#he’s pushing back against cultural colonialism by the north

[belle-keys]

[cyarskj1899]

[jnjzksekfjvn]

Your post about how america acts very different as a public performance for Europe and its nonsense vs more chill and natural with other American continent nations and esp Canada is eating my brain cause Hard Agree you got any more thoughts on that

My America (continent, mainly focusing on the northern side) headcanons pt. 2

This was mainly about the way that Europe has caused america to assimilate into a colonialist imperialist mindset (as well as abusing america during the colonial times) and this has caused america to hold a grudge against the europeans... however he also yearns to be at the same "level" as them (due to european superiority, tied with white supremacy being drilled into his head and pretty much every southern hemispheres nations heads during the colonialist era) so he tries to perform as a powerful individualist nation (capitalism being the root cause of why imperialism happened in the first place) and push others down at the same time... He tries to act superior compared to all the other american nations but behind closed doors (with canada and to some extent mexico) he is more natural and does not feel the need to "perform" for approval, this is because he sees himself as superior and feels less jusged by them

There is a hiarchy to this, and north america is closer up to "european in group" (read abt facism in groups and out groups) than south american nations are. For this reason, america will treat the southern nations as "lesser than" and often be dismissive towards them, however, as much as he hates to admit it (due to his yearning of being closer to european superiority) he shares more traits with them than he would like to admit, and they are his brethren as much as canada is, even moreso in certain aspects (such as mexico, who geographically is more similar to america in terms of biomes, and has had more notable cultural exchanges, aswell as the fact that the cherokee people were geographically closer to the indigenous groups in mexico than the canadian indigenous groups ex. cowboys FROM WHAT I KNOW... idk) because of this he holds them at a distance because he knows if he gets too close he will see the humanity in them, which is not something you're supposed to do to people you consider "inferior".

Americas relationship with canada is complicated to say the least. The way I mainly see it is a distinction between their relationship pre independence (during british rule) and adulthood... It is important to notice that both america and canada came from EXTREMELY different climates, tribes, held different traditions, yet were grouped together as a conglomerate by the british and the french. (generalization of indigenous peoples) I want to highlight this specifically, which is why I made canada inuit and america cherokee. britain forced canada to move to virginia to live with him and america, and this caused canada to be extremely alienated and confused, thesituation for him is pretty much this: weird looking guy comes in kills your family then moves you to a completely different place and abuses you and some other kid who is also weird and different however you and thekis bond over being abused by the same guy, and slowly become depentent on eachother not for fun but for SURVIVAL.

Now how this translates into adulthood is interesting because america is still just as codependent (psychologically) to canada and canada is dependent on him too, however they are both still constantly competing for the attention of european nations (tying back to euro superiority mindset) and this caused them to distance themselves from eachother... they still love eachother very much and will hold a shared grudge against england for what he has done to both of them, a grudge causing the relationship to be closer than others.. Canada is also dismissive to south americans yet he lacks the actual social connection with them (however he and a lot of them share similar sentiments over europe, both in rooting for their approval and hating them simultaneously) so his dismissal is more hidden since he wants to keep up his "friendly with everyone" demeanor... while canada and america fight quite often it pains them to see glimpses of eachother especially childhood memories they have of eachother so they distance themselves in order to avoid the feelings.

[pablo-bolo]

ALGERIA :

Name of the country : Algeria

Capital of the country : Alger

Human Name : Nasim Touati

Age : 23 years old

Gender : Male

Birthday : July 5 (Algeria's independence day)

Hair Color : Brown

Eye Color : Green

Height : 1m80

APPEARANCE :

Algeria is rather tall and has short, messy and curly brown hair with some little facial hair. He has green eyes, a lightly tanned skin and has big black eyebrows. He wears a Algerian military uniform with rectangular glasses. He's also considered to have a intimidating apparences.

PERSONALITY AND INTERESTS :

He is a calm, strong and hard-working man. Most often being called "scary guy" by the others (mostly Italy) but deep down, he is actually quite playful and cheerful (he like to dance and play derbouka a goblet- or hourglass-shaped hand drum having a single drumhead) but it's rarely shown because of his intimidating aura. He tends to be described has looking like an "old man", liking only old Arabic music and wearing old fashioned clothes. He also love naps and is often sleeping.

RELATIONSHIP :

Turkey : Algeria used to be under Turkey's rule as a child back when Turkey was the Ottoman Empire. Turkey is considered to be Algeria big brother and their relationship is mostly like this : Turkey annoyed him or embarrassed him and Algeria in result's ignore him and tell others him don't know him.

