What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?
I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.
Native Girls are beautiful.
Native Boys are beautiful.
First Nations Girls are beautiful.
First Nations Boys are beautiful.
Indigenous Girls are beautiful.
Indigenous Boys are beautiful.
Aboriginal Girls are beautiful.
Aboriginal Boys are beautiful.
Inuit Girls are beautiful.
Inuit Boys are beautiful.
Métis Girls are beautiful.
Métis Boys are beautiful.
Aleut Girls are beautiful.
Aleut Boys are beautiful.
Afro-Indigenous Girls are beautiful.
Afro-Indigenous Boys are beautiful.
Mi’kmaq girls are beautiful.
Mi’kmaq boys are beautiful.
Two-Spirit Girls are beautiful.
Two-Spirit Boys are beautiful.
You’re beautiful if you have dark skin.
You’re beautiful if you have light skin.
You’re beautiful if you’re in between.
You’re beautiful if you’re mixed.
You’re beautiful if you fit the Western Gender Binary.
You’re beautiful if you’re don’t fit the Western Gender Binary.
You’re beautiful if you’re multiple genders. You’re beautiful.
(Aboriginal, Inuit, and Métis lines added by @phaedragona. Two-Spirit lines added by many people. Afro-Indigenous and Mixed lines added by @condorofrph. Aleut lines added by anonymous. Mi’kmaq lines added by @kennachaos . Correction on gender lines by @doyoumisterjones . If there’s anyone I’ve left out, feel free to add on to it and/or message me and I’ll change the original post.
As you may know, the word ‘Sioux’ is considered to be a slur amongst members of the Oceti Sakowin. It is not our word for ourselves, but rather a name given to us by another nation and perpetuated by the Europeans / Euro-Americans.
You also may have noticed that our official tribe names often contain the word ‘Sioux’ (‘Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe’ for example.) The reason for this is entirely legal. When our treaties were drafted, they were written as an agreement between the US Government and the ‘Sioux Nation.’ For this reason, we cannot fully abandon the name. However, when we’ve had opportunities, we’ve dropped the name in places we can (’Oglala Lakota County,’ for example, a name chosen by the rezidents.)
Simply put, members of the Oceti Sakowin generally don’t refer to themselves as ‘Sioux’ and, if we can’t change it legally, at least we can continue to assert our identity on our terms. So, if you choose to respect that, here’s a quick Oceti Sakowin education guide:
Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires)
Oceti Sakowin (encompasses all language dialects) is the simplest and broadest replacement for ‘Sioux.’ You can use this term if you aren’t aware of the specific language group to which ‘Sioux’ refers. Within the Oceti Sakowin are three main groups, which are further divided into seven subgroups:
(Mnikiwoju/Mniconjou) – Swamp Plant (Cheyenne River Reservation)
Itazipcola
(Itazipco) – No Bow (Cheyenne River Reservation)
Owohe Nunpa
(Oohenunpa)
– Two Paunch Boiler (Cheyenne River Reservation)
Sihasapa – Black Feet (Cheyenne River Reservation, Standing Rock Reservation)
Hunkpapa – End of Horn (Standing Rock Reservation)
*modern terminology
*In the past, the term Nakota has been applied to the Yankton, but this is a mistake. The Yankton speak Dakota. Nakota speakers are Assiniboine / Hohe and Stoney, who broke off from the Yankton at a time so long ago their language is now nearly unrecognizable to Lakota and Dakota speakers.
The Burnum Burnum Declaration England, 26th January, 1988
I, Burnum Burnum, being a nobleman of ancient Australia do hereby take posession of England on behalf of the Aboriginal people. In claiming this colonial outpost, we wish no harm to you natives, but assure you that we are here to bring you good manners, refinement and an opportunity to make a Koompartoo – ‘a fresh start’. Henceforth, an Aboriginal face shall appear on your coins and stamps to signify our sovreignty over this domain. For the more advanced, bring the complex language of the Pitjantjajara; we will teach you how to have a spiritual relationship with the Earth and show you how to get bush tucker.
We do not intend to souvenir, pickle and preserve the heads of your 2000 of your people, nor to publicly display the skeletal remains of your Royal Highness, as was done to our Queen Truganninni for 80 years. Neither do we intend to poison your water holes, lace your flour with strychnine or introduce you to highly toxic drugs. Based on our 50,000 year heritage, we acknowledge the need to preserve the Caucasian race as of interest to antiquity, although we may be inclined to conduct experiments by measuring the size of your skulls for levels of intelligence. We pledge not to sterilise your women, nor to separate your children from their families. We give an absolute undertaking that you shall not be placed onto the mentality of government handouts for the next five generations but you will enjoy the full benefits of Aboriginal equality. At the end of two hundred years, we will make a treaty to validate occupation by peaceful means and not by conquest.
Finally, we solemnly promise not to make a quarry of England and export your valuable minerals back to the old country Australia, and we vow never to destroy three-quarters of your trees, but to encourage Earth Repair Action to unite people, communities, religions and nations in a common, productive, peaceful purpose.
