Stronger Than You

Everyone say thank you american indigenous people for cultivating corn, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cacao, pumpkin, squash, and anything i missed. Makes life more meaningful globally

When zionism was founded you can literally trace herzl and Ben gurion and his companions speaking about the "voluntary" and "involuntary" transfer of the "fellahin" or the Palestinians. They begin their "transfer" committees (because ethnic cleansing was not a term back then) to argue and talk in depth about whether to buy their movement to Iraq and send memos to the United States articulating that "voluntary" transfer plan. You can pinpoint when ben gurion gets frustrated and talks of forced transfer being the only way to make a jewish majority state. All this said about palestinians and our inferiority and that we must be "uprooted" from the land. We understand zionism as it is in action not your arbitrary conceptions of what it could be "despite its history"

You read this book and all the bullshit about "nakba was tragic but that was war and there was never a plan to intentionally force out palestinians" collapses. Ben Gurion and his crew endlessly planned our "transfer"

I'll never forget reading about one zionist leader who traipsed around the country side and found that it was all settled by palestinians and at the end of his observations he wrote "uproot them all" no differently than the "right wing" politicians like smotrich and Ben gvir that liberal zionists assure you is not the israel they know

o/ my family is from Tantura, one of the northern coastal towns which the zionist roving armed militias massacred in 1948 at what's often named the "start" of the Nakba. The alexondri brigade came, following the commands of Ben Gurion, and spontaneously massacred as much of our village as they could. There was not a fight or battle for the village. They simply came into our town, rounded up every man or boy they could get their hands on, lined them up on the beach, and began executing them. Others raped anybody they felt like as their friends shot anybody who tried to stop them. People tried to flee and they shot who they could too to try to ensure we didn't move elsewhere in Palestine. Out of the 1,250 person town, just one pile on the beach consisted of 250 dead. They forced us to stay and wait, at gunpoint.

Because, they had a plan to ensure we wouldn't stay in Palestine. They force-marched us, Trail of Tears style, to a distant zionist settler colony.

They had film crews from MGM, the American movie company, already on site. They had busses prepared at the ready. They recorded a stupid little media moment, "helping the refugees from the violence move to safety 😔", as they forced us to board their busses.

And without telling anybody anything, they drove those busses of captives as far as they could. Out of the Levant. And they dumped us in random distant cities.

My grandma & grandpa, both children at the time, were both dumped in Baghdad, Iraq. My father was born there.

My grandma, like many other survivors of it, refused to talk about what she experienced those few days. She took what she saw to the grave. It took serious investigation by my dad for us to find somebody else who was there and could talk about it. It took an Israeli settler doing interviews of those alexondri brigade brigands, decades later, for us to hear more of their plans. Turns out that media crew was brought back to our town for them to film a fake little fighting video, throwing grenades into & getting into gunfights with empty houses. Sound familiar? The settler who did that research was turned into a pariah and tortured to "confess" he made up all those interviews, which he recanted the instant he was no longer being tortured.

To this day it is hard to find Palestinian cultural heritage from the area we're from. Because they deliberately sent us as far as they could to random spaces, we weren't part of the same areas of super dense Palestinian refugees like in Jordan & Lebanon. So Much of what we do have preserved is from the southern & Central regions. For example, as I learn tatreez, I'm trying to get access to early pictures of my grandma, because that's the only way I'll be able to learn what tatreez motifs & thobe constructions were worn in Tantura.

The whole thing was very deliberate and premeditated. You kill a person, but you genocide a people-- and they came equipped with American and British support, and with the commands of their own leaders echoing in their ears, to commit a genocide.

Went to the Aboriginal artifact exhibit in Chicago. And it’s interesting. How many blankets and masks and totem poles say ‘unknown source’, because every five seconds my mom would stop and point to something and say. “Pauline’s grandmother made that,” or, “That belongs to Mike’s family, I should call him” because. It’s all stolen

“These artifacts were excavated by archaeologists from a burial site in the 1970’s. The remains were returned for reinterment” Okay cool, cool cool. So you just, like. Dug up the grave of a respected family member, stripped them naked, mailed their body back to their family and kept everything they were lovingly put to rest in. Like a graverobbing bastard

Reminds me of the time when of the elders from my hometown started touching a totem pole in the Museum of Anthropology out at UBC and got yelled at by the staff, only to tell him that the pole had been stolen off of the front of her bighouse when she was ten years old.