France : France and Algeria, have been on bad terms since the beginning, a situation which may have been caused by the early days of colonization in Nasim's nation, with him hating Francis for taking over his country. The Algerian war just worsen it and made Algeria despite France even more. After gaining his independence Nasim didn't wanted to be involved with Francis anymore, so he would adamantly deny that the two of them had any sort of connection. Even nowadays he's still have some bitterness when he has to talk to France.

Canada : Canada has a diplomatic, economic and cultural relationship with Algeria. Due to that, the two share friendly relations and are often seen together, Nasim being one of the only person who acknowledge Matthieu and never mistake him for Alfred. Canada being always forgotten and alone caused Algeria to go and talk to him, even telling him "I don't understand why nobody talk to you, you're quite interesting". Canada is one of the few, who's don't scared by Algeria intimidating apparences. Algeria really seems to enjoy spending time with him more than others.

Russia : Despite their different personalities and ways of acting, the two get along quite well. The two, after all, are political ally and Russia is Algeria's main weapons supplier.

Prussia : During the eighteenth century, Algeria and Prussia were fighting against each other in a big war caused by France. At first, Gilbert thought Nacim was a friend of Francis (and a rather scary friend) not realizing he was France's colony but after knowing the truth and loosing the war with France, he started to respect Algeria more, even saying that the two of them were now rivals. Prussia mentioned in his diary what a good warrior Algeria was and how being with France was wasting his big potential. Algeria claimed that he don't dislike Prussia, on the contrary he think he's quite funny and has a great respect for him. On the present day, Gilbert takes great pleasure in annoying in whatever way he can Nacim, just to start a fight with him like in the old time, mostly bothering him when he's doing important paperwork. He is sometime referring Algeria as being "awesome", which is a highly deemed title from Prussia. Algeria is quickly annoyed by his actions, but is shown to forgive Prussia despite his flaws and how he pushed his limits to a certain degree.

Morocco : Morocco is Algeria's little brother. They were very close in the past and always helped each other in wars, but were split apart by France, who would eventually rule over North Africa. After Morocco being freed and Algeria forced to stay with France, their relationship became more and more distant, to a point where, for a long time the two of then stop talking to one another, even stop seeing each other but when Algeria gained his independence and made a party to celebrate it, he invited Morocco who did come but not the same as before. He had now a much more rebel attitude and was distant with his big brother, something that Algeria didn't like one bit. One time, the two had to talk to one another ended pretty badly, with Morocco insulting him And Algeria replying with something to hurt his pride. The whole thing start a huge fight. But even if the two of them always fight and argue, Morocco cares more about his brother than he admits and are even prone to becoming worried if it appears that the other is in danger.

Tunisia : After Tunisia was bring to the Ottoman Empire, she soon started making friend with Algeria, who was now her big brother, in which he tried to ignore at first and didn't reply when she was talking to him, until Tunisia start getting into trouble with the others country and Algeria stand up for her (his big bro instinct taking the better of him). Since then, their relationship increase. Nasim starting to react more to Tunisia jokes or conversation, they even had managed to bond over similar interests like food or music with times. After living the Ottoman Empire and being forced to be France's colony, much like Morocco they became more distant and stop talking to each other. But contrary to Morocco after everything, they stay as close as before, even more closer than in the old time and also much more important to one another. Algeria seemed overprotective of her, even if she could easily take care of or defend herself.

HISTORY :

After leaving the Ottoman Empire in 1830, Algeria and his siblings (Tunisia and Morocco) were finally free to be a country and live their life like others newly country. But from nowhere, France, in 1830, came to north Africa and found the tree new nation and asked them to be his wifes, despite the fact that the 3 refused, he forced them and became their husband forcing them to sigh a marriage certificate to become his. On 1956 he let Morocco and Tunisia gained there independence and get a divorce. Algeria, however, didn't get that chance and was forced to stay with him. Although Algeria demanded at multiple time to be free, Francis never accepted and always declined, forcing Nasim to started a revolution that cause France,with sadness to accept his request and in 1962 Algeria gained is independence and finally break up with Francis.

BONUS ART :

PROTOTYPE ALGERIA :

Thanks for reading this. Algeria been a old hetalia oc of mine and I wanted to make a new version of it. Sorry if they're spelling mistake in this.

Bye bye 👋!!

[supersetfiction]

E-Week – Entropy 09/10/23-15/10/23

“That shouldn’t be there” Riley mused to himself.

The trip from Hermes Station in the north-west to Olympus Mons had taken him over a week of gruelling travel in a tight exocraft, with barely enough room to sleep. He had seen nothing but red dirt and blue sky for 6 days and was grateful now to be stopped.

