#also this cost everyone anon privilege again sorry y'all

[butch-with-a-deep-voice]

So I recently received a rather hateful anon. I chose to block them instead of responding to the anon itself, so as not to receive any further bullshit from them. But they were attacking me on grounds that I was white, and faking being indigenous (along with some rather hateful slurs mixed in), and I do want to address that.

I never claimed to not be white. I'm Métis, a community that is entirely predicated on being mixed race. I am of both white family roots and indigenous. Glossing over the fact that light-skinned Indigenous and Latinx people exist all over North and South America, and that the internalized colonial racism-binary received on that basis is its own expired can of worms (thank you blood quantum debates 🤮), mixed race people exist y'all. In fact, most Métis people are light skinned. Our people's history is defined by being "too white" for many indigenous communities, and "too Indian" for white society, and that comes with its own generational stories, traditions, and trauma.

When I joke that "my family's shit is in the colonizers museum" that's because it literally is. It's like a 5 minute drive away, and a request to access the vaults to go look at it. When I go to ceremony with Métis community members and Elders I don't stop being white, and when I interact with purely "white" aspects of society I don't stop being indigenous. Both are true, that's how dialectics work. I am very aware of the privilege my skin colour affords me, and I never take it for granted. In fact I actively try to use it when I can to create opportunities for my indigenous siblings who aren't as light skinned.

I don't make this post as some form of defense or argument to my indigeneity. I have enough security in myself and my community that some anon isn't going to shake me that easily. But I make it because the notion that a blood quantum or a hue of my skin color negates my family's heritage is what colonization aimed to achieve in the first damn place. Attacking eachother for shit like how pale I am during winter (cuz honey, I *TOAST* during summer) achieves nothing but furthering internalized racism plaguing indigenous people baseline.

To that anon, if you find a way around my block somehow, I'm sorry you've been hurt by people enough to find it appropriate to drop vitriol like that into people's inboxes unannounced. I hope you can find healing and love within your life, to turn that around. I'm gonna light a smudge for you.