Indigenous People’s Day Photo Project 2013

"Dear Columbus…"

Photo Credit: Andrew Burlingham

South Puget Sound Community College’s Diversity & Equity Center

Olympia, WA 

Yes. YES. Fuck Columbus forever. I’ll always distinctly remember being a -child-, maybe 7? and even then being so horribly angry about Columbus. I was originally vocal about it. The real kicker? I quickly learned to shut up about how I felt. I tried to talk about how infuriating it was to learn how Columbus invaded and destroyed an entire native people. And every adult I talked to tried to convince me everything Columbus did was totally okay. Apparently children aren’t supposed to learn about Columbus and find him to be anything but ~brave~ and ~adventurous~ or some shit. I’m still, even now, fucking appalled anyone, ANYONE, could so easily and thoughtlessly try to indoctrinate a small child into accepting genocide of native people. It’s …disgusting, and so extremely telling of how far our culture will go in its dehumanization and erasure of the violence native people endured and continue to endure at our hands.

So. Yes. Fuck Columbus. I hope someday we all celebrate Indigenous People Day and only remember Columbus for his crimes against humanity.

Girls pose by a jail that recalls the witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. Photo taken in 1945.

I recently learned that the water in Salem was contaminated with the fungus from which LSD is derived and a legitimate theory for the whole thing is that everyone in the town was tripping balls 

This might be the greatest thing ive ever seen on the internet

We did a whole massive thing on this in history. I believe the fungus in question is called Ergot and it’s terrifying. It makes your muscles spasm so when they had seizures that was the reason, not because they were possessed. One woman had to be strapped to her bed, she was seizing so bad. And, like ‘theybuildbuildings’ said, it had the same effects as LSD; as soon as you touch it, let alone consume it, it messes with your entire system. The worst thing is, you practically always had a bad trip. Many complained about bugs crawling under their skin or monsters emerging from the shadows to scratch and bite at them until they were screaming. It was a horrendous thing and the worst part is, Ergot is still around. It grows on crops and, if your wheat isn’t properly treated, it can be eaten and you’ll most likely experience the same as the women of Salem. 

god i love history

This is hella cool and almost correct… 

The effects on the people of Salem were probably from consuming bread with the fungus in it, not from contaminated water. And apparently rye is way more commonly affected than wheat. In fact, often the members of the clergy were able to afford nicer bread made from wheat and thus were not as commonly affected.

You don’t go on a spasm-y trip just by touching it. You have to consume it for weeks, which results in chronic poisoning. ( If you stop eating it early enough, you may recover. So when people suffering from these “demonic possessions” took refuge in churches and stopped eating low-grade rye bread they were sometimes miraculously healed. 

More interesting facts:

Ergot poisoning can result in convulsions & hallucinations, or it can cause gangrene, depending on which group of active alkaloids are present. (Horrifying, either way.) It killed a lot of people in Europe in the Middle Ages. 

In Europe, often there was a strong correlation between wet summers (which provide ideal conditions for ergot) and reports of witchcraft/ possession. And in Norway and Scotland, records of witch persecution are only found in areas where rye was grown and used to make bread.

And I just learned right now that one author dude translated the word “Beowulf” as “barley-wolf” which could indicate a connection to ergot. The LSD-like effects could be a valid explanation for stories of Old Norse warriors going into the a sort of trancelike battle rage.

(this is exactly the kind of stuff my herbology medicinal plants class is about, it’s so cool omfg. we had a lecture on ergot last week.)

BETTY BOOP - Origin Ms. ESTHER JONES, known by her stage name, “Baby Esther,” was an ” African-American singer and entertainer of the late 1920s. She performed regularly at the (The Cotton Club) in Harlem.  Singer Helen Kane saw her act in 1928 and (COPIED or stole ). Ms Jones’ ‘baby’ Singing Style! > for a recording of “I Wanna Be Loved By You.”  Ms. Jones’ singing style went on to become the inspiration for (( Max Fleischer )) cartoon character’s Voice and SINGING style of BETTY BOOP, was YES a Black Woman.  Her singing trademark Was.. “boop oop a doop “.. In a baby voice at the cotton club in Harlem. -  Esther Jones who’s stage name was “Baby Esther” was a popular entertainer at Harlem’s Cotton Club in the late 1920s. Baby Esther interpolated words such as ‘Boo-Boo-Boo’ & ‘Doo-Doo-Doo’ in songs at a cabaret.  Helen Kane SAW Baby’s act in 1928 and (stole) Used it in her hit song I Wanna Be Loved By You. An early test sound film was also discovered, which featured Baby Esther performing in this style, disproving Kane’s claims. Baby Esther’s manager also testified that Helen Kane had saw Baby Esther’s cabaret act in 1928.  Supreme Court Judge Edward J. McGoldrick ruled: “The plaintiff has failed to sustain either cause of action by proof of sufficient probative force”. In his opinion, the “baby” technique of singing did not originate with Kane. $250,000 infringement lawsuit Esther’s manager also testified that , Helen Kane & her manager , saw Baby’s act somewhere between 1928-1929. Scholar Robert G.O’ Meally said, Betty Boop The WHITE CARTOON herself had, as it were, a BLACK grandmother in her backround. Baby Esther was presumed dead by 1934, just when the lawsuit had ended. @Learn your History or they will Hide it from you. @BLACK-American MUSIC and DANCE Styles. - Influential WorldWide “

don’t forget that Betty Boop was a major influence in Osamu Tezuka’s work. Tezuka is considered one of the fathers of modern anime with the “big doe eyes” style so to some extent all anime girls nowadays owe part of their legacy to this lady!

