Citizens of Tomorrow, Be Forewarned

A very beautiful image of these smiley blackfoot. It seemed everything was alright…

Photograph by Mary T. S. Schaffer in 1907.

I just love how humanizing this is, it’s the first time I’ve seen us not depicted as the stoic archetype of this period

Pictured here are Sampson, Frances Louise, and Leah Beaver who actually were very close friends with the photographer and were regular subjects of her work. It’s amazing what happens when you view us as people rather than museum objects - you capture us as people, as friends, as lovers, as parents rather than the stoic image of genocide and colonialism in-progress. 

If you’re interested in learning more about female photographers and how they aided in representing native peoples through positive representation and ethical photography, I would suggest reading “Trading Gazes.” Mary T.S. Schaffer and other influential female photographers, and friends, of native peoples are given some much-needed recognition in this book while also discussing the white woman’s place in our genocide and colonization. 

Inuk Man Teaching A Boy How To Shoot. Circa 1920

A special Flashback Friday for Native American Heritage Month: Ed Rogers, our first Native American graduate

When Ed Rogers (J.D. 1904) wasn’t studying hard for his night courses at the Law School, you could find him honing his leadership skills on the football field. Rogers was captain of the Gopher football team in 1903, and kicked the tying point in a legendary game against Michigan that year. He went on to serve as Cass County Attorney for 46 years and was a leader in tribal councils as well as the National Council for Indian Affairs.

Frederick Monsen - Hopi Mother and Daughter, Hair Dressing, Oraibi, Arizona, 1886 - 1911

Link for full article below.

*pretends to be shocked but also maybe this will make people realize that Indigenous People Know What The Hell They’re Doing and Deserve Respect*

3 other fun/cool facts about the Inuit:

1. They also invented kayaks and dog booties.

Dog booties are actually really important for working sled dogs in winter to protect their paw pads from iceburn and keep ice from getting in between their toes and burning them that way.

2. The traditional Inuit diet is one of the healthiest in the world, and the most balanced for the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 consumption

Most modern diets consume way too much Omega 6 and not enough Omega 3.

3. Inuit is a plural noun. When speaking about a single person the correct word is Inuk (always capitalized)

For example, “This Inuk woman is wearing traditional Inuit tattoos”.

And she is wonderful

Never a bad time to remember that indigenous people are wonderful and deserve to have a good day.

In 2005, when Hovak Johnston heard that the last Inuk woman tattooed in the traditional way had died, she set out to tattoo herself and learn how to tattoo others.

What was at first a personal quest became a project to bring the art of traditional tattooing back to Inuit women across Nunavut, starting in the community of Kugluktuk.

With the rise of missionaries and residential schools in the North, the tradition of tattooing was almost lost. Now, there are HUNDREDS of Inuit women with traditional tattoos.

( photo taken from Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project page)

You can read an article about this here

apparently native american tribes were in contact with the donner party and offered them food when they saw the colonists were starving and the donner party turned them down and decided to go the whole “cannibalism” route instead. 

tfw a group of unprepared strangers show up, refuse the food you offer them, start fucking cannibalizing each other, and then call you the savages

maria tallchief photographed by walter e. owen 

also WHY does every american lit or american history or w/ever course contain the entire history and writings of england & greater europe up until the colonies but NO documentation of the oral histories and stories from actual native american tribes and look at how that influenced and was influenced by european traditions to create the “american” story. like i KNOW why but christ

the first ever anthology of native american poetry was published this week and barnes and noble has a 1998 anthology of native american plays and those are literally the only two anthologies of native american literature i could find and i am PHYSICALLY INSISTING that u buy them and support the native activists and authors who pushed for them to published because holy shit y’all

I don’t think a lot of people really understand that ecosystems in North America were purposefully maintained and altered by Native people.

