#LISTEN TO INDIGENOUS STORIES

[kaspavanlortsyal]

Let It Be Enough - 1 Year Anniversary

"You will always be enough."

This beautiful art was commissioned from the incredibly talented Elle Noir (twitter/instagram/deviantart)! Thank you, Elle, for bringing this beautiful moment in their story to life.

This time last year, I posted the first chapter of Let It Be Enough on AO3. The butterfly effect of my simple desire to share my silly little story is unbelievable. In one year it garnered over 50k hits on AO3, and that isn't even the coolest part. I made lifelong friends, found a community of wonderful writers, and fell in love. I reflect upon 2023 and bear witness to the power of storytelling. I never thought that I'd still be writing fanfiction about Petra and Miles a year later in the form of my Fairytale AU, The Memory of Stars, and yet here I am.

The world of Avatar is magnificent. It gives me hope that the highest grossing movie of all time is an allegory about colonialism. It emphasizes the importance and beauty of our connection to the Earth (or in the case of the Na’vi, Pandora), and condemns corporate greed. I sincerely love Avatar, not just because of the nostalgia, but because of how bold it is in its storytelling.

Stories are the backbone of society. For all of human history, we have told each other stories. Stories shape our worldview and helps us convey emotions and ideas. Every person finds their own truth in the shape of words.

James Cameron is a fantastic storyteller. However, he is also a white man, and some stories are not his to tell. Many aspects of the Na’vi are drawn from real world indigenous cultures. I understand that he consulted various groups in his development of the Na’vi, but if you enjoy Avatar, I strongly encourage you to seek out own voices stories as well. Our world is troubled and complicated, but I truly believe that it gets better each time someone opens their mind to traditional indigenous knowledge. That gives me hope more than anything: the will to listen. 

One of my favourite books: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (If you're a fan of audiobooks, Robin reads the audiobook herself and it’s incredible. I highly highly recommend picking this up, especially if you like plants.)

Also, if you are playing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, please dedicate time to researching Residential Schools and their dark legacy in North America. You will better understand the real world inspiration of the Ambassador Program, but more importantly, you will be offering a listening ear to the important stories of survivors. Feel free to add more book suggestions to the comments as well!

Thank you for being here. 

[sastiel-is-my-serotonin]

There's a lot of stories I've been told by elders, teachers, cousins, all about what it was like to be taken away from their parents. Or at least attempted to be taken away.

Certain ones stand out the most in my mind. I used to be really involved with church, my entire family was. So we were close to our pastor.

Outside of church my mom was helping her with some things and I remember when she started to open up about her experience with boarding schools.

I sat there and listened as she talked about it. She was one of the ones who'd get in trouble for talking in her native tongue. She learned to stop because some punishments you simply didn't come back from.

She cried talking about when they cut her hair. She didn't understand why her parents were sending her away, she didn't know until she was older they had no choice.

She didn't get very far before she went inside, it all being too much and she didn't want us kids to hear the worst parts.

Even though she wasn't there anymore, she became a pastor who had incredibly short hair. She hardly spoke her language, and at that point she was one of the elders. It still affected her long after and it took me a really long time to see it. Because she was always wrapped up in native clothing, had beaded pieces. She clearly was still within her culture, there just were some parts she never returned back to.

Recently, although she talked about it when I was little too, my Mom talked to my little sister about the sweeps they'd do on reservations.

They all recognized the vans that meant every native child had to hide until nightfall, if you were caught, you weren't coming back.

You couldn't just run inside to your parents, they'd go from house to house, if you were there, they could take you and your parents couldn't do anything about it. It was legal.

All their parents could do was warn them about the vans and beg them to hide until it was safe.

Her and whoever she was with, friends, cousins, siblings, they'd stay out of sight until nightfall. The only thing protecting them was the fact that the vans couldn't be there at night.

It was a part of their normal, you see those vans, you hide and make sure they don't see you. It didn't matter if they showed up in the morning, you didn't exist until they were gone.

It's really no wonder why she still hates vans to this day, she won't buy one even though they're great to fit big families, like ours. And she's always aware of cars but vans especially.

