- Bart Simpson (via teachingtoday)

My wildest daydreams look like this.

Today my family all went to the Pequot Museum, a really extensive indigenous history museum on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation and owned and run by members of the tribe. It was a nice change of pace from how natural history museums (what up, Field Museum in Chicago) often treat indigenous people as a part of landscapes, less than human. (And oh no, I’d best not hear anything about how it could be a compliment to be seen as “closer to nature” or how objecting to that is speciesist; that junk is blatantly racist.)

I appreciated that they didn’t sugarcoat things, like they were pretty clear about damage done by Europeans in the americas, and ways that Europeans tried to claim indigenous people’s knowledge of the land in the Northeast. There was a recreation of a couple men putting up a spiky wooden fence around their village to keep Europeans out because they were coming into the village and fucking with people. All the stories being told in the exhibits I saw were told in ways that acknowledged that native folks aren’t extinct; indigenous cultures weren’t being talked about in past tense like often happens.

The Pequot Museum is hosting the Smithsonian’s exhibit Indivisible about African-Indigenous people in the americas. I’d already seen the online version of the exhibit and was really excited about it. We had to leave, though, before we’d seen much of that exhibit, so I’ll try to go back sometime soon and take notes.

girl-germs:

ceramickitten:

My dearest friends,

Last year so many of you came together and helped donate money to purchase toys for the children on Pine Ridge reservation. Thank You!

It was wonderful but unfortunately (my people) the Oglala Lakota Sioux need more than toys this year, they need propane. I know that toys are something pretty and heart swelling, I was totally in tears when I saw the little brown doll I requested to be bought last year. Unfortunately, at this time, it’s more grim than that. The most basic of needs is the most important thing to aid with.

lease consider donating to this in someone’s honor instead of attending Black Friday. If you cannot help, please consider sharing this to signal boost so that more can.

Much love to all of you. ♥

Paypal donations to koja@riseup.net

    •    According to current USDA Rural Development documents, the Lakota have the lowest life expectancy of any group in America. The median income on the reservation is approximately $2,600 to $3,500 per year, with about 97% of people living far below the federal poverty line. 

    •    Heating and fueling just one house on the reservation can easily impact 2 dozen lives, as there are an average of 17 people per family home (with up to 30 in many houses).

    •    39% of the homes on the Pine Ridge Reservation have no basic water, sewage system or electricity and lack basic insulation.

…this has 15 notes.

- Ayn Rand, statement at a Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 

“Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.”

I don’t even need to analyze this or add commentary to the extent I normally do. Ayn Rand is just a jerk.

(via she-hulk-smash)

She seriously is fucking terrible.

(via offbeatorbit)

I wish I had brought in this quote to school today! The kids I was working with are starting a project about exactly this.

(via bad-dominicana)

My partner, in response to me saying I couldn’t find any info on a local college’s Native American student group’s annual anti-Columbus Day dance/event. My cynicism is rubbing off on him.

Paula Gunn Allen, “Notes Toward a Human Revolution” in Off the Reservation.

Derrick Jensen & crew, eat y’all’s hearts out. Women of color been saying this forever.

custerdiedforyoursins:

readnfight:

[Bunch of stuff is cut out, from this thread about indigenous people being compared to nature/animals]

Again, when white human culture tries to dominate both people of color and nature by linking them and insulting them alongside each other, we are not further insulting nature by refusing to be insulted so. And we absolutely do not need other people telling us how to respond.

In conclusion: since when was it in any ways decent for white people to tell people of color how to respond to racism, and to skew our refusal to be dominated in order to have some way to chime in on it? I’m (not) sorry when white people feel left out of conversations on how we deal with white supremacy. Cause this shit’s racist.

Oh, it makes me really sad when white people feel left out, because I’m speaking to them. It’s those people up there who are the people that need to read and take to heart what we’re all saying. They’re the ones who go around saying this shit (obviously).

Yeah, I guess I should clarify. White people should participate in a conversation like this, especially to listen and act in good faith (those two things are KEY!). But, they are showing they are not listening, acting in good faith, or thinking critically if they are telling people of color how to deal with racism—in this case saying it’s wrong and oppressive for indigenous people to be offended.

So, sit back and listen and do your homework and ask some questions that you’ve thought about, but please do not act like you know how people deal, especially if you’re not basing yourself on any kind of understanding of history.

cynicallyabsurd:

Fuck yeah, feminists!: DO NOT COMPARE NATIVE AMERICANS TO NATURE

dianamcqueen:

custerdiedforyoursins:

REPEAT: DO NOT COMPARE NATIVE AMERICANS TO NATURE. DO NOT ASSOCIATE US WITH NATURE. DO NOT SAY WE ARE CLOSE TO NATURE. DO NOT SAY WE UNDERSTAND NATURE. DO NOT MAKE ANY FUCKING CLAIM ABOUT NATIVE AMERICANS AND NATURE.

That is racist. Equating Native Americans to nature…

Actually no. I don’t think that when I think native Americans are close to nature. Not all of them are really the ones that protect the old ways I would view that way.