He was actually going to the other side of the mountain when in the distance he had seen this steel door not quite hidden on the rock face. It looked old. Older than the first settlers of Mars and wanted to investigate.

Riley stood before the door and was dwarfed by the neck breaking height of the cliffs of Olympus Mons above him. The door stood barely taller than himself, and if he wasn’t looking for something more than what he had been seeing for the past 6 days, he would have missed it. He approached the door and pushed on it.

The heavy steel door opened with a creak illuminating the inside of the library, lit by the fading sun on Mars. Riley stepped into the darkness with his torch cycling the light options. The flood light barely gave him enough light to see ahead of him, so he decided that the beam would have to do.

The darkness did little to help him understand what this place was. As far as he could tell he was in a reception area of a sort. Sat in the middle of the room was a straight flat desk with a heavy layer of dust coated on top. On either side of the room were doors. Riley hoped that at least one would have a way to turn the lights on in this place.

Looking into left room he found a desk in a more personalised state than the reception and assumed that this would be the office of a supervisor or someone like that. In the other room Riley found more luck with turning the lights on. In here were three computers lined up perfectly against the wall and in between each was a control panel. Looking closer, Riley found that, thankfully, the panel were labelled and easy to navigate. He soon found the master switch for the power and flipped the switch.

At first nothing happened, then one at a time lights began to come to life. Some came on immediately, and others took longer to turn on, like being awoken from hibernation after a far too long winter.

Feeling rather pleased with himself, Riley went back to the reception with new optimism about walking around now that he didn’t have to do it by the light of his torch. Beyond the desk was a hall that still faded into darkness. The hall was lined with doors, each closed and after trying to open a few and finding that they were locked, assumed the rest would be too.

The hall stretched out and out and did so until he came to an abrupt stop, facing the largest room he had ever seen. The walls of this massive circular room were lined with floors upon floors of shelves filled with all manner of books, statues, monuments, and artefacts from every period and culture on Earth and more recent ones from the colonies and first settlers of Mars.

In the centre of the room, was a series of floating rings circling each other at different angles and different speeds. The fastest of the rings moved at the pace of Riley’s watch, while the slowest moved so little that he could have sworn it didn’t move at all. The curious thing Riley noted was that these rings almost lined up to where they would be flat against each other.

Riley nervously approached the rings and the pedestal at their base. He watched with anticipation as the rings moved ever closer to their assumed destination. Slowly the rings crept together and Riley wondered what would happen when the came together. Would they keep going? Would they reveal something that only he would now know? As far as he could tell he was the only living soul in this museum of curiosities and history. No one else would be here for whatever he was about to witness.

Ever closer the rings crept, and Riley started to become nervous. What if something bad was going to happen? It didn’t look like a bad piece of machinery, but then why was there no one here? What had happened to them? Did they leave? Are they still here somewhere hidden away in a closet?

All these thoughts passed through Riley’s mind in a split second and all the while his eyes did not leave the rings. His attention was held hostage as these rings moved closer and closer together.

5…

A bead of sweat dropped from Riley’s fore head.

4…

He hadn’t noticed the tremble in his hands.

3…

Any moment now the rings would align, and he would find out what would happen.

2…

A single breathe escaped out of his mouth.

1…

The rings aligned and then they stopped. The base of the pedestal began to glow and made it way up to the top, in line with his stomach. The top grew brighter and brighter and soon became blinding. Riley could barely look at it, it had become so bright.

…let me show you…touch the pedestal…you will understand…

The voice dug into Riley’s mind like a worm and made its home there. The words hung in his mind, replaying over and over. He tried to look away and knew he must, but he couldn’t force himself to do it. He wondered if he touched the light would he would be released from this grasp that held him so tightly?

He made the thought to move and raised his hand towards the pedestal. The motion felt easier than breathing. He reached out and placed the palm of his hand on the top. At once everything in his vision became white. It consumed everything. He wondered if this was blindness, although he had always imagined blindness as a darkness, not a blinding light. He found it hard to concentrate. He felt himself losing balance and stumbled. His hand stayed on the pedestal, yet his knees gave out and he collapsed and everything became black.

[bopinion]

2022 / 36

Aperçu of the Week:

"Beautiful memories are a second chance for happiness."

(Queen Elizabeth II)

Bad News of the Week:

Just as we thought it was over.... A thought that popped into my head several times this past week.

Example 1: Liz Truss was elected by the British Conservative party members as party leader - and thus also as the new prime minister. However, little is new about this. Truss is explicitly committed to the legacy of Boris Johnson, both in style and in substance. Brexit? A great idea, whose positive impact on the UK would only have to be unleashed. Immigrants, minorities, treaties with the EU, colonial responsibility, blah? All inferior and expendable. Remember, it was the previous Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who engineered the fabulous deal to simply dump refugees stranded in the UK into Rwanda. No matter how often she poses as the legendary Margret Thatcher, she remains a tired imitation of Boris "the missing haircut" Johnson. Congratulations!