I can't help but sit here and wonder if ICWA is overturned, are my sisters going to have their own stories to tell?

It's already bad how many Natives are taken away because of CPS, if it wasn't for my tribe helping us close the cases opened against us, I would've been. So many of my cousins were, it wasn't unusual for my Mom to open her home to them because they would run away. They knew she would help them. We all knew how bad they were treated, but we couldn't adopt them all. I think my Mom would have if she could've. But it was enough for a lot of them to just have a spot to stay, knowing someones looking out for them who won't judge them.

We need every little bit of protection even now to keep native families together. That fact that this is being attacked right now is so deliberate and Natives have been shouting for people to see that.

This is a pattern, not a coincidence. So many generations have their own stories about how native kids were taken away. Hell, my generation, we have ours! It's always a legal system that we have to fight that non natives ignore. It's a different font, but same story.

Boarding schools were legal, the reservation sweeps were legal, and CPS and foster care, again legal.

The genocide for natives never stopped, it just takes a new form. This is just the latest version. Don't stop talking about ICWA, be loud about it! Don't let them overturn it!

[the-most-pathetic-edge-marquis]

the dude string trail

(aka jasper cowboy headcanons UwU)

i had a conversation with the one and only @su-angelvicioso that inspired me so strongly i wrote this even though i was Not Writing Twilight at the time, and you know what fuck it, i think it's funny. cori, as always, thank you for being my favorite person to talk about twilight with.

this is completely authentic and not sarcastic at all. why would you think that

one fall, jasper decides that he misses embracing his texan heritage. he wants to get back into being a cowboy!

(this is definitely only about him missing horses and his human life & has nothing at all to do with being sick of living with the cullens & kind of in trouble because he ate someone again & tired of having to defend himself to alice about wearing boot-cut jeans for no apparent reason. because none of those things are happening. obviously.)

“back into being a cowboy?” emmett says. “wait, when were you a cowboy?”

jasper ignores emmett, who is obviously just jealous of jasper because he has superpowers and is better at fighting, and definitely doesn’t know anything about cowboys or cowboy culture because what would someone from rural tennessee know about cattle ranching.

he also definitely doesn’t have a cooler more authentic southern accent than jasper. what

because the cullens are richer than god and alice will do literally anything to get rid of jasper right now because he called her maría by accident again i mean what that never happens he gets himself a nice two-week vacation all alone on a ranch up in wyoming.

(texas is too sunny. that’s definitely the only reason he doesn’t go south.)

he arrives. he realizes that he has gotten way too used to living in houses that esme made because he explicitly chose a ranch with some of the fanciest cabins, and he’s a vampire who doesn’t feel discomfort or really need to sleep—but he still sees the cabin where he’ll be staying and winces.

it’s…it’s fine, he supposes. a little log cabin, with lots of windows and glass doors and a view of the mountains. it’s just…

well. first of all, is the emphasis on the little.

also it’s just…very brown. surely the log walls would be enough, right, they don’t need to have brown rugs too? and brown curtains? and weird little yellowish shades on the lamps?

at least the blankets are colorful. great southwest style.

(he squashes the part of himself that sounds an awful lot like maría laughing about how cheap and mass-produced the thing clearly is; not even a good imitation, she’d probably sniff,and then go and find herself a new rebozo just out of spite—)

(this is why jasper isn’t in texas.)

whatever.

he waves off the worker who led him to the building—she’s in the middle of some spiel about what to do if he has questions, but why would that be relevant?

she radiates annoyance for some reason, as she heaves jasper’s suitcases into the building and hurries off. he has to admit, she does a very good job of covering it with a bright smile. if not for the empathy, he probably wouldn’t have noticed.

did he do something wrong, he wonders for a moment, but ultimately he decides the girl must just be in a bad mood today.

weird. he can’t imagine working here is that bad.

anyway. jasper isn’t here to worry about the interior design of the cabins, he’s here to be a cowboy!