Like, we used to purposefully set fires in order to clear underbrush in forests, and to inhibit the growth of trees on the prairies. This land hasn’t existed in some primeval state for thousands of years. What Europeans saw when they came here was the result of -work-

the east coast was all mature and maintained food forests. decades if not centuries of nurturing and maintenance. when the british arrived they were amazed that there were paths through the forest just “naturally” lined with berries and edible plants, like a garden of eden. then they tore that shit down to grow wheat. dumbasses

My mom is an ethnobotanist and getting people to understand this is literally her life’s work. A lot of native tribes just had a whole different way of looking at agriculture. Instead of planting orchards in tidy rows near their villages, they went to where the trees were already growing and tended them there. They would girdle trees by stripping the bark in order to stop the spread of disease or thin out badly placed saplings. And they would encourage the companion plants they wanted and weed out the ones they didn’t, so that in the end the whole forest would be productive while remaining an ecosystem and not a monoculture. It is still agriculture, but it is a form of agriculture that is so much gentler on the landscape that, as OP says, the European settlers could not recognize what they were seeing. To them the natives must have seemed to magically live in abundance while they starved. They did do controlled burns, but so-called slash and burn agriculture was never a primary farming strategy in North America. They were just way more subtle than that. They also made the amazing Mississippian mound structures so it’s not like they couldn’t do dramatic reshapings of the landscape when they wanted: but they changed their minds about that, walking away from Cahokia and the dense, farming-supported urban structure they had build there in the 13th century, well before any European contact. My mom says it wasn’t a collapse, it wasn’t a war, it wasn’t a natural disaster; the farmers in Cahokia just voted with their feet. They just gradually left, dispersing in different directions but generally not very far, and it was probably because they’d gotten tired of men’s bullshit. See, agriculture was a female domain in pretty much all the native American cultures. The specifics differed by tribe, but often they had gender-specific age-grade societies: for example, the Hidatsa Goose Society was composed of married women of childbearing age. Not only did they physically plant the fields, they also had responsibility for conducting the social and ritual events around ensuring the harvest. This included things like digging the storage pits, and organizing feasts in order to bring the whole community together to plant plots for families who were suffering illness or disability, and could not do it themselves.  So, as Cahokia urbanized (at its “height” it was a population center of  between 10,200 and 15,300 people), it is very likely that the traditional, informal systems of land use-right allocations–again, always the women’s domain–became stressed by top down political pressures from the rulers (who were men). And as my mom puts it in her book Feeding Cahokia: “If rights to land ever became highly restricted as a result of a top-down, centralized process of allocation, the likelihood of poorly informed and unfair decision making is extremely high.” So basically, the farmers took their families and they moved away. Not all at once, no mass exodus, just…gradually, they decided that they’d tried doing things the urban way, and they didn’t like it. They went back to living in smaller villages sustained, not by intensive farming, but by more garden-style plots and the traditional, sophisticated management of “wild” lands that they had never stopped practicing. It takes a shift in thinking to recognize that was a deliberate choice on their part. Not a failure: Cahokia never collapsed, not dramatically–it just gradually wound down. They were perfectly capable of feeding themselves and they did for well more than a century. They went back to the old way because they liked it better.

And again, different tribes had different specific ways of doing it, but farming was always the women’s domain–and there are also important spiritual figures who occur under different names in different tribes. One of these is Grandmother/Old Woman Who Never Dies: giver of all plant food, protector of children, bringer of summer, and rejuvenator of living and dying things. I’m just gonna end by dropping this passage from my mom’s book because it’s amazing: “I think it likely that the female flint-clay statues from BBB Motor and Sponemann represent an Earth Mother personage in a manifestation known to all early Cahokians, and that their Woodland ancestors had sought her powers and favors for centuries preceding the Mississippian period, just as Siouan speakers continued to protect her sacred bundles and conduct rituals focused around them long after Cahokia was abandoned. She never died. Several years ago, I accompanied a traditional Hidatsa farmer named Amy Mossett from New Town, North Dakota, to the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center [in Illinois]. When we came to the display case containing a cast reproduction of the Birger figurine, Mossett froze, took a step backward, put her hand on her chest, and said, ‘That’s Grandmother. And the snake is her husband.’“

and a shoutout to the two Māori men who travelled to Vienna in 1859, got themselves apprenticed as printers (and incidentally became accomplished ballroom dancers), and finally had an audience with Franz Josef where they charmed him so much that he sent a printing press to New Zealand….which was promptly used from 1861 to print the newspaper of the Kingitanga anti-colonial movement.