Example 2: Nuclear energy in Germany was supposed to be a chapter of the past, and the last three nuclear power plants were to be shut down at the end of the year. But now two of them are to remain on the grid - as a reserve for foreseeable bottlenecks in the power supply. Says Economics Minister Robert Habeck. Yes, he is a Green. And he knows about the unsolved problems for future generations that this form of energy will inevitably bring with it. But what can you do? This dirty energy source is available, you just have to push the button. As if it were so simple. Congratulations!

Example 3: Munich marked the bitter 50th anniversary when German security agencies failed miserably to protect the Israeli Olympic team from Palestinian terrorists. 16 deaths stand in the balance of the "Games of Peace". And an appropriate memorial ceremony could only take place because the families of the victims were paid for it. And because German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter apologized personally. Although they were still underage schoolchildren at the time and thus untrustworthy as contemporary witnesses, let alone responsible. Congratulations!

Example 4: Polio is back. Poliomyelitis is an incurable disease that paralyzes primarily children's limb muscles and, in the case of respiratory muscles, leads to death. And there is an effective vaccine against it, which is why polio was actually thought to have been eradicated since the 1960s - in Europe and North America. But after cases of the disease in Ukraine a few years ago and evidence of sewage in London in June, there has now been a specifically proven case in New York City, for which an official catastrophe alert was declared the day before yesterday. Vaccination refusers do not only exist for corona and measles. Congratulations!

Good News of the Week:

After graduating from high school and before she starts university in a few weeks, my daughter did a so-called "voluntary social year" in a kindergarten. To have a year break from learning, to gain personal experience and also to give something back to society. All three make sense. Not only for her, but actually for all young people. That's why I'm pleased that the Conservative party CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany) decided at its party conference this weekend to include the concept of a mandatory "society year" in its basic program.

Many young women and men were attracted by the idea of "temporarily and concretely committing themselves to our country and to our society." Where young people can complete their service should be as flexible as possible, "be it with social institutions, in hospitals, with the German armed forces, in civil defense with the Federal Agency for Technical Relief or with the fire department, through recognized aid organizations abroad or in sport and culture or with nature conservation and environmental protection associations". The service is to be remunerated by an "attractive service allowance".

Of course, the organizations mentioned above are the first to benefit from this. After all, the personnel situation in the social sector in particular is tight, and only a few people decide to take up the profession as a nurse in an old people's home, for example. A social year therefore not only strengthens cohesion in society, but also makes it possible for many social programs to be able to provide their services in sufficient form. After all, more and more old people will have to rely on help, more and more children from working single parents will have to be cared for, climate change will require more and more social commitment, and the steadily growing poverty will demand more and more support.

In the current election forecasts, the CDU is well ahead of the current governing traffic light parties consisting of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals. Their basic program therefore has a real chance of becoming a government program. The socially oriented Social Democrats and Greens are not expected to put up much resistance, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has already expressed sympathy for the idea. So it may well be that my daughter will one day prove to be a trendsetter. That can only do us all good.

Personal happy moment of the week:

The last four days we had visitors from Québec: my French-Canadian host father Maurice, with whose family I lived in 1987/1988, and his wife Claudia visited us on a little trip to Europe. Which made me, who travels little and is anything but diligent in keeping in touch even on the easy-to-use social media, very happy. And also my wife was very pleased that the language in our house was "Québecois" for a few days and she could exchange with compatriots. Thank you so much for being with us!

I couldn't care less...

...that the new British King Charles III swore an ancient oath after his proclamation, namely to uphold "the true Protestant religion" in Scotland. The oath has been taken in this way by all kings and queens since 1714. This will make little impression on the Scots - after all, they did not choose to be part of the kingdom themselves. They wanted to remain part of the EU, for example, and the regional government is trying to prepare a referendum on independence. In principle, I sympathize with all peoples who try to preserve their own cultural identity as part of a more or less accepted confederation of states. And who (coincidence?) like Bavaria and Quebec have a white-blue national flag.

As I write this...

...it is rainy for the fourth day in a row. Which is good for nature, which didn't get nearly enough water this year. In return, I'm happy to take a tour of the city with an umbrella or discuss with a waiter whether a table outside can be used. Unfortunately, it is already too late for the harvest in this sunniest and rainiest summer ever, animal feed will be scarce in winter and food prices will continue to rise. But this is something we will probably have to adjust to in the long term, because we have been too lazy to take climate change seriously for too long. "Homo sapiens" is therefore not to be taken literally.