(his thoughts sound like maría laughing at him again, at that idea, but he’s not going to think about why, thanks.)

jasper, because he is a vampire war lieutenant and a strategist and not an idiot (thank you very much, emmett), is well aware that the horses might not react...let's say ideally...to him being a vampire.

he also has a plan.

it's a great plan. simple. he'll sneak down to the pastures in the dead of night and wander around getting the horses used to his smell.

the plan did not account for the possibility that a number of the employees would be sitting on a porch at midnight smoking weed together. (didn't they care about their jobs? what if something went wrong with the horses? geez.)

admittedly he sneaks past them easily enough, but it's still annoying.

the more difficult thing his plan apparently failed to account for...

were horses always this mean?

jasper, over the course of his midnight jaunt, gets kicked, bitten, knocked over into piles of horse shit, (apparently even a vampire can be thrown off-balance by an entire herd of furious ungulates), and somehow covered in hay.

he refuses to consider the possibility that alice is watching this.

(when he gets back to the cabin later that evening, he of course finds a sticky note in his suitcase informing him to just throw the entire outfit away.)

he does, eventually, figure out that he can use his powers to calm a few of the horses down long enough to let him get within approaching distance.

this is inevitably followed by him letting his guard down, and said horses booking it away from him at top speed, shrieking like demons, but he decides to call it good enough regardless.

he spends basically the rest of the night in the shower, which he was not expecting to have to use. the water pressure is shit.

he definitely isn't sulking about this.

(he still smells like horse manure in the morning.)

the actual riding goes better though! totally! it's fine!

"so, do you have any horse experience?" the employee (he's pretty sure it's a different one than earlier) asks him as she leads him down to the corral.

"it's been a while," jasper says, "but i used to be pretty good."

for some reason, this makes the girl's eye twitch.

despite her obvious annoyance, she keeps trying to make conversation. jasper, despite wanting to tell her to fuck off, but is extremely polite and subtle and good at secret-keeping, (obviously), so he tolerates the conversation.

for some reason, it still doesn't go smoothly.

"where are you from?" "texas." "oh, nice! one of the other guides, jeremy, he's from austin." (a baffling pause, as though she's expecting him to say something to that inane statement.) "so was that where you learned how to ride?" "yes." "what'd you do?" "i was in the cavalry."

for some reason, that gets her to stop trying to talk to him, and jasper enjoys thirty seconds of blissful silence as she leads him into the pen of already-saddled horses.

this is what he's here for. who cares about the people, he's going to ride.

(he tries to ignore the fact that the horse she deposits him is extraordinarily fat, and so clearly done with life that he hardly has to try to calm it. it's fine. it is not a statement about what she thinks of his riding skill.)

(fine, it probably is. but she's clearly an idiot.)

anyways! he rides! it goes great! it's fine!

(anyone who says differently doesn't know what they're talking about and they weren't there anyway.)

"wow," the guide says as they start walking out toward the trail, "this is the most amped i've seen arrow like, ever." jasper, who is kicking the horse probably harder than a human would even be able to and getting absolutely 0 increase in speed, is not impressed.

"okay, we're coming up on a stream," she says at another point on the first insufferably long trail ride, as her mare splashes calmly through it. "your horse might not want to cross, so you need to just--"

jasper knows. he kicks harder.

the demon horse responds to this by deciding to jump across a stream that is literally the length of one of its steps.

jasper does not fall off. he just...gets down. very quickly. over the side of the horse's neck. onto his face.

his cowboy hat floats off downstream, but it was ugly anyway.

("okay no, my guy's definitely got the worst fashion boots," he overhears the guide saying to one of her coworkers during lunch, when they probably think they're out of human earshot, "did you see the fucking snakeskin patches--")

on another ridiculous ride through a bland, endless meadow, the nightmare horse stops dead in a patch of grass and ignores everything else, (including jasper's attempt to manipulate it into having any energy).

"he's trying to eat again," the guide says, sickly-sweet patient even though he can feel her amusement. "you just need to pull up to one side and kick forward!"

jasper comes the closest he ever has to revealing the vampire secret, (not counting the times he ate people), just so he can tell her that he knows, he has a perfect memory, the goddamn horse just won't do it.

in the second week he buys his way into--er, gets invited into--a more advanced session, with actual cows. of course, they leave him on the same asshole of a horse, who clearly doesn't know how to respond to basic commands like turning, even when he's putting all his weight into dragging the reins to the side.