Honestly, you seem to view animals as less than human. I don’t. So please don’t assume that being close to nature is an insult. I think of all life equally. I also don’t think someone assuming all people who say one thing are all thinking the sane thing needs to examine so of their own prejudices.

^^^ Agreed. The original argument is extremely speciest and offensive.  If I call anyone (regardless of race or ethnicity) “close to nature” you may view that as an extreme complement. I do not view many Native Americans any “closer” to nature today than someone of English descent. Even so, there is NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING wrong with being “close to nature” or “like an animal.”  You, like me, ARE an animal and if you think that offensive, again, examine your own prejudices, please.

Okay. I think folks can agree on some things. Structurally white-human-centric culture sees its members (white people) as superior to indigenous people just as structurally white-human-centric culture sees its members as superior to nature and nonhuman animals. The issue isn’t how much you, as an individual, like animals and therefore don’t take it as an insult. The issue is the intent, the way it stands within that culture, and the history of that categorization as inferior. If you wouldn’t be insulted, good for you! If you don’t have to worry about racism against indigenous people, lucky! It’s not as much what the insult is, as the fact that an insult is being hurled.

For example, when my siblings and I were kids, we would make up mean names to call each other, that often weren’t even real words. On the one hand, someone else could come in and say we shouldn’t be mad at each other if the names we were calling each other didn’t mean anything; on the other hand, they did mean something, because we intended to hurt each other’s feelings. It didn’t matter what words we were using.

White supremacy will make up infinite ways to put people of color down. Many times it is by comparing people of color to people or beings that they are not. If I don’t want to be called a mudbaby, does that mean I don’t like mud? If I don’t like being portrayed as hypersexual because I am a black woman, does that mean I’m anti-sex? If I don’t want to be called a fox by someone who thinks I’m cute, does that mean I hate foxes? No! In all these cases, I don’t want to be characterized as something I’m not, based on my race or gender or whatever. It’s not the word itself, but the meaning behind it.

Further, these are really parts of the same system. White supremacy intends to dominate people of color as well as land and animals. Do a tiny bit of research and it’s incredibly clear. Look at early colonialism, look at indigenous resistance fights, look at what’s happening to indigenous people in the Amazon and Chiapas and the Niger Delta, look at where the US mines uranium and who’s poisoned by it, look at who lives on toxic land in cities, look at who lives in areas of cities with high asthma rates, look who cheap meat-based food is marketed towards. I mean, seriously, I don’t like telling people that they’re being simple-minded, but jeeeez.

White people came to the americas and Africa, called us savages and work horses and beasts and roaches and dogs. It is ridiculous to tell us that we should allow ourselves to be called that. When a white person compares people like me to cockroaches, they are showing respect for neither me nor the cockroach; it is not then wrong of me to call them on it. Maybe I personally like roaches; that doesn’t make it okay for a white person to call us that, even if I myself am not insulted.

Again, when white human culture tries to dominate both people of color and nature by linking them and insulting them alongside each other, we are not further insulting nature by refusing to be insulted so. And we absolutely do not need other people telling us how to respond.

In conclusion: since when was it in any ways decent for white people to tell people of color how to respond to racism, and to skew our refusal to be dominated in order to have some way to chime in on it? I’m (not) sorry when white people feel left out of conversations on how we deal with white supremacy. Cause this shit’s racist.

custerdiedforyoursins:

REPEAT: DO NOT COMPARE NATIVE AMERICANS TO NATURE. DO NOT ASSOCIATE US WITH NATURE. DO NOT SAY WE ARE CLOSE TO NATURE. DO NOT SAY WE UNDERSTAND NATURE. DO NOT MAKE ANY FUCKING CLAIM ABOUT NATIVE AMERICANS AND NATURE.

That is racist. Equating Native Americans to nature is racist because what you are really saying, cognizant of it or not, is that we are wild beasts. We are animals to you. We aren’t real people, but these in between creatures that ~understand the land around them.

This isn’t some shit I’m making up. Look at old US paintings from the 19th century. When they weren’t posing the Natives with their Indian Peace Medals (look that shit up), they were adding them to landscape paintings. You know why we were put in landscape paintings? BECAUSE WE WERE VIEWED AS A PART OF THE LANDSCAPE BECAUSE WE WEREN’T CONSIDERED PEOPLE.

So when you say that you admire the Natives’ view of nature (besides perpetuating a Native mono-culture which doesn’t exist), or when you claim that you are a Native because you understand plants and shit, YOU ARE A LYING SACK OF RACIST SHIT.

It gets pretty blatant when you go to a natural history museum (or flip through anything put out by National Geographic) and the only humans depicted are indigenous, because they are assumed to go alongside exhibits about dinosaurs and birds and trees and whatever. I went to a natural history museum a few months ago where the only exhibits on humans were indigenous americans and Senegal. Indigenous americans and sovereign West Africa are as extinct, I guess they meant, as the dinosaur whose skeleton was reconstructed in the museum’s atrium.

This is also why I get so pissed when people (yo green anarchists, I’m looking at a lot of y’all!) praise things things like “primitive” skills. Have they never thought how loaded that is? And that people, who surprisingly still exist, might not actually be flattered by that praise? I have had that conversation way too many times with way too many radicals.

(via jhameia)