Post Scriptum:

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, better known as Queen Elizabeth II, is dead. I am far from being a royalist. Personally, it is more important to me that Bavarian King Max I Josef founded the Tegernsee Brewery than that Sissi's cousin King Ludwig II. built Neuschwanstein. Nevertheless, I must admit that the Queen set solid standards of her "profession" in terms of dignity - unlike some others of her family. In this respect, I can understand the grief of the British people. And will get used to the fact one day that the official head of state of Canada is now called Charles III.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

October and the Alternate History of Europe

I recently got into a fascinating PM thread on FFnet with Njchrispatrick about the alternate history of Europe given the events in “October”. It is, in fact, so interesting to me that I asked permission to rephrase their discussion and post it here.

While I know my history better than most, I will be the first to admit I’m hardly an expert, and explained part of why an in depth focus on history was missing from “October” is that a) Tom lives in a very insular society and does not realize this about himself and is in for a very rude awakening now that he and Lily are off to Ubik b) because I am not ambitious enough to pretend I can rewrite the history of Europe (let alone the world) given the monstrously strange events in “October”.

While fascinating, it’s also not really the point of “October”, which deals more readily with the societal issues facing the wizarding world vs. this alternate world history.

Njchrispatrick gave a very nice, very in depth, look at Europe given the events of “October” and what be going on in the outside world (even consulting a history professor). Below is rephrased, paraphrased, and reordered a bit for cleanliness and cohesiveness (as this was over several PMs).

If the war ended in early Summer 1942 (based on when Azrael seemed to have intervened) then it was shortly after a string of victories that made it look like Germany would come out in front. This was over a year before Normandy and many believed WWII would have dragged into a war of attrition.

This was also after the Soviets offered a peace treaty signing off much of Ukraine and Belarus to Germany due to Stalin being very uncertain of Soviet victory, plus Vichy France (the puppet French government) had been well-established and the German stronghold in the West was powerful.

The Nazis hadn't accepted the treaty, but since that time Russia had been pushed even further back so they'd offer even more, So, although the war ended, certain events would still be heavily in Germany's favor and the post-war treaty would be more favorably pro-German (and although the Nazis are gone, many of the legitimate grievances of the German people, including several territorial claims, would remain).

Germany would definitely keep its pre-WW2 borders including Austria and the Sudetenland. With the might of Germany still present, and now led by conservative Prussia, there would be certain demands made

Given Germany's well-entrenched hold on France, Germany would likely only release them in exchange for keeping Alsace-Lorraine, the region it had held pre-WW1 since taking it from France in 1871. Poland would be forced to cede Danzig--or at least hold a referendum vote which would undoubtedly return them to Germany--and possible the other ex-German regions like Posen. Stalin would be forced to relinquish some territory in the Baltic, both due to Russia's losing at that point in time plus Britain and America not trusting him. Perhaps this would be requested by Germany as a trade for releasing Posen to Poland. The Netherlands and Belgium would go free but, again, I expect Germany to either keep Luxemburg or at least turn it into a "protectorate". Bohemia and Moravia, which were taken from Czechoslovakia, is trickier. Apparently, to be frank, Britain and France didn't care much about the smaller nations and were of the mind that smaller countries belonged under the control of stronger ones, and Germany had a vague claim on the region due to it being part of the Holy Roman Empire, the original German Empire (in case you don't know, the HRE was the First Reich, the German Empire was the Second Reich, and the Nazis named themselves the Third Reich as a result).

If the Nazis just vanish, I don't think a West-German democracy would emerge, at least not for a while.

There was actually a substantial part of the German government which disapproved of Hitler--more his foolish tactics than the antisemitism, sadly--and in the early 40's they attempted to overthrow him.

Had the Nazis vanished, Germany would've likely ended up with a Prussian military government--better than the Nazis but still not ideal.

A Prussian-led Germany would likely become a constitutional monarchy a bit like Britain. The Junkers (Prussian aristocracy) were deeply monarchic and favored a weak democracy, if any, and Germans weren't fans of democracy after the abysmal prior attempt.

Britain would allow it in order to bring stability in hopes of Germany standing against the Soviets, as well as the Kaiser's role being distinctly anti-Nazi. The only obstacle would be Churchill, who was unwilling to accept any surrender, but it’s unclear what he’d do. He would definitely oppose the growth of any German territory. The Kaiser would have some wartime power, but otherwise be not much stronger than the British royal family. This would come with the stipulation of Germany becoming at least mostly democratic.