White privilege

Forty-six million white adults today can trace the origins of their family wealth to the Homestead Act of 1862. This bill gave away valuable acres of land for free to white families, but expressly precluded participation by Blacks.

"how do I have privilege?"

the first female chinese immigrant to america was a sixteen-year-old girl who was part of a cultural exhibit where she sat in a life-size diorama and people watched her eat with chopsticks while wearing silk clothes and that’s really all you need to know about the commodification of chinese women

Afong Moy.  Her name was Afong Moy.  Say the names of people who should be remembered.

sources: [1] [2] [3] [4]

also an addendum to the hunger games slide, when they put out a casting call for the role of Katniss, they specifically asked for only caucasian actors to audition, which left out any possibility for any amazing PoC actors to have been discovered.

i hope this was informational and i didnt leave anything major out. if anything is wrong or needs to be updated, message me and i’l fix any fallacies!

A lot of white people who do black face think they are being “respectful”. That’s a result of ignorance. It’s not okay, obviously, but please don’t post their personal information such as their phone number and address in order to “teach them a lesson”. They’re just dumb, ignorant, white people who won’t do it anymore if they’re told why it’s racist.

Oh look, historical reasoning for some fucked up shit. It fits on my blog, yes it does.

Hey Theodore Roosevelt, remember that time someone tried to assassinate you, but you just laughed and proceeded to give a 90-minute long speech with the bullet lodged in your lung, where it remained for the rest of your life? Or when you tore up your leg after being thrown into piranha-infested waters while exploring uncharted Brazil? Or all those times you broke your ribs from falling off horses while doing badass jumps? Or when you destroyed the sight in your left eye in a White House boxing match? Or that time you killed a cougar in a knife fight (seriously)? And how the only way death could finally get to you was in your sleep, in the early morning on January 6th in 1919. Here's to TR as the infinite inspiration for pure, condensed badassery.

furnweh:

Theodore Roosevelt, October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919

“Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight.”

Original Badass.

All of our presidents combined can’t add up to how much of a badass he was.

TR Appreciation Post ‘12

Not to mention he was an attractive mother fucker.

Today, September 8th, is the 60th birthday of Ruby Nell Bridges - a woman who, being the first black child to attend an all-white school in New Orleans in 1960, underwent a traumatizing ordeal that came to signify the deeply troubled state of race relations in America.

On her first day of school at William Frantz Elementary School, during a 1997 NewsHour interview Bridges recalled that she was perplexed by the site that befell, thinking that it was some sort of Mardi Gras celebration:

"Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.”

Only six-years-old at the time, little Ruby had to deal with a slew of disgusting and violent harassment, beginning with threats of violence that prompted then President Eisenhower to dispatch U.S Marshals as her official escorts, to teachers refusing to teach her and a woman who put a black baby doll in a coffin and demonstrated outside the school in protest of Ruby’s presence there. This particular ordeal had a profound effect on young Ruby who said that it “scared me more than the nasty things people screamed at us.”

Only one teacher, Barbara Henry, would teach Ruby and did so for over a year with Ruby being the only pupil in her class.

The Bridges family suffered greatly for their brave decision. Her father lost his job, they were barred from shopping at their local grocery store, her grandparents, who were sharecroppers, were forcibly removed from their land, not to mention the psychological effect this entire ordeal had on her family. There were, however, members of their community - both black and white - who gathered behind the Bridges family in a show of support, including providing her father with a new job and taking turns to babysit Ruby.

Part of her experience was immortalized in a 1964 Norman Rockwell painting, pictured above, titled The Problem We All Live With. Her entire story was made into a TV movie released in 1998.

Despite the end of the segregation of schools in the United States, studies and reports show that the situation is worse now than it was in the 1960s.

Today, still living in New Orleans, Briges works as an activist, who has spoken at TEDx, and is now chair of the Ruby Bridges Foundation.

