This blog will also highlight issues of cultural appropriation and racism, especially in popular culture.
Link reblogged from I am. I am. I am. with 42 notes
Moniquilliloquies.: On Pronouns and Colonialism: Tumblr Social Justice and the English Language →
TW: Racism, Suicide
A lot of people like me who grew up speaking primarily North American indigenous languages have told me they experience a sort of “Pronoun Confusion” where everything in the third person is “it”. The tree is “it” and its leaves are “they”. The grass is “it”…
Source: digatisdi
Link reblogged from Indian Country Today Media Network with 12 notes
American History Myths Debunked: No Native Influence on Founding Fathers →
When Cracked.com posted an article on May 15 entitled “6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America,” it started something of a mini-sensation. Tens of thousands of people liked it on Facebook, and more than 1.4 million people have viewed it on the site thus far.
“When the first Europeans swept into the northeast of the New World, far from finding a organizational blank canvass on which to create a brand new system of government, it should be part of the curriculum for students in the Americas to understand that they instead encountered a highly organized, very powerful alliance of five nations that controlled a giant expanse of territory, from the St. Lawrence river south into Pennsylvania and west into Illinois. The Iroquois League was, and still is, the oldest participatory democracy on Earth.”
Definitely read the original article as well as the ICT article, the original breaks down some good points quite nicely and it’s a great website in general. It did get something wrong (that I noticed) though: vikings never had horns on their helmets.
Whenever I think about how the Peacemaker united the Haudenosaunee Nations, it gives me hope for the future of humanity. What he did was take 5 nations occupying huge territories, that had been at war with each other for generations, and he found the warmongers in those communities and reformed them to bring his message of peace to their people. Even more amazing than being the earliest known democratic nations, what impresses me is that they gave Clan Mothers, as representatives of their communities, the ability to step in and take away power from leaders that did not act with regard to the people’s wishes and best interests. Even with nation presidents, as I understand it, the Confederacy still upholds this system with council matters. If only the U.S had taken on the Haudenosaunee way of governance fully. People should not claim to favour “democracy” without first learning what that word actually means, and how the people they learnt that system of governance from actually practice it.
“One of the strangest legacies of America’s founding is our national obsession with the apocalypse. There’s a new JJ Abrams show coming this fall called The Revolution about a post-apocalyptic America, and of course The Hunger Games. We go to a gift shop in Arizona and see dug-up Indian arrowheads, and never think “this is the same thing as the stuff laying around in Terminator or The Road or that part in The Road Warrior where the feral kid finds a music box and doesn’t know what it is.”
We love the apocalypse as long as nobody acknowledges the truth: It’s not a mythical event. We live on top of one.”
Photo reblogged from Urban Native Girl Stuff with 136 notes
Traditional Native American Clothing of the Early 21st Century” “Medicine Man” and “Chief”19x25 color pencil on paper. Inspired by the vintage paper dolls of the late ’50s early ’60s by Steven Paul Judd.
“I’m not a psychologist so I can’t tell you the effects of seeing your people only portrayed in a certain way. I can only speak on my own experience of being a little kid and looking for others on t.v. that I could identify with. Only person I could find was Erik “Ponch” Estrada from “CHiPs”. So as a youn’un I pretended to be a motorcycle cop. So my thought is, what if our youth could see there selves not in just a historical context, but as doctors, lawyers, astronauts. So that’s when I decided to make these drawings. They are big (19x25).” Steven Paul Judd
Source: facebook.com
Photo reblogged from Folk art with 10 notes
A Chuvash woman wearing traditional costume
Source: folkthings
Video reblogged from Aj, Rromale! with 9 notes
SULUKULE: Kimin için dönüşüm?/ Transformation for whom?