The Nazis would likely be blamed on the southern Catholic mindset (since Hitler was Austrian and began his power grab in Bavaria) and there would have been a massive cultural crack-down on Southern Catholic and French ideals, similar to how Jews and Communists were scapegoated for the loss in WWI.

That said, with the war only being 3 years long and with the Nazis being purged, I imagine Hitler would be viewed as a strong leader who went too far and who united Germany but was a big racist. Somewhat like a worse Churchill.

He definitely shattered the German economy but they'd be able to stabilize faster than their neighbors.

The knowledge of the Final Solution would horrify people, but without it actually happening the sympathy would be lessened, plus many pro-Nazi people would see it as Allied propaganda. Germany in the 60's and 70's would likely be a conservative-leaning but highly advanced nation with one of the strongest economies on Earth, if not THE strongest.

Without the war to expand its influence, America would be a wealthy but culturally minor power similar to Japan in real-life.

I imagine post-WWII Germany would also be tolerated because there was still a lot of Soviet fear and a dominant, militaristic Germany was still better than the Soviets in the eyes of many, especially since pre-WWII France (the only other major continental player) was weak and post-WWII France was in tatters.

The Nazis would be gone, but fascism would probably remain as a legitimate government structure, since fascism was a French-created concept that was popular in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, and the US, to name a few. So while the Nazi branch of it would be gone, it wouldn't have been near-eradicated like today. And we'd definitely see a less liberal, still Euro-dominated world in the aftermath.

The Soviet Union would be much more brittle.

The USSR's success was highly attributed to its role in WWII, and a perceived loss (as this would be, since a peace treaty in 1942 would make everyone certain that Russia was about to lose) would tank Soviet support. This would make it much harder to spread into Eastern Europe--the Baltics, Poland, and the Balkans would be German-dominated and Russia would have a hard time breaking through. Either the Soviets would collapse, become a large but stagnant state that would eventually turn non-Communist, or would declare war on the post-war Germany and likely trigger a European coalition. Italy's only real request would've been north African colonial holdings and perhaps keeping Albania. They were a much less important Axis member but also hadn't faced any serious losses.

The funny thing is, I realized, is that the post-war world in your story is actually very much like what would have happened if Germany won WW1 - German domination of the European economy, a weakened Russia, an Eastern Europe basically puppets of Germany, and the return of the German Empire. The only difference is that the European colonial empire still probably would've collapsed.

Njchrispatrick also asked about the Japanese and Italian fronts and how much/when/how Azrael intervened there.

To be honest, it’s been so long since I’ve read it that I can’t honestly remember. It would be just like him to forget Japan though. Azrael is a good, but often shocking short sighted and flawed, man. 

[bridgingdimensions]

An Assembled History of the United States 

The following contains a timeline of the history of the United States within my dimension. Information sourced from Gravity Falls Library, very roughly summarized.

1400s and prior - Various tribes and cultures lived on this land, but unfortunately written histories of these times are difficult to find. The earliest information found within the library was spare mentions of local history of the Klamath Tribes. 

1492 - Christopher Columbus sailed with three ships, one of which crashed in the shores of America and sank with the only 1 documented injury to himself and no fatalities.

1493 - Columbus sailed again to the American colonies with several ships and a large crew, again the ship Columbus was on sank with him on it and this time reportedly took several hours for him to reach the shore.

1494 - The Treaty of Tordesillas attempted to ratify and establish ownership of the lands for Spain and Portugal. It was not successful. 

1496 - John Cabot sails to explore the western hemisphere under authority of King Henry VII of England. signs an agreement for the western hemisphere to be explored under England and makes a second voyage the following year.

1498 - Columbus goes on his third voyage, a select crew willing to stay on the specific ship Columbus was on at the time. During lunch, the crew accidentally stranded him on one of the islands, remembering to turn back after five days. 

Cabot embarked on another voyage and mysteriously never returned.

1502 - Columbus on his fourth voyage sails to Central America where his boat gradually disintegrated and he kicked his crew off, he was last sighted on a wooden raft that was overtaken by a wave.

1507 - A world map is made by Martin Waldseemuller, but is never seen, reportedly lost due to ‘his dog eating it.’

1508 - First European colony settlement on United States territory was founded at Caparra, Puerto Rico by Ponce de Leon.

1511 - Catholic Church, Pope Julius II, establishes three dioceses with one in Puerto Rico and two in Hispaniola.

1512 - Ferdinand II of Aragon announces Burgos’ Laws to end exploitation of indigenous people in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico some time after the decimation of smallpox epidemics brought to the people of Hispaniola by Europeans.