So super proud of Harley and his pairs partner Katia. Harley is our first Indigenous Winter Olympian, and he and Katia had a great skate! Harley is from literally just down the road from us – my Mum teaches in his home suburb!
This Black History Month, we’re featuring quotes from contributors from the AWN anthology All the Weight of Our Dreams: on living racialized autism (editors Lydia X.Z. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, and Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu)
Image descriptions from top down.
[First image text:
“Claiming a heritage and culture is not only about color. It’s about lived experience, attachment, feelings, tradition, home, and love.”
-E. Ashkenazy, “Foreword: On Autism and Race,” All the Weight of Our Dreams: on living racialized autism, an AWN anthology available now on Amazon
Background photo in low-saturation color is a group of tree roots]
[Second image text:
“I came to understand that autism was not something tragic or shameful…. I was born right the first time.”
-Finn Gardiner, "Letter to People At the Intersection Of Autism and Race,” All the Weight of Our Dreams: on living racialized autism, an AWN anthology now available on Amazon
Background photo of a blooming flower in purple hues]
[Third image text is
“We who exist anyway, Our selves proof of a revolutionary survival power. We who must keep breathing and breaking bleeding recreating.”
-Mikael Lee, “Revelation,” All The Weight of Our Dreams: on living racialized autism, an AWN anthology now available on Amazon
Background image is a grayscale dandelion]
[Fourth image text:
“Yeah, I notice. I notice that I’m different from other blacks because I’m autistic. I notice that I’m different from other autistics because I’m black I notice Do you?“
-COBRA, “Confessions of a Black Rhapsodic Aspie,” All the Weight of Our Dreams: on living racialized autism, an AWN anthology available now on Amazon
Background photo in low-saturation color shows the back of a person’s head and shoulders]
[Fifth image text:
“If I had a time machine and could go back to my school days, I wouldn’t try so hard to mold myself into a person whom I was not meant to be.”
-Kristy Y., “Burnout in Recovery,” All the Weight of Our Dreams: on living racialized autism, an AWN anthology available now on Amazon
Background is a faded photo of a chalkboard]
[Sixth image text:
“I’m Black. I’m a woman. I’m the child of immigrants. I’m a mother. I’m autistic. And I know there are more people like me somewhere.”
-Dee Phair, "Unpacking the Diagnostic TARDIS,” All the Weight of Our Dreams: on living racialized autism, an AWN anthology available now on Amazon
Background is a closeup photo of a small child’s hand holding an adult’s hand]
I actually got out of bed just so I could go full rant about this on my computer, so y’all buckle up (thank you for giving me this opportunity lololol)
Okay, so this happened about a year, maybe a year and a half ago. I’m gonna go ahead and make this one public for the benefit of those that didn’t follow me back then, if that’s cool.
Let me preface this by saying that I had taken literally every one of the professor’s classes before then. Partly because they were the only anthropology style class the uni offered, and partly because halfway through the second class I realized that literally everything was the same, except the books, which we never used. Even the assignments were the same, and I had perfected a system of how to do those quickly, easily, and last-minute, lol. So it was pretty much the definition of an easy A, and the prof liked me bc I was nice, actually listened to her even though I’d heard it all before, and didn’t rat her ass out for not actually teaching what she was supposed to, lol.
I should’ve known right there.
So when there was an opportunity to take a Native Americans in North America class with her, I jumped on it. I needed the hours, I obviously knew a lot on the subject already, and it would be another easy a, if history was anything to go by.
It became one of the most frustrating classes I have ever taken.
As always, the class started the same as the others. We started out learning about vocab and models. NBD, we’d get to specifics eventually, right?
Now there are about 16 to 18 weeks in your average semester.
By week 6 we had yet to learn anything about Native history. She’d assigned some reading about the moundbuilder’s archeological sites, but nothing about the modern day. Maybe she was just taking it slow, I thought, though I was bothered by her only talking about Natives in the past tense. But she’d told me in the first class I’d taken with her (years ago by now) that she was enrolled Native, so I didn’t call it out immediately.
We get to week 8, halfway through the semester, she hadn’t covered anything. No mention of treaties, modern movements for civil rights, AIM (American Indian Movement), the illegal overthrow of Hawai’i, buffalo kill offs, smallpox blankets, Chicago museum’s bullshit, NAGPRA (a law protecting grave sites and demanding the return of remains to their Nation by museums and sites, if the Nation will accept them (sometimes they allow the remains to be housed by the museum bc they’re typically more secure there, but that’s very rare)) beyond how it affected archeologists, the different regions, the language families, ghost dance, the flooding of lands by companies illegally, human zoos, RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS, THE FUCKING TRAIL OF TEARS, NOTHING.
Like your 4th grade history segment, as racist as it probably was, probably was more informative than this bitch was being, okay? And I was getting mad. Y’all know me. Native activism is a huge part of my life, and has been for years. Students were being allowed to say really racist shit unchecked. The prof wasn’t teaching jack. Misinformation was being spread, even by the prof.
It felt like even in a class dedicated to us, we didn’t matter. Our history didn’t matter.
I was fed up.
