#colonization

[cantaloupetheclown]

hey just so you know it is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada today, September 30th. this day recognizes the tragedy and horror of the "Indian Residential School" system that was active since before 1867, and continued up to 1997. it was focused on removing Indigenous youth from their tribes and communities and assimilating them into the culture of european colonizers, which effectively cut off an entire generation from their people and families, destroying many aspects of Indigenous culture. it was also responsible for the deaths of many Indigenous children, most of which were covered up as much as possible.

September 30th is also called Orange Shirt Day, in honor of Phyllis Webstad. when she was initially taken into a residential school, they confiscated her personal clothing, including a brand new orange shirt, and never returned them. many people choose to wear orange shirts on this day in solidarity of the children that were stolen.

the day is now dedicated to learning about Indigenous cultures, figuring out matters of reconciliation and recompense, minimizing further harm to Indigenous communities, and honoring the lives lost and changed due to this act of genocide.

colonization is very prevalent all over the world, so even if you're not Canadian it likely reflects a similar history in your country, that is one reason why I feel it can benefit people of all nationalities to learn about.

and while reading and learning online is important, nothing can match the experience of talking about it directly to Indigenous people who have gone through these things. their stories and beliefs and experiences are important and incredible to learn about.

[words-and-coffee]

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

[ID: A poem titled: Kupu rere kē. [in italics] My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth. I have been thinking about this advice. The convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home. I have been thinking about this advice. Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: every potential reader is reassured that although you're expected to understand the rest of the text, it's fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics. I have been thinking about this advice. Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged — but after a while I could see she had a point: when the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place. I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it. Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in -[end italics]- Aotearoa -[italics]- and which do not.

Next image is the futurama meme: to shreds you say...]

(Image ID by @bisexualshakespeare)

[decolonize-the-left]

End blood quantum now

Blood quantum is how much native blood you have in you and it needs to be a certain threshold to qualify you as a tribal member. Blood quantum varies from tribe to tribe.

It means my mom is a tribal member but because my dad is outside of my tribe... I don't have enough tribal blood to enroll. Neither does my daughter. Our "official" indigeneity ended with me.

My dad is still native tho. Just southern native. Others have two parents enrolled in separate tribes and can't enroll in either one despite being Full native because their parents were mixed with other tribes so they don't have enough blood of Any tribe to qualify.

And to what end are they doing this?

Under the treaties the US govt can lay no claim to native land. So how do they fix that? Get rid of the natives, of course.

And since they can't slaughter us in broad daylight anymore they did the next best thing. What the colonial government has ALWAYS done to us and other poc.

Made up a bunch of arbitrary laws to restrain and limit our power and numbers.

And this can't continue. We are the only race who needs to apply to be part of the community we were born into. The only race who needs to prove our blood.

And that's the thing: it's not even based on blood. Racist scientists defined who was a full-blooded native based on things like shoe size, head circumference, and skin pigment.

Not blood. And besides that it wasn't uncommon for outsiders to become part of a tribe!! You didn't need to be native by blood to be native! Blood quantum has made it IMPOSSIBLE for them to qualify and made it impossible for tribes to practice that long time aspect of our culture.

So please share this post. So many people legitimately think natives are extinct and even less are aware that we do more than just sit around drinking all day. Few people have good feelings about us and within that there are a few who actively help. Please be one of those few.

We need support and allies and for our voices to be heard. Please don't let this post just be me screaming into a void. We need people to know what blood quantum is, how archaic and harmful it is, and to help us spread awareness to people who otherwise would ignore us. Use your privilege.

[princessbubblegumandjustice]

Queen Elizabeth II’s Death Could Jump-Start Efforts to Abolish Monarchy in Former British Colonies

As it should! And why stop there? :)

[animentality]

[thenuclearmallard]

The Sámi are being arrested for protesting.