("i'm pretty sure this dude has somehow never seen a cow," the guide complains during another lunch. "did you see the face he made when darren brought the herd in?" there's a beat, then they start giggling--if jasper had to guess, he'd say she's imitating said expression. which is just rude. he's seen cows before. obviously. he just wasn't expecting them to be literally covered in each other's shit. they smell so bad. who wouldn't make a face at that?)

anyways. the cattleworking is fine.

and he could totally have landed on his feet after the horse stopped out of nowhere if he wanted to.

he just needed to keep his cover. same for stopping the cow that tried to make a break for it and almost trampled him while he was down. he had it under control. he did not need the guide to electric-prod it in the face.

(alice and maría's voices are both laughing at him in his head now.)

one of the older men gently suggests that he might enjoy himself more going back to trail riding. that is also fine.

on day ten, he gets back to his cabin late (the girl asked if he wanted to help her brush down his horse today, and everyone else seemed excited about the option so he said yes, and now he smells like horse sweat), and goes to pull his twelfth new outfit out of the suitcase. (there is a washer/dryer in the cabin, but what does he look like?)

there's a note folded up in the button-down.

i'm picking you up in 15 at the front office, alice's chicken-scratch says, or you're going to snap and eat a bunch of horses and we're going to have to buy the ranch instead of getting me that paris studio that's going up for auction next year.

for a second, jasper considers ignoring it. he's not surrendering. this is his vacation goddamnit, he's fine--he rubs a hand over his mouth in thought, and an ungodly combination of horse hair, dirt, and hay smears onto his face.

20 minutes later, he's in the passenger seat, alice speeding around mountain passes and playing a pitying bluegrass CD for him.

"i had a good time," he tells her.

"sure, sweetheart."

"it was nice to cowboy again."

"mm-hmm, sweetheart."

"i do know how to ride horses."

"i know, sweetheart."

they drive the rest of the way back in silence.

(it never occurs to jasper that he should've left a tip.)

[misschanandlerbong-3]

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I really appreciate that this is a time of year designated to spend time with family and engage in family traditions of meals shared together and community.

However. At the same time, and not discounting that. This is your annual reminder that the Thanksgiving origin stories we tell play a significant role in the propagandizing narrative of American innocence with regards to indigenous peoples.

This time of year, we often, in addition to spending time with family, do the ritual retelling of the "origin story" of Thanksgiving, whether this be kids learning in school about the first Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag/Wôpanâak peoples, watching the Charlie Brown special retelling this, or dressing up as pilgrims and Indians. This narrative, regardless of its veracity or attention to the surrounding context, is often one of the only narratives we tell about American colonies and indigenous peoples. Its dominance in our collective imagination is reinforced by our ritual retelling of it every year. And it does this in the relative scarcity of narratives about the horrors American colonists inflected upon indigenous peoples as they wiped out large swaths of indigenous people through violence and disease, not to mention various forms of gendered violence.

I want to emphasize that it is the lack of these narratives of the violence Americans inflicted (and continue to inflict) upon Native Americans, in combination with the dominance of the Thanksgiving narrative, that contribute to a continuing imagining of America as innocent, as not owing indigenous peoples reparations as well as an end to violence and recognition of sovereignty.

And this trope of American innocence is not limited to our relation to indigenous peoples. It comes up again when we talk about slavery and African Americans (see, for example, the resistance to The 1619 Project, which was attempting to relieve the narrative scarcity around the horrors of slavery). It comes up again when we talk about Asian Americans the specific forms of racist violence that America has always subjected them to (from the treatment of Asian immigrants working on railways to the Japanese detention camps of WWII to the violence visited upon Asian Americans during Covid). And so much more.

And this narrative of American innocence is especially reinforced by trying to put temporal distance between the oppression Americans acknowledge and us now. For example, when people respond to BLM or demands for reparations with "but that was in the past, get over it." Or the continual rhetorical positioning of indigenous peoples as "ancient" or as not continuing to struggle for existence and thriving.