Then, she pissed me the absolute fuck off. She proceeded to spend the rest of the class talking about South America.
Now, our Indigenous family below the equator absolutely deserve to be discussed. They have so many issues that really, really need to be boosted and respected. We do not raise their voices often enough. But this was a class specifically about North America, and her reasoning for making it otherwise was racist in so many ways.
First, she changed the curriculum outside of its scope because she was “MORE INTERESTED IN SOUTH AMERICA, AND WOULD HAVE TO DO RESEARCH TO TALK ABOUT” the issues I was publicly demanding to know when she would cover. As if her personal interest and ignorance were more important than our lives.
(side note, it turns out she was lying about being enrolled and Native. Her white supremacist brother (not even kidding) had said that a Cherokee woman chief in Minnesota or some shit had enrolled them. I asked her if she meant Wilma Mankiller, the first modern female Cherokee chief. She said no, it was someone else, and in the late nineties, after Wilma would’ve no longer been Chief. I publicly called her out, and even another student jumped in to help, because there was no other woman Chief then, and there was no recognized Nation that far North. Her white supremacist brother had lied bc he felt othered while working near the Din’e on a job site, bc they didn’t include his racist ass, lol. So she’d lied her way into being allowed to teach a class she didn’t even know or care about. So at this point, I was fucking done with her, lol)
She also was showing us old propaganda films, and literally every group she discussed was being painted as ignorant, warlike savages by her and the materials. She even defended a man that intentionally exposed Indigenous peoples with no immunity to certain diseases to said diseases ‘just to see what would happen.’ She recommended his books, including ‘Noble Savages’ to us. I shouldn’t have to explain why that’s racist, lmao.
All of this is to say that I was VERY fed up, she (and the class) was VERY racist, and she was going down.
Then her foolish self decided to assign a massive project where we were supposed to ‘teach the class’ about a Native subject (y i k e s, esp. since the class was full of non-Natives). Since I was Fed Up, I decided to skip the usual schooling on cultural appropriation to instead teach everyone (including her) about just a smattering of the important things she hadn’t even mentioned in passing. 🙂
What followed was a 33 page powerpoint.
Apologies for any inaccuracies, and blanket tw for slurs, racism, death, csa, torture, child abuse, etc etc etc
(I added all the regalia pics bc they made me happy and calmed me down, which I was gonna need. I set the presentation up as “Man, I sure had trouble deciding what to make my presentation about. Should I talk about X? Y? Z? This? That? This? And so on until I reached residential schools and Reconciliation as my discussion topic.)
I hope those gifs work. If not, they should be under my “Oka Crisis” tag, or “n i fn a history” and “n i fn a protests” tags. I also had decided early to use the Nations actual names where possible.
Oh look, a quick and easy way to make people realize THIS IS WHY YOU DON’T FUCKING REFER TO US AS SLURS, and here’s how to discuss the issue without being additionally harmful.
OH LOOK, SOURCES
#FreeLeonardPeltier
Getting progressively angrier at this point. The class is smart enough to stay silent.
#MMIW #NoMoreStolenSisters. Please bring them home. Whatever it takes.
Stayed on this slide juuust long enough to stare each person in class down.
Oh look, we’re finally hitting my actual topic. Again, shit’s about to get very heavy. Please read only if you can. I will not be glancing over these to check them rn, bc I can’t. I’m sharing just for y’all to see, and hopefully reblog to educate people.
I honestly wept as I worked on this part. I can’t read it again.
Calling it out.
AYUP. Canadians are so nice and their government isn’t problematic at all
There are survivors that are my age, and younger.
Not letting them forget that this isn’t just in the past. It still wounds us.
It still hurts. We’re still recovering.
I included resources for them, including the prof, to actually educate themselves, since our school sure as shit wasn’t going to do it.
A handful of my sources.
Anyways. I was done. So fucking done. She (the prof) still tried to guide the class back and pretend that it was acceptable that she hadn’t taught them anything. I didn’t let her. I reminded them all that the only reason that this was Canada focused was bc they’d just had the Truth and Reconciliation reports, whereas the US government hasn’t put any effort into assembling data on their atrocities. Go figure.
In Thunderbird Strike, a new side-scrolling game that launches at the ImagineNATIVEfestival this week in Toronto, players can control a thunderbird—a symbol in several Indigenous cultures—that destroys as much of the oil industry’s machinery and pipelines as it possibly can. And it’s so satisfying.
The game was created by Elizabeth LaPensée, an Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish games developer, and assistant professor of media and information at Michigan State University. She told me in an interview that she wanted to create a game where Indigenous players could reclaim some agency around oil pipelines, even if through a video game.
“Especially when we’re talking in the context of pipelines, and the oil industry, there are some wins we can have. But ultimately protectors will be pushed out and the processes are going to move forward. It’s happening with mining and it’s happening with pipelines,” LaPensée told me over the phone.
The creator of this game is getting attacked and defamed by oil lobbyists and racists
(and let’s be honest, the venn diagram circle of “oil lobbyists” is just a small circle in the larger circle of “racists”) and could really use support and advocacy:
knitting in the dark 