thoughtportal reblogged
white people please just purchase native artwork and jewelry from native people i keep seeing idiot white people be like “waaah i wish i could support native creators but its cultural appropriation” girl why would beaders sell you their earrings then. just dont get a medicine wheel or a thunderbird then like damn it is that easy
If Native folks are making it to sell to white people with the approval of their tribe, it’s not “appropriation”–its support and appreciation! So yes, buy that native-made dream catcher, but not the mass produced fakes made by white people. Like, you can go to a pow wow and buy native crafts there, too.
here are some places to get native/indigenous goods and merch online if you can’t find something local or if physical access is an obstacle:
https://sweetgrasstradingco.com/ https://nativeharvest.com/ https://byellowtail.com/ https://www.salishstyle.com/ https://trickstercompany.com/ https://hutxh.com/ https://www.thentvs.com/ https://urbannativeera.com/ https://www.oxdxclothing.com/ https://kotahbear.com/ https://www.totemdesignhouse.com/ https://ginewusa.com/ https://eighthgeneration.com/
and the only native-owned comic shop in the world: https://redplanetbooksncomics.com/
This semester in college we’ve been working with a company in an indigenous museum to help their sales
They work with native artists in all of Brazil, so the site is in portuguese
Buying from indigenous artists is not appropriation!
thoughtportal reblogged
I know I already made a post about this. But ICWA is LITERALLY being challenged by a white couple that wants to adopt indigenous children to erase their culture and Christianize them. The tribe, whom has a say in who can take their children, is like "Nah, we don't want our youth Christianized like you tride last time"
And the lawyer that's helping the white couple try to overturn ICWA (so that they can erase the cultures of indigenous children) is doing it pro-bono (which means he's not charging the couple anything).
AND that lawyer is a big time lawyer whose clients are usually oil and gas industries. He's literally fighting for indigenous children to be ripped from their tribes and culture so there's less indigenous people to protest big oil destroying their sacred land.
-fae
If anyone's wondering about how they can help, I'm not sure if this will have a direct impact on this case directly but NICWA is an organization that defends Native American children. You can donate here:
The Christian Groups Fighting Against the Indian Child Welfare Act https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/the-christian-groups-fighting-against-the-indian-child-welfare-act/
terrible people in Michigan history
How do you keep your language alive while also protecting the health of elders? That’s been the quandary facing Ojibwe educators during the pandemic. As native speakers, Ojibwe elders were the primary teachers of the language, but they were also the most vulnerable to COVID. Leah Lemm of Minnesota’s Mille Lacs Ojibwe band tells us how she and others figured out how to continue learning while also ensuring the wellbeing of teaching elders like her own father.
Music in this episode by Airae, Gridded, Megan Woffard, Headlund, Joseph Beg, Jules Gaia, Rymdklang Soundtracks, Molecular Machine. Read a transcript of the episode here.
Some Ojibwe language resources recommended by Leah: James Vukelich’s Ojibwe Word of the Day; the University of Minnesota’s online Ojibwe dictionary; the Ojibwe Rosetta Stone project; and the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe and the Minnesota Historical Society’s Aanjibimaadizing book project.
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Leonard Peltier (born September 12, 1944) is an American Indian activist and mainstay member of the American Indian Movement who, following a controversial trial, was convicted of aiding and abetting murder and has been imprisoned since 1977. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for aiding and abetting resulting in the death of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in a June 26, 1975 shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.[1][2][3]
In his 1999 memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, Peltier admitted to participating in the shootout but said he did not kill the FBI agents.[4][5] Human rights watchdogs, such as Amnesty International, and political figures including Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the 14th Dalai Lama, have campaigned for clemency for Peltier in recent decades.[6][7][8]
At the time of the shootout, Peltier was an active member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), an indigenous rights advocacy group that worked to combat the racism and police brutality experienced by American Indians.[9] Peltier ran for President of the United States in 2004, winning the nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party, and receiving 27,607 votes, limited to the ballot in California. He ran as Vice President of the United States in 2020, on a ticket with Gloria LaRiva as the presidential candidate, on tickets for other left parties as well as on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party. Leonard withdrew from those tickets on August 1, 2020 for health reasons.[10][11][12]
Peltier is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Coleman in Florida.[13] Peltier became eligible for parole in 1993.[14][15] On January 18, 2017, it was announced that President Barack Obama denied Peltier's application for clemency.[16] He is of Lakota, Dakota and French descent. He is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa.
For the past 21 years, as a lead operator at the California Institute of Technology’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Yellowfly’s son, Corey Gray, has helped to run machines that detect gravitational waves. These violent ripples travel through spacetime like waves created by a pebble dropped into a pond. They can be caused by the collision of two black holes or the collapse of supernova, and there are even some still rippling around from the birth of the universe—you know, small things.
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves over a century ago in his general theory of relativity, but scientists only first observed these ripples in 2015, thanks to LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, where Gray works. (It seems like we’re always going to be catching up to Einstein). When Gray, who is a member of the Siksika Nation of Alberta, Canada, found out about this major scientific milestone, he began to think about the press releases. They would no doubt be translated into widely spoken languages—French, Japanese, Mandarin. “That’s when I thought it would be freaking cool to get my mom involved and translate this news into Blackfoot,” Gray says, adding that he isn’t quite fluent in the language himself. “This way she would be a poet for Einstein and astrophysics. A code-talker for gravitational waves.”
Though she now lives in southern California, Yellowfly grew up on a reserve in southern Alberta, Canada. In 1957, she enrolled in the Crowfoot Indian Residential School, as was required by Canadian law. These boarding schools were a long and cruel tradition in Canada, where governments and churches pursued a policy of cultural genocide to stamp out the culture of First Nations people, according to a 2015 report from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yellowfly remembers that the first French word her mother learned during her own boarding school experience was “sauvage,” the slur the nuns lobbed at their indigenous pupils.
“The school wanted to get rid of everything that made us native,” Yellowfly says. “The language, the religion, the ideology—everything that was Blackfoot.” If the nuns caught children speaking their native language, the children weren’t allowed to return home over the weekend, and could be physically punished. Yellowfly remembers how she and her classmates developed an underground whisper network in which they spoke to each other in Blackfoot whenever the nuns were out of sight. These small acts of rebellion helped Yellowfly cling to her identity and language.