sneakolae - Tumblr blog

[sneakolae]

“So here it is. I consider "woman" to be a made-up category, an intangible, constantly changing idea with as many different definitions as there are cultures on Earth. You could say the same thing about "justice" or "money" or "democracy" — these are made-up ideas, stories we tell ourselves about the shape of our lives, and yet they are ideas with enormous real-world consequences. Saying that gender is fluid doesn't mean that we have to ignore sexism. In fact, it’s the opposite.”

[sneakolae]

“Transformative justice is a large framework, so this description cannot cover everything. We are trying to build alternatives to our current systems and break generational cycles of violence within our communities and families. We do not believe that prisons or cops make us safer. We believe that we can create the things we need. Transformative justice is one way that we are trying to address violence, harm and abuse in our communities in ways that are generative and do not create more destruction and trauma. Transformative justice processes are not perfect, and we are still learning a lot.”

[sneakolae]

“Apologizing is part of accountability and accountability is a sacred practice of love. If you’ve hurt someone you care about, it is sacred work to tend to that hurt. You are caring for this person, the relationship you share, as well as your self. You are engaging in the sacred work of accountability, healing, and being in right relationship. This work is part of the broader legacy of transformative justice, love, and interdependence. Do not take it lightly and give it the respect it deserves.”

[sneakolae]

“For most of us, we have been taught to fear accountability and struggle to know how to conceive of it outside of punishment or revenge. Accountability does not have to be scary, though it will never be easy or comfortable. And it shouldn’t be comfortable. True accountability, by its very nature, should push us to grow and change, to transform. Transformation is not to be romanticized or taken lightly. Remember, true transformation requires a death and a birth, an ending and a beginning. True accountability requires vulnerability and courage, two qualities that we are not readily encouraged to practice in our society.”

[sneakolae]

“And by shifting the focus to animal welfare, Hall conceals the necessity for animal liberation because welfare relies on the notion that we are entitled to others’ bodies as long as we treat them nicely. Such badge allyship is as fraudulent and toxic as that which white women have been serving up to black people since the dawn of western civilization.

Badge allyship allows co-conspirators to appear sympathetic while holding the perpetrators’ boot in place. It is the illusion of solidarity by altering the material conditions of our marginalization instead of removing them altogether. Animals care about as much for her token concerns toward their “welfare” as I do about her performative outrage on my queer and black behalf.“

[sneakolae]

“Trauma-informed approaches shift the focus away from the individual and onto the collective, reflecting the ways that ‘traumatic events have primary effects not only on the psychological structures of the self but also on the systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community’. (Herman 2015: 51) Thus it is not up to the individual alone to heal from their trauma. If it is the case that the ‘traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others’ (Herman 2015: 53), healing requires the ability to rebuild a sense of safety and trust in our relationships with others—even if those others had nothing to do with the traumatic event itself—to know that we can show up as our full selves, with all of our trauma and messiness, and still be cared for.

To do so within the realm of the university presents a variety of challenges, almost always undergirded by the disavowal of emotions as a valid form of knowledge and the valorisation of the ‘rational’ individual. It’s okay to study affect theory; it’s another thing to live your affect in the classroom. The ways in which emotions are framed as a disruption to learning, rather than integral to learning, turns the university into a socially toxic environment. Drawing on the work of James Garbino (1998), Ginwright explains: ‘Socially toxic environments are environments like neighborhoods and schools where lack of opportunities, blocked access, constrained resources, unclear pathways to a better life can erode trusting relationships and severely constrain collective action and agency’. (2016: 3) In terms of the university, we can think of the ways that the university creates barriers to bringing one’s whole self to the classroom.”

[sneakolae]

“A healing centered approach to addressing trauma requires a different question that moves beyond “what happened to you” to “what’s right with you” and views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than victims of traumatic events. Healing centered engagement is akin to the South African term “Ubuntu” meaning that humanness is found through our interdependence, collective engagement and service to others. Additionally, healing centered engagement offers an asset driven approach aimed at the holistic restoration of young peoples’ well-being. The healing centered approach comes from the idea that people are not harmed in a vacuum, and well-being comes from participating in transforming the root causes of the harm within institutions. Healing centered engagement also advances the move to “strengths-based’ care and away from the deficit based mental health models that drives therapeutic interventions.”