Museum collectors did the equivalent of kidnapping a family member when they were away fishing.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires all institutions that receive federal funding to repatriate remains and artifacts so if you can identify the source of something on display absolutely get a hold of that institute’s repatriation office

R.I.P. The 2976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan and 1,690,903 Iraqi and 35000 Pakistani people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit

A 10-year update to this post:

R.I.P. to the more than 4,500,000 people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, who have lost their lives as a result of American occupation.

[Original video. Downloaded for easier access.]

When one thinks about "ancient" Native American civilizations and ruins... the thing is that... most of them, they weren't ancient. The Inca were not fully conquered by the Spanish until 1572... for reference, the Mona Lisa was painted in 1502 and Martin Luther made the 95 Theses in 1517.. the "ancient" Aztec Empire was younger than the university of Oxford founded in the 11th century, Montezuma lived at the same time than Leonardo Da Vinci... There are castles that are younger than Machu Picchu, those cities were inhabited by millions just a few centuries ago, and some (Cuzco, México), many actually, are still inhabited today. People speak about the Ancient Maya as if it was some mysterious civilization that was lost, and while it was past its prime at the time of European conquest, the Maya still had city-states and were living in the same areas they live today.

There are still millions of people, right now, who speak Quechua, Nahuatl, and Maya in all their dialects, and I'm just talking about the three most well-known civilizations here... there are millions of Native Americans who still speak their languages and practice their culture and beliefs alive, both thriving and struggling today.

Talking about the "Ancient Inca" or "Ancient Aztecs" makes as much sense as talking about the "Ancient Dutch" or the "Ancient Swedes", and it's another way of erasing them, saying that they just aren't around anymore just like say the Sumerians, or that they just weren't relevant to world history. They were contemporaries to modernity and they're still alive today.

You can talk about the Ancient Olmecs or Ancient Chavín though. Because the Inca and the Aztecs are relatively "modern" but their cultures were just the latest from a cycle of civilizations stretching millenia before Christ.

U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.

Daily reminder that the US, who love to scaremonger about "communist labour camps," have legal slave labour if you're in prison

okay so as much as this post punches above weight on its own i need people to know exactly how many industries in the us are using prison labor, because it is many more than you think:

about 2/3s of prisoners in the united states work and most of those people make nothing for their work. if they make any money it's averaging 52 cents (that's $0.52) per hour and most of the money gets withheld for "room and board, taxes, and court cost" by the prison. some states, including alabama, arkansas, florida, georgia, mississippi, south carolina, and texas, pay nothing. here is a 150 page ACLU report on this that was published in 2022. if you refuse to work you might be sent to solitary or have your parole chances destroyed. there are no labor protections. people get killed. incarcerated people produce billions of dollars a year and almost never get paid.

there are basically three forms of prison labor. the first is labor inside of prisons to keep the prisons running. which means that if they let people out? their admin goes down. which is a reason to not let people out. the second is work release, providing inmate labor to private companies at offsite locations, like poultry plants, cattle and dairy farms, and other agricultural services. (this includes firefighting. incarcerated people are saving your fucking lives for less than five bucks a day.) the third is production of goods for external sale, including farm work, manufacturing, call center, distribution services, and others. and yes, before you ask, this includes immigration detention, which may i remind everyone is made up of civil detainees; immigration violations are not crimes but civil violations and people are trapped and exploited in private prisons and then utilized for profit.

this is legal because of the thirteenth amendment to to the US constitution, which states (and this is a direct quote), that "neither "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the united states[.]"

colorado banned prison labor five years ago but prisoners say it's still going on as of november 2023. there are other state initiatives trying to get prison labor banned, but when the government literally relies on incarcerated people to keep running, it's an uphill fuckin road.

companies which use prison labor or sell products made by prison labor include:

walmart

kroeger

target

aldi

whole foods

mcdonald's

wendy's

starbucks

sprint

verizon

victoria's secret

the dairy farmers of america

dickinson frozen foods

badlands quilting

pizza hut

hickman's egg ranch

fidelity investments

jc penny

american airlines

avis rental cars

the oregon department of motor vehicles

3M

allstate insurance

american apparel

american express

costco

enterprize

fedex

frito lay

hertz

HP

little caesars

kfc

office max

sara lee

xerox

and so many others.

The problem and practice is so pervasive it is honestly really difficult to boycott and divest from products produced by prison labor. Sometimes we can search and find out if a company uses prison labor, sometimes it just feels unknowable. Sometimes those companies are your only option for internet service.

Companies also love to market a product as "made in America" without clarifying it was made by prison labor. If something says it was made in America but gives zero further details, be very wary of it. Shit that is marketed towards a conservative audience absolutely loves to do this especially.