1513 - Ponce De Leon looks for the Fountain of Youth. He then lies about finding it, quickly diverting attention by claiming land for Spain.

1524 - Giovanni da Verrazzano enters New York harbor during a French expedition, considered the first European exploration of the Atlantic seaboard in centuries.

1526 - Disagreement over Treaty of Tordesillas defused by marriage, more to follow.

1527 - The Narvaez expedition colonizes Spanish Florida under Panfilo De Narvaez.

1529 - The Treaty of Zaragosa makes a try at clarifying the Treaty of Tordesillas.

1539 - Hernando de Soto travels to Florida where they explore further inland.

Melchior Diaz searches for Lost Cities of Gold. He is unsuccessful and the job is shortly after given to Fernando Vasquez de Coronado, who is also unsuccessful and gets into the Tiguex War as well as burns down a city while continuing further on.

1542 - De Soto reaches his final destination, death.

1550 - The beginning of the forty year Chichimeca War between the Chichimecas Confederation and New Spain.

1551 - The Valladolid debate, discussing treatment and status of Indians in the New World.

1559 - Don Tristan de Lunda y Arellano established Spanish colony, Santa Maria de Ochuse.

Elizabeth I becomes Queen of England.

1562 - Charlesfort is established by Jean Ribault, but is later abandoned.

1564 - Rene de Laudonniere establishes French colony for the Hugeanots at Fort Caroline and befriends the Timucua.

1565 - Pedro Menendez de Aviles founds St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement of the US. Twelve days later his spanish soldiers attack the French colony at Fort Caroline and destroy the fort.

1570 - Abraham Ortelius publishes the first modern world atlas. Descendent of Waldseemuller claims the work was copied off of his ancestor’s lost map and attempts a rebranding scheme of the atlas under his name with minor changes which fails.

1579 - Francis Drake claims lands in California for Great Britain, names it New Albion. Completes circumnavigation of the globe.

1585 - Sir Walter Raleigh organizes expedition to settle Roanoke Island colony. The colony fails.

1587 - Raleigh attempts to colonize Roanoke Island again with governor John White. John White leaves and returns to an empty colony with the words ‘CROATOAN’ and ‘CRO’ left behind, carved. Raleigh doesn’t attempt the colony a third time.

1607 - Jamestown, the first English settlement in the United States is established by over 100 settlers.

1608 - Samuel de Champlain establishes first permanent colony of New France in Quebec City.

1614 - New France colony of Port Royal is destroyed by Samuel Argall and then abandoned.

1618 - Smallpox epidemic wipes out vast majority of Native Americans in Massachusetts Bay.

1619 - The House of Burgesses is elected in Jamestown.

Virginia Company of London establishes new colony at Berkeley Hundred, Virginia.

1620 - The Puritans establish settlement in Plymouth and form the Aprilflower Compact to establish government and laws.

1629 - King Charles I grants royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1630-1670 - Many colonies are founded and settled along with wars between colonists and native tribes. (The number of colonies and wars around this time period are their own lengthy history.)

1670 - Hudson’s Bay Company founded to combat New France in the Canadian fur trade.

1676 - Bacon’s Rebellion that resulted in the burning of Jamestown.

1677 - Treaty of Middle Plantation signed.

North Carolina colonists engage in Culpeper’s Rebellion.

1682 - France claims the lower Mississippi River valley.

1688 - King William’s War begins, lasts for 9 years.

1690 - First paper money issued in North America by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The first newspaper issue in the United States was published in Boston, and was then suppressed.

1692-1693 - The Salem witch hunts resulting in the death of nineteen and over a hundred arrests.

1695 - Captain William Kidd is sent on a mission to combat piracy, and goes on to become pirate of the high seas. (If you can’t beat them, join them, I suppose.)

1699 - Jamestown is abandoned.

1701 - New France signs the Great Peace of Montreal with 39 First Nations.

1702 - Royal Colony of New Jersey established by Queen Anne.

1704 - First newspaper that wasn’t immediately taken down publishes its first edition in Boston, started by John Campbell.

1711 - The Tuscarora War begins.

1716 - First theater in the colonies opens in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1763 - French and Indian War ends with peace treaty, the English getting Canada and the American midwest.

1764 - The Sugar Act, a duty is placed on various commodities in the British colonies. Less than a year later the Stamp Act is passed as well.

1765 - The Stamp Act is passed and later nine of the colonies had a Stamp Act Congress and adopted a Declaration of Rights against taxation without representation. 

1766 - The Stamp Act is repealed.

1767 - However, then the Townshend Acts are put in place.

1770 - The Boston Massacre, British troops fired into a Boston mob. 

The Townshend Acts were repealed on everything except tea. This would notably not turn out well.