[sneakolae]

“This is not a pipeline protest. Wet’suwet’en people have been taking care of this land for thousands of years, including through 200 years of attempted colonial theft. One of the ways industry and the state have tried to steal land is to delegitimize Indigenous governance and criminalize the way we live. To them, the exercise and enforcement of Wet’suwet’en law is criminal. The media coverage has died down. The public eye wants violence and destruction, but turns away from our quiet resistance. People are less interested in our governance systems operating as they should.

We do not consent to the destruction of our land, and we refuse the “benefits” of projects that require the destruction of our neighbors’ land. We turn toward our Indigenous relatives and neighbors to reweave the connections between our nations and each other. In the past months, we have gathered here with our neighbors from across Turtle IslanD.— We’ve stood on the front lines with Tahltan, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Mohawk, Mi’kmaq, Anishinaabe, Cree, Dené, Tsimshian, Dakelh-Carrier, Kwantlen, Secwepemc, Nahuatl, Aztec, Inuit, Métis, Lakota, Musqueam, Squamish, and many more. Our grassroots networks build connections just underneath the soil; we tangle with each other and our ancestors and make each other harder to extract from our lands. We build new relations and new-old relations. This is more than resistance. Gathering here, we strengthen alternatives to a system meant to destroy us. We strengthen each other’s ability to live off the land, to be on our territories in meaningful ways. We stand together against the invasion of our lands and bodies, for Indigenous autonomy and freedom. Join us.”

[sneakolae]

‘“I’m going to be out here all night in this cold weather because I have to, because of the land I love, the Elders I love, the language I love,” says Sutherland-Wilson. “Everyone here has extremely similar stories to mine because all of our nations have been subject to the same unilateral imposition of colonialism, the oppressive legacy of Canada.”

He adds, “Our parents fought for our rights, our grandparents fought for our rights, our great-grandparents [too]. Every inch of recognition we have earned from the Canadian government has been hard fought. Canada has never ceded it without us forcing them to do so. It’s our generation’s turn to stand up and do it.”’

[sneakolae]

“Wet’suwet’en territory is a large traditional territory about 300 kilometres west of Prince George, in Northern British Columbia, that is occupied by members of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, which comprises five clans. According to the Vancouver Sun, the territory is about 22,000 square kilometres. The nation is unceded territory, meaning it is not covered by treaty, and according to lawyer Dr. Pamela D. Palmater, the Wet’suwet’en people have been living on and governing those lands under their laws for generations. “[They’ve decided] through their system of hereditary governance and talking to the people that they don’t want any pipelines or any projects on their territory that could possibly contaminate water or the land or make people sick,” she says. “So they made that decision, [and] they’ve been successful in keeping other pipeline projects out of their territory.” That is until now.”

[sneakolae]

“This is why it probably feels unethical to surveil Larry the human, even if he never, ever finds out that you’re watching him. It’s also why many people consider it off-limits to film a person in a coma or a person with a developmental disability that hampers their ability to understand what it means to be filmed. “The act of looking is itself an enactment of power, irrespective of whether who/what is being looked at is bothered about being viewed,” says Brett Mills, a professor of media studies at the University of East Anglia who often writes about nature documentaries. “So the question is not ‘Does the thing being looked at care?’ The question is, ‘What power do I enact when I insist on the right to look?’”

The entitlement we feel toward animals changes not just how we view them but how we interact with them. The idea that we deserve access to these creatures’ every waking minute creates a culture in which people get dangerously close to bison and lions, pass around a baby dolphin until it dies, and harass bears. When people see animals as something we should have access to, 24/7, we put both ourselves and them at risk.”