And we see it again in the US's respond to the mass genocide of Palestinian civilians by the state of Israel.

As I said at the beginning, I appreciate Thanksgiving as a time to come together with family and participate in family traditions. But I can simultaneously recognize that Thanksgiving and the narratives we tell around it are part and parcel to the, I repeat, propagandizing narrative of American innocence, which serves to legitimize the continuing oppression of people of color, indigenous peoples, and many other minority populations in the US, as well as abroad.

I highly, highly encourage you to:

(i) read up a bit on these attempts to tell other stories countering the trope of American innocence (for example, Viet Than Nguyen's The Sympathizer, or the 1619 Project, or Dorothy Roberts's Fatal Invention, or Kim Tallbear's Native American DNA, or Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's As We Have Always Done, or Nesrine Malik's We Need New Stories, and so many others)

(ii) support indigenous groups like the NDN collective, and educate yourself on the indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live in your area (so, for Pittsburgh, look into the Council of the Three Rivers American Indian Center)

(iii) learn what indigenous groups are actually asking for, for example the NDN collective's statement concerning Palestine, or educating yourself on what demands for "sovereignty" mean for indigenous peoples in the US

But I also encourage you to enjoy your time with family this holiday! It's a special time that I'm glad the institutions of America give us time for

[thermospoetryandstars]

red white and blue

inspired by ‘Throat’ by Ellen van Neervan

written 31/05/2023

I was born

with blood on my hands

white skin is so easy to stain

is that our problem?

we made ourselves the perfect canvas for arterial splatter

thick and vibrant

straight from the aorta

got so sick of our acres of monotonous purity

we sank our white teeth into the ‘other’

bled their colour onto court papers

a “masterpiece” of oil paints

always oil

look what we transformed

isn’t it beautiful?

there’s blood clots

under my fingernails

caught myself nibbling

we never leave it alone long enough to let it dry

reopen inflamed wound after wound

can’t let it turn brown

why are we so obsessed with red, anyway?

I was born

with blood on my hands

is that my crime or ours?

I didn’t ask for this

what happened to my

choice

to my

autonomy

shouldn’t my own

skin

belong to me

I don’t want my

face

to look like the billion others

with the hungry eyes

I was born

my mother tore her own flesh

to get me out

the doctors told her to push harder

the umbilical cord wrapped around my pallid

neck

my father tells me

the day I was born my

skin

was

blue

I’m so sick of those colours

sick enough to vomit

spit and heave onto the sidewalk

everything they fed me

everything I believed

they fed me

I was born

I heave

I can’t take it back

I heave

I can’t give it back

for every mouthful I spit

I suck in another lungful of air

even now

I’m still greedy

I heave

again

up my throat crawls

the last thing my stomach offers

two apple seeds

face it

I was born

and nurtured

as a sapling grown on stolen soil

so rich with iron

i’m plump with it

on summer days

every australian stares at the sun with open mouths

insatiable

tell them:

chew into my ripened fruit

you raw naked holy beasts

eat

for a chance

to taste your own humanity

know

that red

is the only

colour

our flags share.

[summerhighlandfalls]

My favorite donner party adjacent lore is that apparently one guy escaped and ran to a nearby indigenous group and they were like yeah we can give you some of our food, just don’t overeat your stomach isn’t used to it and then the guy overate despite being warned not to and died

[oldmyths]

boy i want to watch some movie and tv with native people in it . without witnessing the tragedies

[nothorses]

"the public education system is intently evil and all teachers are abusive because it was the worst experience ever for me personally"

guys, look, I'm legitimately sorry that happened to you. that's fucked up. it shouldn't have happened, and it shouldn't be allowed to happen again to you or anyone else. I'm sorry.

public school was hard for me too, at times, and I'm still suffering the consequences for the harsh grading, the arbitrary deadlines, the hours of completely useless-to-me homework. I could name a few teachers who have been pretty fucking terrible. the fact that nobody considered getting me evaluated for ADHD has had an impact on my self image and academic success that I can't erase.

and also.