You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is?  I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off.  Woopie. 

Salt of the Earth (1954), dir. Herbert J. Biberman

Damn, son.

EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH SALT OF THE EARTH

Salt of the Earth actually has a crazy interesting history- OP already said it was made in 1954, but that was in the middle of the Red Scare (communism scary cold war hysteria)

Congress’s anti-communism target fell hard on Hollywood, and those in the industry who were suspected of communism at all were blacklisted from all jobs, because studio’s didn’t want to face backlash from Congress

Salt of the Earth was made nearly 100% with blacklisted crew members from Hollywood, and had such difficulty finding actors that they hired local citizens and miners from the actual strike the plot is based on. There were only 5 trained actors involved, and one of them (Rosaura Revueltas, the woman in the gif) was deported to Mexico before they finished filming on accusations of communism, with no proof and no substance. The filming was plagued with police harassment and threats (according to my professor they were shot at more than once), and the local union hall was burned down.

The movie itself not only covers a real 1950′s labor strike demanding safer and more equal labor conditions for Mexican-American employees, but after the miners were facing arrest, their wives and children took up the strike in their place. The movie’s combination of blacklisted crew, civil rights and feminist message, and pro-union plot (during the red scare) got the movie blacklisted and only 12 theaters in the entire United States would show the movie- it was successful in Europe, but didn’t actually achieve viewership in the US until the 60′s

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/10/salt-of-the-earth-labour-workers-blacklisted-filmmakers

Awesome video displaying phenomenal craftsmanship—posted by one of my favorite Tiktok accounts: Tlingit_Haida

Aani (the land known as Southeast Alaska) has been home to the Tlingit and Haida Peoples since time immemorial

Edit: To clarify, this particular video features Git Hoan Dancers, of the Tsimshian Tribe. They say so in the video, but I realize my caption about the Tlingit and Haida Nations might cause confusion.

yearly required reading

This is one of those true, declassified government things that always sounds made up but one of the things Henry Kissinger did with his career was use the CIA to help turn small, prosperous socialist nations into fascist dictatorships just to keep those nations powerless and possibly to keep socialist systems *looking* doomed and futile to the American public, like maybe just to scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income. Yes it sounds like an insane conspiracy theory a maniac would invent. It also happened multiple times and several generations of people around the world are still living in misery because of it.

Remember folks, the two types of conspiracy theory are "Things the CIA or FBI has admitted to doing" and "Antisemitism"

happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.

Non-Natives reblogging this are great and wonderful

Please remember that "land back" does not mean "indigenous people are mystical elves with innate epigenetic wisdom of land stewardship and they don't belong in big cities," nor does it mean "non-indigenous people can't be farmers." What it DOES mean is that "non-indigenous farmers should be paying the equivalent of property taxes to the native governments their land was stolen from." It means, "there's a great deal of indigenous scholarship on sustainable agricultural practices that farmers should be taking into account, because indigenous agriculture was more advanced than European agriculture at the time Europe invaded the Americas and western agriculture *still* hasn't caught up in terms of figuring out how to produce equivalently high crop yields without compromising the ecosystem." It means, "non-indigenous farmers should be in an intellectual discourse with indigenous agricultural scientists and indigenous peoples that still do traditional farming, figuring how to repair the damage western farming practices have done to the ecosystem."

It also means that indigenous peoples should regain the right to sustain themselves on the land according to the practices they want, and they should have free reign to perform their cultural practices and protect their holy sites, as opposed to the current model where if they try to honor their dead on public lands they get violently removed.

People also get angry at this concept thinking it'd mean non-native people getting mass evicted from their homes but 1) your home is already owned by a bank or big business or government, the difference would mainly be who you're now paying rent to and 2) most of the land in America isn't residential anyway.

This topic isn't about your house that you're already struggling to pay for, it's about thousands of miles of the planet rotting away under the monopoly of big agriculture and oil, but hypothetically speaking I think a local tribe would treat you a shitload better than whatever inhuman real estate brand you're already at the mercy of.

Juneteenth is about Black people who were officially technically supposed to be freed from enslavement. Nobody else. Nothing else. It's not a POC day. It's not a "freedom for all" day. It's Black folk, Black culture, Black emancipation, SPECIFICALLY. Any other observation for Juneteenth is gentrification.

Your Juneteenth reminder that just because they made it a "national holiday," it's still not. It's for the celebration of Black Americans being freed from slavery, finally.

It's from Texas. We been welcoming other descendants of the enslaved. But we close the gate and draw the line with "everybody."