Just researched a bit- they’re names are Wiremu Toetoe and Te Hemara Rerehau Paraone and it’s quite a fascinating story.

Also notable is how Te Hemara described Vienna’s high society as ‘a mountain of gnats’.

10 breathtaking portraits of Sioux Indian and activist Zitkala Sa taken by Gertrude Kasebier from the late 19th century.

1800s-1900s Portraits Of Native American Teen Girls Show Their Unique Beauty And Style (15+ Pics)

I love love love seeing historical/archival photos of people who are not white Christian Europeans :)

this is my fave from the source, tho.

You have no fucking idea how much i love you for the sources.

The caption for the smiley gal up above is “#O-o-be, The Kiowas, 1894”. Come on, if you’re gonna reblog the image, at least give her name and tribe! She’s even got her name on her blanket! Also OMG she’s wearing an elk tooth dress…Having a dad who could gather THAT MANY elk teeth was a sign of high prestige for plains natives, girl’s got bling! I love the rest of the outfit too!

Kiowas Tribe. 1894.

1990 -  When developers and the town of Oka wanted to start building a golf course on stolen land that belonged to them and that contained a sacred grove and a burial ground, the Mohawk tribe around Kanehsatake, Quebec, rose up and occupied the area. The mayor of Oka sent in SWAT teams to make the construction possible.

After chasing off the police and construction workers, members of the tribe use a front-end loader that was left behind to build barricades from the abandoned police vehicles, blockading a highway. Ultimately the stand-off with the police and the Canadian army lasted 78 days.

From this great documentary: [Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance]

In 1513, the Spanish invader Vasco Nuñez de Balboa massacred 40 indigenous Panamanian Two-Spirit people by feeding them alive to his war dogs. 

What is often overlooked about this massacre is the monumental weight of the event, it shook the continent. 

This was one of the first catastrophic events of colonization, a direct and brutal declaration of spiritual war, moving like a shockwave ahead of the physical war.

This was BECAUSE they were TWO-SPIRIT.

Within decades, traveling by foot thousands of miles, news of this direct attack on two-spirit people spread all the way up into what is now called North America. This was a culturally devastating threat for many nations, as they viewed their two-spirit relatives and leaders as a divine connection to, and sacred guidance from, the Creator.  

Even before seeing European invaders with their own eyes, many tribes knew of this massacre and began to ignore the two-spirit qualities in their own children, in the hopes of protecting sacred people and hiding them from invading attention. Within 200 years of this massacre, two-spirit cultures across the continent had largely gone underground, or they had hidden traditional knowledge from their own youth out of fear. 

This spiritual rift between the people and their two-spirit youth only deepened with the forced assimilation of boarding schools, which began detaining indigenous children 347 years after the massacre.

The term “Two-Spirit” was coined in the 90′s inter-tribally, in the spirit of solidarity between native nations, to decolonize their internalized views of gender/sexuality and once again embrace two-spirit people. However, many are still advocating within their own tribes for recognition and respect.  “Two-Spirit” is an umbrella term, similar to “LGBTQ+”; the meaning is entirely dependent on the individual’s culture to define. For some nations it’s gender based, others it’s sexuality based, and for many a mixture of both. But for all nations with two-spirit people, it was a cultural role that went above and beyond gender or sexuality and into the realm of a blessing to the people - of Creator’s mysterious divine diversity.

In many nations 2S people held esteemed and sacred roles within traditional society, such as providing insight and guidance to medicine men or spiritual leaders, adopting orphans and the elders without family into their houses, marriage counsellors and matchmakers, being legendary artists and warriors, and being highly desirable as lovers or partners because of their status and divine power. In my own tribe, mixóge were considered a blessing upon the people from Creator, a symbol of a healthy, harmonious and complete nation.

Balboa is still remembered and venerated in Panama as a heroic explorer. 

“Balboa is best remembered in Panama, where many streets, businesses, and parks bear his name. There is a stately monument in his honor in Panama City (a district of which bears his name) and the national currency is called the Balboa. There is even a lunar crater named after him.”

It’s Native American Heritage Month AND recently Trans Day of Remembrance. I hope ya’ll share this and recognize the gravity of this inherited trauma for Two-Spirit people.