I grew up in an area where education, in particular, is incredibly progressive-leaning. educators are working really hard to create and try out education philosophies and practices that prioritize kids and their learning, rather than teachers and what they think kids should learn.

My sex ed was comprehensive, and came entirely from school. My gay sixth grade teacher taught me about HIV/AIDs in a useful, accurate way. In high school, I learned about the way orgasms work & I was prepared not to feel shame for normal stuff.

I learned that Communism was not what the USSR actually practiced, and what it really means. I learned about atrocities and, specifically, the genocide of indigenous people committed in/by the US. I learned about the military industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, and I learned about manifestations of racism specific to my local area. I learned about Stonewall, and the intersection of the civil rights movement with gay rights and disability justice.

My creative writing teacher taught us about LSD, and the real reasons we shouldn't do it, after a hilariously ineffective assembly run by some local cops. He spoke gently, carefully, and emphatically about his friends and his own experiences. Later in the semester, he read us a story he wrote about two gay men finding each other in a deeply homophobic environment.

My sci-fi teacher made me feel safe & seen as a kid with "weird" interests. My US History teacher helped me research and put together a 10-page paper on the modern relevance and mission of Feminism. My government teacher made me feel appreciated for the work I put into the class, and the thought I put into what I said in it, even though he disagreed with a lot of it. My sixth grade teacher bought me books to read with his personal money, whichever ones I asked for. My third grade teacher made me feel safe. My science teacher in middle school made me excited for and passionate about science, and saw and nurtured the effort I put into her class.

A lot of stuff sucks, absolutely. But I am seeing new teaching methods being tried out all the time, and I am watching teachers get really excited when I teach their students about the roots of modern graffiti in US black history & to question property laws, and just...

There's hope. there are so many people doing so much work to make things better. so many people agree with you on what education should be, and are trying so fucking hard to put that into action, and so many public schools- not just teachers, but whole schools and even districts- are really doing that work. so much is getting better.

I had more to say, about necessary childcare and trusted adults and outside contacts and time away from abusive family. But like. Please just sit down and listen to more people on this, and please talk to educators and education professionals about what's really going on in this big huge world of philosophy, science, and practice.

[neenamaiya]

Aug. 10.22.

[rightwriter]

Indigenous Storytelling

A lot of the stuff I've posted so far is pretty white western-centric views of telling stories. The whole article is very informative! An excerpt: "Many of the main characters in Plains Indian mythology never end. Not only are they immortal and indestructible—where they may be killed in one story and are right back at it in another—they also age with the listener. Coyote stories for children have childlike morals; for teens Coyote is a much rougher character; and, for elders only, grandpa Coyote is smart, and his stories are deep and filled with complicated plots and plans."

[akajustmerry]

anyways, the Zionist "Indigenous" narrative (see: lie) is so funny to me. putting aside Zionist definition of Indigenous is not at all the actual definition, imagine if anyone else tried their version of it. imagine if I did, okay. listen, imagine if i, someone who had a Scottish great great grandmother (true story), rocked up to old nan's county and was like, "actually this whole county is my land now because my g x 2 granny was from here so <3 oh and if you don't give me all your houses for my 1000s of friends who also had great great cousins from here I'll kill ya with a bazooka my friend gave me.....because I'm Indigenous <3%" like that's a genuinely unhinged thing to do. Zionism is so genuinely unhinged.

[ghouljams]

same hozier anon from earlier!

i was rereading your viking au and couldn't stop thinking about soap and butchered tongue!? specifically:

so far from home have a stranger call you "darling" and have your guarded heart be lifted like a child up by the hand

of course, hozier is specifically discussing the treatment of indigenous peoples and the wexford rebellion of 1978. but it got me thinking, what was soap's transition into viking life like? what is it like to speak a different language with reader when it's something shared just between them? the first time reader calls soap a term of endearment in his own mother tongue?

imo, andrew made unreal unearth with the intent of forcing us through every circle of hell and then just keeping through it all on a loop. and i thank him for it (what does that say about me).

