and at nothing in particular if not, and the sun begins to set. (The sun will also set if you are observing a chimp, but the chimp is more amusing, so you are less likely to mark the moment in your notes. An orang observer has plenty of time to be a student of the vanities of sunset.)

You watch, and the orang dreams...when casually and as if thinking of something else, the orang slips the hexagonal peg into the hexagonal hole. And continues staring off dreamily."

Vicki Hearne, "The Case of the Disobedient Orangutans"

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You there! Federal museum professional educator or FEMA climatologist or NOAA metereologist or CISA cybersecurity specialist or Army civilian logistics employee. How would you like to work for ICE? No? Not interesting? You’re working for ICE now. You’re working for ICE or you’re quitting. You don’t get a choice. You’re an ICE brown shirt or you’re out of a job.

This is not hyperbole. This is happening across the entire United States government.

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refusing to apply first aid to the wound because "it shouldn't have happened in the first place, so what we really should be doing is making sure no one gets stabbed ever again"

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oh I know her well we went to 2014 together

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I don’t have friends or family I can share this with who wont somehow steal my joy, so I’m gonna share with my friends on my screen instead bc I love all 7 of my followers so much.

A professor reached out to me asking if I could be persuaded to join her study abroad trip to the south of France next summer.

I’m 33, and this has quite literally been my DREAM since high school. And I don’t mean visiting France, I mean LEARNING in France. Enriching myself surrounded by old books in Europe, attempting to actually use the language I spent 5 years studying.

I grew up very low income, and while I’ve had similar-ish opportunities there was always a poverty related reason I couldn’t go (most people in my class don’t just *have* passports for no reason- I was lucky and grateful if my family could even afford a weekend trip to the jersey shore as a kid). I grew up with a sibling who had a major disability, and had to drop out of community college at 19 when my grandmother and mother had back to back strokes requiring full time care, so needless to say my dreams have spent most of their lives on the back burner.

This isn’t a dream, this is THE dream i’ve had for as long as I can remember. Even as a child I always envisioned myself soaking up knowledge and culture in foreign places and I was devastated when my grandma, the only person who believed I’d pursue my dreams, passed away. I traveled most of the US in a team based young adult disaster relief service program to scratch the itch of not going to college in my twenties, and just being able to attend a 4 year school in my 30’s has been a privilege, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to say yes to an opportunity like this one, which just happens to not only align with all of my special interests but the program is also a brief enough amount of time that I can feasibly go despite having 30 something responsibilities at home!

The program is going to take place at a writers retreat in a beautiful building that’s most likely older than any operational building in the US, just seeing pictures of the stunning little library where I’d most likely spend most of my class time is making me so ecstatic. I yearn to be surrounded by books and history. I still need to officially apply and do some money math so I’m having a hard time believing it will happen but I’m determined to make it so.

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i forget if i've mentioned this before on here, but when i was about 5 i was obsessed with monsters inc and watched it at least twice a week not because i especially liked it as a movie but simply because i was passionately in love with randall. and in fact the very first fanfiction i ever wrote was a monsters inc whump fanfiction about me finding randall in the swamp after he got beaten up with a shovel and tenderly nursing him back to health. all this to say i have been the person i am from an incredibly young age

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ceramic pngs

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