Chinese-American Shipbuilder

“Los Angeles, Calif. — Miss Ethel Mildred Lee, 23-year-old girl born in this country of Chinese parents, is shown at her job as an electrician-helper at the Los Angeles yards of the California Shipbuilding Corporation, where she has worked for almost two years. Extra incentives to help the war effort are two brothers in the U.S. Army and one in the Navy yard at Honolulu, Hawaii. Miss Lee, who’s 4 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 98 pounds, buys $100 worth of War Bonds a month.” — January 20, 1944

Miss Ethel Mildred Lee, doin’ the damn thing. So many examples of women shitting on bullshit patriarchal thinking, just hidden in plain sight throughout history.

this is also your feminist history: shit’s complicated. 

-On Presidential Doodlers

Said alligator:

(via thedancingtoast)

Very Funny, JFK

In 1961, New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons contacted John F. Kennedy after seeing Presidential autographs for sale in a store and informed him of the prices. At the time, George Washington’s was priced at $175, Ulysses S. Grant’s at $55, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s at $75, Teddy Roosevelt’s at $67.50, and JFK’s at $75. Below is the response mailed to Lyons.

How much you wanna bet it wasn't even JFK? Just some smartass staffer?

A young “Miss Maggie” Walker, the daughter of a former slave, who in 1903 became the first woman of any race to found and become president of an American bank. She also founded a newspaper and a department store called “Saint Luke’s Emporium.”

Courtesy of the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site Find Black History Album on Tumblr  Pinterest  Facebook  Twitter

Writing Research - The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties is a term sometimes used to refer to the 1920s in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, characterizing the decade’s distinctive cultural edge in New York City, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, London, Los Angeles and many other major cities during a period of sustained economic prosperity. French speakers called it the “années folles" ("Crazy Years"), emphasizing the era’s social, artistic, and cultural dynamism.

Normalcy returned to politics in the wake of hyper-emotional patriotism after World War I, jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood, and Art Deco peaked. Economically, the era saw the large-scale diffusion and use of automobiles, telephones, motion pictures, and electricity, unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture. The media focused on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars, as cities rooted for their home team and filled the new palatial cinemas and gigantic stadiums. In most major countries women won the right to vote for the first time. Finally the Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the era, as the Great Depression set in, bringing years of worldwide gloom and hardship.

The social and cultural features known as the Roaring Twenties began in leading metropolitan centers, especially Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Paris and London, then spread widely in the aftermath of World War I. The United States gained dominance in world finance. Thus when Germany could no longer afford war reparations to Britain, France and other Allies, the Americans came up with the Dawes Plan and Wall Street invested heavily in Germany, which repaid its reparations to nations that in turn used the dollars to pay off their war debts to Washington. By the middle of the decade, prosperity was widespread, with the second half of the decade later becoming known as the “Golden Twenties”.

The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity and a break with traditions. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. New technologies, especially automobiles, moving pictures and radio proliferated “modernity” to a large part of the population. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in both daily life and architecture. At the same time, jazz and dancing rose in popularity, in opposition to the mood of the specter of World War I. As such, the period is also often referred to as the Jazz Age. [1] [2]

Names

Society & Life

Commerce

Fashion

Entertainment & Food

Dialogue

Health, Hygiene & Medicine

Law Enforcement & Crime

This is BEAUTIFUL.

On the morning of September 4, 1957, fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts set out on a harrowing path toward Harding High, where-as the first African American to attend the all-white school – she was greeted by a jeering swarm of boys who spat, threw trash, and yelled epithets at her as she entered the building.

Charlotte Observer photographer Don Sturkey captured the ugly incident on film, and in the days that followed, the searing image appeared not just in the local paper but in newspapers around the world.

People everywhere were transfixed by the girl in the photograph who stood tall, her five-foot-ten-inch frame towering nobly above the mob that trailed her. There, in black and white, was evidence of the brutality of racism, a sinister force that had led children to torment another child while adults stood by. While the images display a lot of evils: prejudice, ignorance, racism, sexism, inequality, it also captures true strength, determination, courage and inspiration.

Here she is, age 70, still absolutely elegant and poised.

Seizure of indigenous land, 1776-1887

an important reminder as ‘4th of July’ rolls around

Boarding schools used Native appropriation to embarrass, degrade & exercise control over Native children. Native appropriation is an extension of the federal government’s assimilation and termination policies to ‘kill the Indian and save the man.’

gross

Those nuns’ smug faces contrasted against the children’s. It breaks me.

In case anyone was wondering why this post isn’t so much funny as it is just horrifyingly true

Or kind of like how I spent probably like 2000 bucks so white men could teach me the history of my own fucking people

Or how I had to explain to my own fucking white sister why it wasn’t okay for her to make money dressed up like an “Indian Princess”

Or how my white ex-in-laws fucking accused me of being a pothead for smudging my fucking room and used that for grounds to kick me out (with no other place to go), which was traumatic enough that I never fucking did it again

Or how last week at work I had someone literally tell me they thought addiction to tobacco was Native American’s “revenge” for genocide, because we’re extinct now or almost because “you don’t see a lot of them these days”, and killing “us” with cigarettes is “their” revenge

This photo is a picture of what it feels like to be a ghost

A fucking ghost in your own native land.