[afragmentcastadrift]

New Zealand considers changing its name to Aotearoa to confront its past : NPR

[queenhelenblackthorn]

I just want to thank wakanda forever for reigniting my violent hatred for the spanish empire.

and while we're on the subject of colonization: everyone's always talking about the british but let's not forget the spanish, french, portuguese, dutch, and belgians also fucked up multiple continents, wiped out multiple cultures and languages, and enslaved natives all over the world.

[cakeofdoom]

If you've ever seen a list of 'History fun facts' you might have run into the fact that "Oxford University was founded before the Aztec Empire." This is true, but it's interesting that this is considered a fun fact. There is this general thought or idea that indigenous empires and societies were 'ancient'. Here on Tumblr I've seen the ruins of Machu Picchu tagged as ancient history (it was founded in the 1400s). In games like Civilization aztec jaguar warriors and incan sling-units are ancient units.

I think this idea is caused by a general view on many non-European societies as unchanging and static before European contact. I know this isn't a very novel take, but I think it's interesting because this belief has had a great impact on how colonisers governed their colonial subjects - and I think it still has an important impact today.

You're probably wondering how I'll make this about Greenland and you'll have to wonder no more. For a long time in the 1700s and 1800s the policies of the danish colonisers in Greenland often held that they were in place to preserve the traditional Greenlandic way of life. This was pretty absurd coming from the same people trying to eradicate the current religious and spiritual practices of the Greenlanders/Kalaallit. While its debateable how influential this goal actually was on policies, I do think that it created a very rigid view of what the Kalaallit should be. In the early 19th century southern Greenland was hit by famine as the amount of seals plummeted. Despite this the danish administration still pushed for seal hunting, only selling equipment for seal hunting and increasing the rewards for capturing seals. The famine could probably have been avoided had they started to provide better fishing equipment, but this was frowned upon. Green landers were supposed to catch seals, the Danish colonial administration thought.

Even today some people view indigenous people as wrong for not acting 'traditional' enough. I've seen people say Greenlandic seal hunting isn't actually traditional because they used motorized snow scooters and rifles instead of dog sleds and spears. Similarly with the Faroese whale slaughter because they use motor boats instead of row boats.

This post was written entirely because I've always really hated that fun fact because I hate fun and I hate facts.

[hussyknee]

(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.

Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:

[fatliberation]

No normal person was ever 600 lbs 100 years. Not a single one. It's not healthy or safe for anyone to be that large

Not a single one, eh? Are we gonna attempt to back that up with anything of substance whatsoever or are we just echoing eugenics into a fat person’s inbox and calling it a win? Sit down, bucko.

You know what else isn’t “healthy” or “normal” to be? Disabled. Yet disabled people have always existed. Imagine that!

Wild to think that part of being human means having a variety of differences in the formation and function of our bodies, and that our health status does not determine our right to exist in those bodies.

The eldest of these artifacts dates to over 30,000 years ago. A timespan longer than you or any mortal person can truly comprehend. We’ve been here since the beginning of humanity and we are still here. Fat people, specifically fat Black women, have roamed the earth long before colonization twisted perception of reality into hierarchy and poisoned the minds of generations to view certain human beings as disposable. Fat people have always existed and always will, no matter how much you fantasize about a past and future rid of us.

“How many statues of Black women do the ancients have to hide for you to dig up and understand what God looks like. How many times do fat Black women have to save your life in song. What are you paying attention to? This is why you can never see God in yourself. You are damned by hatred of fat Black women. And no part of you could ever live without them. This is why the universe (huge, black, unfolding, expansive) shakes and shakes her head, you fools. You wasteful fools.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After The End of The World

[words-and-coffee]

Kupu rere kē My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth. I have been thinking about this advice. The convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home. I have been thinking about this advice. Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: every potential reader is reassured that although you’re expected to understand the rest of the text, it’s fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics. I have been thinking about this advice. Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged — but after a while I could see she had a point: when the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place. I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it. Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in Aotearoa and which do not.

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

[thoughtportal]

patenting does not equal invention. patenting is the colonization of intellectual property. invention requires the collective efforts of a diverse group of people over time.

[thenuclearmallard]

Sámi speaking up