Viking!Soap and Butchered Tongue is such a winning combination. I absolutely adore that song, it makes me tear up each time I listen to it. We'll get to Soap's backstory, his trauma, in the official story line, but for now yeah I can talk about his transition to viking life.

Strange men speaking in strange tongues, their clothing so different from his own, but their rough hands are the same, the sadness in their eyes is the same. It's human, it's familiar in a way that stings more than the cuts along Soap's face. They don't understand him when he speaks, looking between themselves, talking in quiet tones. The language they speak is rough, like hearing his own sounds jumbled back to him, but Soap's always been quick. Certain words repeat themselves, certain sounds repeated between men questioningly. He can make assumptions.

He tugs the cloak one of them men gave him tighter around his shoulders. He doesn't want to seem weak in front of them, not when they're so clearly attempting to decide what to do with him. A different man pushes the conversation apart with his mere presence, leveling Soap with an icy stare. When he opens his mouth the words that come out are rough and mispronounced, but familiar.

"You want work?"

Soap nods quickly. Work, sure. He's strong, he's smart, he'd do anything to get away from the smell of death that carried him here, he can work. Even if it's hard, even if he hates it, he can work. Anything to get off this godforsaken rock.

What he thought would take months takes mere weeks. Weeks of living with the men that call themselves vikings to pick up enough of their language to converse. "Soap" they call him.

"Because ya needed a bath," Ghost grumbles over dinner one night. Soap laughs, not because it's particularly funny, but because he understands him. It's rueful, almost despairing. He understands him. No one will ever hear the words of the Mactavishes again.

Working helps him adjust. There are things to do to keep his mind off of everything, he learns the words for ship parts before he learns colors. He knows how to count money before he learns how to introduce himself. He knows Price before he learns the word for Captain, learns not to apologize for that. He watches the sun fall, watches it rise again. He teaches Gaz a few words, stops when it makes the ache in his chest grow too big and unavoidable. They get back to his new home and he's given a share of the profits, more money than he's seen in his life. He's given a bed in the long house, warm food, new clothes, he's given a sturdy iron band to wear around his arm, if he wants.

He learns the language, the culture. He adjusts. He translates the next time they're across the sea, trading with people he no longer feels familiar to. A viking wearing his tartan over his shoulders, speaking a familiar tongue, he feels like a stranger in his homeland. He leans against Ghost by the fire, toys with the iron band around his wrist. Strangers to every land but the one that took them in.

He misses his ma.

He doesn't mention it.

He meets you like a ghost of his past. He watches your village burn and sees his own in the smoke. He hauls you off kicking and screaming, in a familiar, painful, tongue. You sound like his memories of home. You sound like the place he's never been able to forget. You mean everything to him, and you hate him.

You won't speak to him, not the way he wants you to, and it's like losing his home all over again.

[enchanted-wildflower]

On animism

One of my teachers at university told us something today, that I believe to be relevant to animism and therefore also witchcraft:

He explained that in the West we see everything as occurences, whereas in some languages the same happenings are described as actions. Meaning that in the West we tend to imply that there is no agency involved in whatever happens, while some other languages tend to imply that someone activily causes things. His example was that in the West rain is understood as something that just happens, no one causes the rain. Whereas in Mesoamerica it was believed that it rained because some god was crying.

While the idea of a literal crying god causing it to rain on earth might be outdated, I find it really interesting how these two perspectives - events vs. actions - might shape our relationship with the world. If rain is not just an occurence, but someone acting with agency, rain becomes another part of the community we live in. The community then doesn't only consist of humans anymore, but of everything that surrounds us. Suddenly there are all these new players that actively affect your life with their actions. Other-than-human persons that you can interact with and with whom you have to keep a friendly relationship. If the tree in front of your house isn't just an object, but a being with agency, you actually have to be at least respectful and might even want to build a relationship with them, get to know them, learn from them.

I think that's really the core of animism. Descriptions of animism are often reduced to the believe that everything has a soul, but I think believe doesn't even factor into it. You don't need to believe that there is a non-physical aspect to rain, mountains, stones. It's about how we interact with them. I don't even have to ask myself the question if the tree in front of my house has a soul in order to learn about and from them or to interact with them. In my opinion animism is something that is done, not thought or believed. It's a perspective.