Özet:
2006 yılında ‘Kentsel Dönüşüm’ projesi kurbanı olan Sulukule, İstanbul’da 1000 yıllık geçmişi olan bir mahalle. Çoğunluğu Roman olan ve evleri belediye tarafından hukuksuzca yıkılan mahalle sakinleri, 40 km ötedeki Taşoluk’ta TOKİ’nin inşa ettiği evlerden satın almak zorunda bırakıldı. Ev sahibi olma umuduyla oraya mecburen taşınan kiracılar hüsrana uğradılar. Neredeyse tamamı taksitlerini ödeyemeyip eskisinden çok daha zor şartlarda Sulukule yakınlarına geri döndü, Taşoluk’ta kalan birkaç aile ise zar zor orada tutunmaya çalışıyor. 1000 yıllık mahallenin yerinde ise bugün zenginlerin lüks villaları yükseliyor. Bu dönüşümden kim karlı çıktı?Synopsis
In 2006, The 1000-year-old neighborhood of Sulukule in Istanbul was the victim of ‘Urban Transformation’. The residents, most of whom were Roma, had their houses demolished illegally and were forced to buy TOKI’s social housing apartments in Taşoluk, 40 km away from their neighborhood. Hoping to own a house, the tenants reluctantly accepted to move there. The majority who couldn’t afford the installments moved back to areas near Sulukule. The ones remaining in Taşoluk can barely manage. Today fancy villas of the rich have replaced the 1000-year old neighborhood. Who has profited from this transformation?Yapımcı/Producer: Imre Azem
Yönetmen/Director: Nejla osseiran
Kurgu/Editor: Mesut Ulutaş
Yapım/Production: Kibrit Film
Müzik/Music: Ozan Türkyılmaz & Barış Yerli
Süre/Running time: 8’
Yılı/Year: 2012
Source: vimeo.com
Photoset reblogged from I am. I am. I am. with 3,006 notes
Sick and Tired by Shihan.
agreed.
Does that put it into perspective for you?
Seriously. I always have to try to put this into perspective for people. People act like slavery was so distant. My mom is older in relation to my age (she had me at 43), and her father was older when she was born (in his early 50’s) and was born in the late 1800’s. One of his PARENTS was born into slavery. For people like my mom, this isn’t the least bit distant. My mom grew up in the Jim Crow south. History is so depersonalized that people can act like slavery, Jim Crow, and blatantly racist institutions existed in 1800 BC
I have an aunt who died in 02 who was born in 1898.
I’d LOVE for someone to have told her that slavery was “long ago”.
also slavery still exists, not only is human trafficking common and epidemic in some places, slavery was never really outlawed. it was hidden and institutionalised in free market practices that benefit from enforced poverty. I don’t aim to compare experiences here, only explain something that I don’t see mentioned often, but in a way the majority of the world population are now slaves; birth certificates create a legal fiction (representing a real person) that the state has absolute authority over. that’s not the dictionary explanation of ‘slavery’ since it’s technically optional to be a member of a state, but withholding the truth from people so that they can’t make an informed decision on whether or not to have their children’s births registered is effectively slavery. also it’s not as if people can survive easily being free, considering who holds power globally and what they are willing to do to keep that power (e.g free market practices). saying that, POC and low GNP countries generally suffer more than others because of the addition of racism and white privilege. but yeah…slavery never really ended and has many forms. whilst the experiences of victims of the well-known slave trade are obviously severe, forcing the people of a poor nation to allow white people to steal their resources, and threatening to bar them from recieving UN/World Bank/etc aid if they don’t, amounts to slavery. it is forcing people into a position which makes survival difficult and often impossible, for the financial gain of people who already have far more than they need. not only that, but often those who are opressed are so because they also are a threat to the power of the oppressors if they are allowed to thrive, or even survive. take the DRC, for example, without the resources they have ‘modern’ life as we know it would be impossible, I wouldn’t be able to own this laptop without minerals from the DRC that are mined under terrible circumstances (google it: it literally involves slavery, child labour and rape). in a fair and reasonable world, the DRC should be the richest nation in the world given how much the rest of the world relies on its resources, yet it is one of the poorest. just think about how much you have personally benefited from that situation before stating that slavery is in the past and isn’t relevant anymore.
Source: fckyeahhiphoplyrics
Photo reblogged from Folk art with 19 notes
Nadiya Asyandu, a Nganasan woman in traditional dress, poses with 10 year old Tanya Falkova. Taymyr, Northern Siberia, Russia.
Photo by © Bryan & Cherry Alexander Photography / ArcticPhotoThe Nganasans are an indigenous Samoyedic people inhabiting the Taymyr Peninsula in central Siberia.
(Source: http://www.arcticphoto.co.uk)
Source: folkthings
Link reblogged from Indian Country Today Media Network with 4 notes
Turtle Lodge Wisdom Keepers Gathering: Preparing for the New Age →
The discovery of a Mayan calendar that blows away all new-agey notions of an impending apocalypse on December 21, 2012, notwithstanding, we are not in the clear yet. Great change is indeed coming, indigenous leaders say.
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