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.
ok this post canceled due to recent events…I was talkin about some 26 year old pop star calling things “gay” in 2007 not a 50 year old hollywood producer who’s been actively pursuing 14 year old girls since 1976
a very important distinction. it’s one thing to fuck up, as all of us are apt to do, and it’s another thing entirely to be an abusive piece of shit with a history of sexual harassment.
Reminder for parents that though you may be struggling, it is never appropriate to use your child as your therapist/counselor. It’s unhealthy for the both of you.
Can I ask why? I’m genuinely curious
There’s a few reasons as to why its wrong.
For one, a kid is not equipped to handle a parent’s problems. I’m not saying to never express your feelings or say that you’re having a problem to a child. That can be healthy. But to use them to just dump on is too much. Children just aren’t equipped to deal with the heaviness of adult problems, especially if they’re already going through things themselves.
Two, the inherent power imbalance makes it really uncomfortable. Your child isn’t your friend, they’re your child. Even if they can offer advice, this sort of thing can become like a role reversal. They also would have a hard time separating themselves from it when it becomes too much. A lot of parents feel entitled to their childrens’ time and space, so the children can become overburdened with no reprieve and no way to express that this isn’t their job.
There’s probably more and better ways to explain this, but that’s my two cents on this.
Because I was the oldest child when my parents marriage was collapsing both of them used me to vent about the other, forcing me to justify their negative feelings about a person that I loved by virtue of their place in my life. At 10 years old I was attempting to negotiate the workings of an adult relationship that had never worked and validate their emotions without being harmful to the other. All the while I was deteriorating into an even more depressed and anxious reclusive child, losing friends and and missing out on normal experiences. I felt like I was responsible for the survival of their relationship, above my own well-being I had to figure out how to save them from divorce, from splitting the family up. I never felt like I had the right to tell them I couldn’t handle it. So I shoved everything down and became weirdly mature, too aware of the fact that I was an adult even if I didn’t want to be. Now I have severe anxiety, depression, and PTSD and I can’t even keep a job. I’m 28. Don’t do this to your kids. Please.
This is one form of whats known as parentification.
My father, having zero support from my mother, would seek me out during his depressive bouts and tell me about how much he wanted to die, over and over. Sometimes I even cleaned and bandaged the wounds. He told me he couldn’t talk to anyone else and I was his entire lifeline. I was nine.
In a similar vein my mother blames me all the time for not leaving my father when she wanted to. She would vent to me about how awful a man he was, how much she hated him and wanted to leave him. And then tell me it was my fault she didn’t because of what I had said. I was twelve. The fuck did I know about life other than it was awful and I was having to hide shit from social work and feeling like it was my fault.
I’m 30 now and they still do this to me. They still try to find ways to other themselves from their failure to protect me and my brother from themselves and make it my responsibility, then try to sugar coat it with “but you were such a good child” or “you’re such a great listener” or “you were so much older than your years”, like yea, cause someone fucking had to be.
Please, do not do this to your children. Please. Get help from an appropriate source, for your sake and theirs. I cannot stress how damaging this shit was to my psyche.
It’s also sometimes called Covert Incest or Emotional Incest.
My ex-mom started telling me about all of her emotional bullshit around the time her marriage to my stepfather was falling apart. I was 10 ½. (This was after a period of about two years of being utterly emotionally ABSENT because she was depressed. So on the one hand, being a child, it was kind of “Oh, hey! Mom’s paying attention to me again! Wait, no, this is actually terrible, what the fuck.”)
She put herself on this pedestal of being Amazing for not “dragging lots of men through her children’s lives”, meanwhile I was 11 and was a PARENT to my infant brother, doing a frankly-insane number of household chores, and having to be reassuring AND the family scapegoat, while being – shockingly – depressed and anxious all the time.
“I’m just venting, I don’t want you to FIX IT.” When you’re 12 or 13 and depressed-as-fuck yourself and your only PARENT has talked about being suicidal? You want to FIX IT. (If only because said parent has also told you horror stories about why foster care would be worse.)
Even later on, as an older teen and later an adult, when I saw a clear solution to a household problem or a budgeting concern, it went to “Well no, you’re just a kid”. Like “… Yes, but you’ve been talking to me about adult shit for YEARS and I’m actually right”. (Same thing with parenting my brother, really. I read PARENTING BOOKS and shit, but it’d be “You are not Sam’s parent.” Okay, but who has actually been here to witness more of his life?)
Yeah, guess who has Complex PTSD and severed contact with her biological family. Guess who – upon having a bad flashback – still defaults to trying to act as something between a secretary (to anyone older) and a parent (to any child-type-people around)? With a side of “Must shield kids if they are in trouble and deflect blame onto myself”? (Though I’ve been better about that one.)
Because even if life was falling apart, even if I was exhausted, some things had to keep being taken care of because nobody else was going to fucking do it.
I mean those aren’t the ONLY reasons, but it’s a reasonable sized chunk of it, and it ended up acting as a catalyst for a lot of the other stuff.
After I disclosed my father’s sexual abuse of me, my mother used me in this way until I left home, aged 22. Among other things, she unburdened herself at length about her attempts to ‘save’ her marriage, including her sex life with my paederast father, through my whole teen years. She would do this often while driving, so there was no way for me to escape. I still dissociate regularly in her presence, and I seriously think she might have done more damage to my psyche than incest between the ages of four and twelve did. She forgets anything she doesn’t want to think about, so talking frankly with my brother in recent years has given me very much needed collaboration and validation that things I recalled actually happened, because her revisionist memory gaslit me hugely and made me constantly doubt myself. And she thinks she was a great parent, because she thinks my brothers and I are nice people. She’s proud of her work.
It’s definitely a positive thing that all these sexual predators in Hollywood are getting outed, but I hope we’re also prepared to make the connection between these allegations and exactly why so many former child stars end up dead or institutionalised before they turn 30. These are not unconnected phenomena. Like, I realise the whole “former child star meltdown” meme is a comedy goldmine, but maybe some awareness of what we’re really laughing at?
^^^^
The percentage of drug users who are child abuse victims is not a small one. And there is a connection. Think about it.
knitting in the dark 