Listening to my teacher also reminded me of the following part of Braiding Sweetgrass (great book btw) which explains all this really well:

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa - to be a bay - releases the water from bondage and lets it live. "To be a bay" holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the lan- guage I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

[...]

This is the grammar of animacy. [...] In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.

To whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy? Naturally, plants and animals are animate, but as I learn, I am discovering that the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of attributes of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people.

[...]

The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013), p. 78-80.

[eterut]

I wanna talk about the prehispanic and mesoamerican representation of music in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

The music was my main motivation to go see the film (alongside with the introducing of Tenoch, one of my favorite people inthe world).

The day of the Mexican premiere, my facebook feed was full of photos of musicians (whom I follow for their prehispanic instrumental and amazing work thru the years in the band TRIBU and colabs with musicians Arturo Meza, Jorge Reyes and Rastrillos) attending the premiere and revealing that they participated in the making of the music for the film!

The news clearly moved me to inexplicable levels because those musicians: Ramiro Ramirez Duarte and Alejandro Mendez Rojas, have spent decades working and promoting research, practice and recognition of prehispanic instruments and how mesoamerican music might have sounded.

In addition, these musicians (one with degree in ethnomusicology and anthropological research and the other as a member of the Otomi indigenous community in the north of the territory where I was born and live), have been and are part of projects and musical groups that have given original music and prehispanic instruments the place they deserve in the broad definition of Mexican music.

In an interview with La Silla Rota Guanajuato They explain that "Prehispanic music no longer exists, from that past only the instruments remain, their melodies".

Alejandro Méndez Rojas commented that is unknown how the music of that time was; everything was destroyed in the 16th century because the Spanish prohibited prehispanic musicians and everything that had to do with ancient culture, they stopped making the instruments, there were no longer any manufacturers.

Did you get chills when the Talokani first came out and hypnotized the ship's crew with their voices? This is what you hear:

Did you feel the love and pain through Namor's origin story? This was what accompanied that feeling:

The pieces Namor, Lost in the depths, Yucatán, Namor's Throne, Imperius Rex and Sink the ship also have remarkable elements from prehispanic instruments and voices.

Hearing the distinctive sounds of snails, flutes, rattles, drums, and canes at epic and emotional moments in the film made my heart race and pride prickle my skin.

About "Árboles bajo el mar", Alejandro Mendez Rojas explain in their social media:

"In this piece I composed all the sounds made with prehispanic instruments. I used a Tepehuano bow, tortoise shells percussed by Huave deer antlers, Mayan double-diaphragm whistle, Mayan trumpets, Tezcatlipoca flute, Mayan tunkul among other instruments made by me.

Thank you for allowing me to promote Mesoamerican musical instruments through their sounds in this film and thanks to all the people who collaborated on this piece."

With their work and passion for the music, they become heroes too:

“One way to ensure that instruments are not lost is to build them again, to execute them, to carry out work so that they last, so that they remain alive.

I think that the instruments of prehispanic Mexico deserve that boost, that promotion to enter a world where there is musical diffusion, the instruments deserve that stage to be better know, we have worked with them for many years, have cost us diffusion"

Because it is another form of representation, it is another way of saying "we are here", but on a large scale, it is an opportunity to continue preserving our culture, our roots and to allow it not to go out.

"Mexico has a wonderful ancestral legacy, worthy of being recovered and put into circulation again, the instruments will come to life in every human being who listens to them"

Gracias señores Ramiro y Alejandro por ser tan chingones y seguir trabajando por darle a nuestra herencia y a nuestras raíces la dignidad que merecen. Felicidades por este trabajo tan hermoso y emotivo. Y muchas gracias por ser parte de mi formación y herencia musical. Me siento orgullosa y feliz por todo eso 🫀

Please, listen all the music from the original soundtrack and give them a lot of love. Thank you Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Goransson for let it be this wonderful dignity manifesto that is Wakanda Forever.

🖤🤎