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

two spirit is not a "native version" of anything

its not a "native version of nonbinary" or a "native version of bigender"

thats not what it means, that’s not what it’s ever meant

two spirit is an pan-tribal term coined by indigenous people in 1990, for indigenous people, to replace the term berdache, an offensive term that white settlers applied to indigenous people that fell outside of the western lens of gender and sexuality

two spirit isnt a "native version of nonbinary" because two spirit doesnt inherently mean someone is nonbinary. some of us are, but so many two spirited people arent. many people in our community also choose specifically not to label themselves with terms like nonbinary, gay, bisexual, etc, and solely use two spirit or another term from their tribe or language

we can be anything and everything and nothing you've ever imagined

to say its a "native version of nonbinary" is not just inaccurate, it's a complete erasure of a massive part of our community

[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.

international people start calling our country aotearoa instead of new zealand challenge

aotearoa is the te reo name for our country, commonly translated as "land of the long white cloud" as the story goes Kupe was guided to our whenua by following a long white cloud in the sky. new zealand is a name which was forced on us by colonizers who stole our precious land less than 200 years ago. by reverting back to the māori name you are metaphorically giving the land back to the tangata whenua, the people of the land, and we can begin to normalize using the proper names for things that should have always belonged to māori

heres a link to a good pronunciation, i recommend practicing saying it along to the video. but please remember that even if you cant get it perfect, say it anyway!! its better to try and get it slightly wrong than not try at all

here’s another pronunciation guide that goes into more detail about how vowels are pronounced in te reo and the structure of the correct pronunciation!

while you're at it, sign te pāti māori's petition to officially change the country's name! anyone from anywhere can sign, please support this kaupapa to restore naming rights to tāngata whenua!

I have a lot of feelings on how indigenous groups who didn’t build permanent structures like cities aren’t seen as being as sophisticated as ones who built large cities, without accounting for the fact that maybe it’s in our values systems to leave as light of a footprint as possible and it’s important that our structures are easily taken down or fade with the passage of time because it’s easier on the landscape, but ya know.

This made me think of the story one of my Coast Salish acquaintances tells of how her family would travel from the Puget Sound up Mt. Rainier every year and, sure, following herds but also they had berry bushes and trees and prairies (with camas is the one she always talks about but I'm sure other foods) that were in the care of specific families so they also followed the plants through the year. They cultivated and cared for them, not just coming to gather and move on to the unknown. They came back and to the same places, the same plants and trees every year.

I think a lot of people mistake what a huge connection that is to land and territory. They hear "nomadic" and dismiss it without realizing. It doesnt mean you dont have roots in the area. It means your roots are so ingrained in the area outsiders dont even see them there.

!!!!!

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. 

Anti-Indigenous things to quit saying/doing:

- Stop saying “off the reservation”. It’s a reference to the pass system that was in place restricting Native people from leaving without permission.

- Stop making “1/16th”, “great-great grandmother”, etc. jokes. All of these reference blood quantum, a system designed to “breed out the Natives”. Indigeneity isn’t defined by a percentage, fraction, etc. Quit policing Indigenous identities and quit joking about genocidal tactics.

- Stop calling things your “spirit animal”. You don’t have one. Only Indigenous people from specific nations have spirit animals.

- Stop making dreamcatchers. They are sacred Anishinaabe culture and are not cute trinkets, crafts, etc. Buy them from Anishinaabe artists.

- Stop buying those little cloth “teepees” for your kids/pets/whatever. Also stuff with tipi prints

- Quit referring to your “tribe”. Enough with the “bride tribe” nonsense and all the rest. Stop trivializing tribal affiliations.

- Don’t wear “war paint”. Don’t put a feather in your hair. Don’t dress up as Native people or characters.

- Stop referring to your meetings/side discussions/parties as a “pow wow”.

- Stop supporting sports teams that use racist terms and logos and caricatures of Indigenous people.

- Stop using white sage. It is sacred and overharvested. There are lots of types of sage you can use instead.

- Stop “smudging”. Smoke cleansing exists in many forms in many cultures, use that. Non-Natives can’t smudge.

- Stop tokenizing your Native friends, classmates, in-laws, half siblings, etc.