[sneakolae]

"In early 2015, when the 10,000-entry Oxford children’s dictionary dropped around fifty words related to nature — words like fern, willow, and starling — in favor of terms like broadband and cut and paste, some of the world’s most prominent authors composed an open letter of protest and alarm at this impoverishment of children’s vocabulary and its consequent diminishment of children’s belonging to and with the natural world. Among them was one of the great nature writers of our time: Robert MacFarlane — a rare descendent from the lyrical tradition of Rachel Carson and Henry Beston, and the visionary who rediscovered and brought to life the stunning forgotten writings of the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd.

Troubled by this loss of vital and vitalizing language, MacFarlane teamed up with illustrator and children’s book author Jackie Morris, who had reached out to him to write an introduction for a sort of “wild dictionary” she wanted to create as a counterpoint to Oxford’s erasure. Instead, MacFarlane envisioned something greater. The Lost Words: A Spell Book was born — an uncommonly wondrous and beguiling act of resistance to the severance of our relationship with the rest of nature, a rerooting into this living world in which, in the words of the great naturalist John Muir, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” just as each word is hitched to all words and to the entire web of being."

[sneakolae]

"The acknowledgment, as much as it is a kind of recognition, also seems to banish the land dispute to the past. This is Native land, it seems to say, and yet here the colonizers are all the same. The real problem is that we never left. We still live on these lands. Failing to take the next logical step—calling for the strengthening of sovereignty and investment in Native voices—is a choice. This isn’t on Indigenous individuals like Waititi; it is an indictment of the audience that applauded him and the Academy that refuses to use its institutional weight and resources to do better. We live in a country where, right now, as the tweets rightly praising Waititi flow, Indigenous land is being blown apart for a border wall and opened up for fossil fuel production. There is something missing here."

[sneakolae]

“That kind of ceremonial acknowledgment has become more commonplace in academic settings in recent years; in film, the Toronto International Film Festival has done it before every screening for two years, and Sundance started at this year’s festival. The recognition is symbolic, of course, but it’s an extremely powerful symbol. It’s meaningful to address colonialism so overtly in an institutional context, and to have Waititi on the televisions of millions of people around the world saying those words will hopefully resonate for a long time.”

[sneakolae]

‘In a 2018 paper in Cell Host and Microbe, scientists in China and Singapore reported their investigation of how bats handle something called DNA sensing. The energy demands of flight are so great that cells in the body break down and release bits of DNA that are then floating around where they shouldn’t be. Mammals, including bats, have ways to identify and respond to such bits of DNA, which might indicate an invasion of a disease-causing organism. But in bats, they found, evolution has weakened that system, which would normally cause inflammation as it fought the viruses.Bats have lost some genes involved in that response, which makes sense because the inflammation itself can be very damaging to the body. They have a weakened response but it is still there. Thus, the researchers write, this weakened response may allow them to maintain a “balanced state of ‘effective response’ but not ‘over response’ against viruses.”‘

[sneakolae]

‘“Strip away the domestic and Israeli political considerations that determined the timing of the plan’s release," said Robert Malley, the president of the International Crisis Group and a former Obama administration official, “and the message to the Palestinians, boiled down to its essence, is: You’ve lost, get over it.”That message, implicitly or explicitly, rewrites the art of the Middle East deal. By tilting the map of a future Palestinian state so precipitously in Israel’s direction, Mr. Trump has embraced a plan that essentially dismantles 60 years of bipartisan support for a negotiated process between Israelis and Palestinians, in which both make concessions and land swaps that would define the lines of a new map.’

[sneakolae]

“Like South Africa’s grand apartheid, the Trump plan physically and politically separates Palestinians by placing them within a non-contiguous homeland (Areas A and B and Gaza), and declaring them citizens of that homeland. Like South Africa’s grand apartheid, the Trump plan grants the Palestinian homeland autonomy over civil matters like education and healthcare, while critical areas such as trade, immigration, and security will remain under Israeli control. Like South Africa’s grand apartheid, the Trump plan is political sleight of hand: a thinly veiled attempt to claim that Israel, a state that rules over roughly the same number of Jews and Palestinians, is actually a Jewish-majority state. Also like apartheid South Africa, the Trump administration claims the homelands are a temporary solution. Once the indigenous population proves itself ready for self-governance they will one day be granted something that resembles a state.”