Please add more!

- Stop treating Native spirits as generic monsters or cryptids, especially w*ndigoag and sk*nwalkers.

- Stop using imagery of skulls in Plains headdresses, especially as tattoos. This shouldn’t need to be explained.

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.

wheres the smiling blackfoot family i want to see the smiling blackfoot family

smiling blackfoot family.

this picture is often miscaptioned, the Beaver family was actually Stoney Nakoda and not Blackfoot

Part of the Nature, Crisis, Consequence exhibit at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. It's on until July 16th of 2023!

VD: Museum curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto next to a display of a Plague Doctor mask and headdress.

She says "what are we looking at here. This is a work called “Resilience: Living in a Pandemic since 1492” by Osceola and Genevieve Red Shirt who conceived of the work in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic. It features a leather plague doctor's mask inscribed with the names of diseases that have devastated Indigenous nations through history. Caption reads "Smallpox, Diphtheria, Spanish Flu, Covid-19.

Wendy says "these are overlaid with Indigenous medicinal plants. The mask is paired with a war bonnet to honor Indigenous people as survivors and warriors" /End VD

Additional description of the work: The medicinal plants are: Marsh Marigold (yellow); Pokeweed (cone shape with purple berries); Purple Coneflower (lavender color with orange center); Skunk Cabbage (burgundy with bright green).

The work is made from: Wicket and Craig tooling leather, glass, metal, sweet grass, thread, hand-painted imitation eagle feathers, ermine pelts, red wool, red horsehair, buckskin leather, re-purposed Buffalo felt hat.

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.

It frightens and discourages me how pervasive "tribal" stereotypes and imagery are in the fantasy and adventure genres.

It's all over the place in classic literature. Crack open a Jules Verne novel and you're likely to find caricatures of brown people and cultures, even when the characters are sympathetic to the plight of the colonized peoples - incidentally, this is the biggest reason I can't recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to everyone, despite Captain Nemo being one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

You can't escape it in modern cinema, either. You'll see white heroes venturing bravely into jungles and tombs to steal from natives who don't know how to use their resources "properly." You'll see them strung up in traps, riddled with sleeping darts, forced to flee and fight their way out. Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, a remarkably inclusive franchise in many other ways, had an extended sequence of the white heroes escaping from a cannibal civilization in the second film.

And when fantasy RPGs want a humanoid enemy, the "bloodthirsty natives" are the first stock trope they jump to. World of Warcraft is one of the most egregious examples, with the trolls - blatant racist caricatures with faux-voodoo beliefs, cannibalistic diets, Jamaican accents, and a history of being killed in droves by (white) elves and humans - being raided and slaughtered in nearly every expansion.

It doesn't matter how vibrant and distinctive the real-world indigenous, Polynesian, Caribbean, and African cultures are. It doesn't matter how much potential these real civilizations offer for complex and sympathetic characterization. Anything that doesn't make sense to the white western mind is shoved under the same "savage" umbrella. They're different. They're strange. They're scary. They have to be escaped, subjugated, eliminated, ogled at from the safety of a museum.

Modern writers, directors, and developers don't even seem to realize how horrifying it is to present the indigenous inhabitants of a place as "obstacles" for non-native protagonists to overcome. "It's not racist," they say, "because these people aren't really people, you see." And if you dare to point out anything that hurts or offends you as a descendant of the bastardized culture, you're accused of being the real racist: "These aren't humans! They're monsters! Are you saying that these real societies are just like those disgusting monsters?"

No, they're not monsters. But you chose to design them as monsters, just as invaders have done for hundreds of years. Why would you do that? Why can you recognize any other caricature as evil and cruel, but not this?

This is how deep colonialism runs.

[ID: The first is an image of Canada and Mexico with the United States edited out that reads "Oh thank god it was just a dream". The second image is an image of North America with all lands labelled with the names of the tribes living on them that reads "Oh thank god it was just a dream".]

here is a REALLY detailed hq map of indigenous american nations if you're interested (you are.)

and alaska. and hawai'i.

looks like we all talked enough shit that staff put The Community Guidelines Violating Maps™ back