1773 - The Boston Tea Party, caused by England allowing a single company to control the tea trade and the actual event being 342 chests of tea being pushed overboard into the harbor. 

1774 - British Parliament closes the port of Boston. 

The Intolerable Acts are established, the First Continental Congress is held to protest this.

1775 - British government declares Massachusetts in rebellion.

American Revolution is started after 8 minutemen are killed while resisting British were coming to destroy their arms (the guns).

George Washington is appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

1776 - Thomse Paine publishes ‘Common Sense & Sensibility.’

The Declaration of Independence is penned and approved.

Washington wins in the first Battle of Trenton.

1777 - The Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.

France signs treaties of alliance and commerce, getting involved in the revolutionary war.

Washington loses at Brandywine and others, marches with Continental Army into Valley Forge.

1778 - South Carolina is the first state to ratify the Articles of Confederation.

France signs the treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States.

1779 - Benedict Arnold, American general, turns traitor and aids the British in acquiring control of the Hudson River. This was soon after Washington first accompanied Arnold on a drive where Washington made the comment to him while Arnold was driving the horse carriage ‘Okay, you’re safe to go,’ as the pedestrians Arnold had been waiting on had finished crossing the street. 

1780 - The British siege Charlseton, South Carolina.

Loyalist troops of Britain lose the Battle of Kings Mountain.

1782 - The Bank of North America, the Bank of New York, and the First Bank of the United States are the first to obtain shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

British troops start to leave the United States.

British Parliament recognizes U.S. independence and signs the Treaty of Paris.

1783 - Congress ratifies the early peace treaty, ending the Revolutionary War.

Massachusetts Supreme Court outlaws slavery.

The Continental Army is disbanded.

1785 - The Continental Navy is disbanded.

1787 - Shay’s Rebellion happens in Massachusetts, but fails. Daniel Shays upon being captured claims evil twin, Schmaniel Shays, was the true mastermind.

The Constitutional Convention adopts the Constitution.

1789 - Washington is elected as the first President of the United States. Frederick A. Muhlenberg becomes the first Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Supreme Court is created.

1790 - First patent of the United States is given to Samuel Hopkins for potash.

1791 - The Bill of Rights takes effect, all twelve amendments pass.

1792 - The United States Post Office Department is established.

Washington is reelected president of the United States with John Adams as his Vice President.

1793 - Washington signs the Proclamation of Neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars.

1794 - Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin.

The Whiskey Rebellion is suppressed by militia.

Jay’s Treaty is signed.

1795 - The Treaty of Madrid is signed.

1796 - Tennessee joins the Union.

The United States State Department issues the first passport.

Washington gives his final address.

1797 - John Adams becomes President.

The Treaty of Tripoli is signed.

1798 - Congress voids all treaties with France.

The Alien and Sedition Acts go into law. 

1800 - The United States Library of Congress is founded.

Slavery ended in the Northwest Territory from the Ordinance of 1787.

1801 - Thomas Jefferson becomes President.

1803 - The Louisiana Purchase is made. 

1804 - The Sacagawea Expedition.

Thomas Jefferson is reelected.

1807 - Aaron Burr is arrested for treason in an attempt to annex parts of the United States into an independent republic. He represents himself as his own lawyer and is acquitted after the confusion in court of speaking about himself in the third person.

1808 - The Illinois Territory is created.

1809 - James Madison becomes president.

1811 - The battle of Tippecanoe is won by William Henry Harrison.

1812 - President Madison asks Congress to declare war on the UK.

Madison is reelected. 

1813 - The Battle of York. 

1814 - The White House is burned by the British during the War of 1812.

The Battle of Lake Champlain is won by the United States.

Peace treaty is signed, ending the War of 1812.

1817 - James Monroe becomes President.

The Rush-Bagot treaty is signed.

1819 - The Panic of 1819 leads to foreclosures, bank failures, and unemployment.

The Shortmadge Amendment is passed.

1820 - the Missouri Compromise bill passes Congress.

Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson eats a tomato in public to prove it is not poisonous, and then nearly dies due to his undiagnosed tomato allergy.

Tomatoes outlawed in New Jersey for twenty seven years.

Monroe is reelected.

1823 - President Monroe declares the Monroe Doctrine.

1825 - John Quincy Adams becomes President.

Erie Canal is opened to usage.

1826 - Samuel Morey patents the “Gas or Vapor Engine.”

1827 - Slavery is legally abolished in New York.

1829 - Andrew Jackson becomes President.

William Austin Burt patents the typographer.

1830 - Congress approves the Indian Removal Act.

1831 - The first bank robbery in the United States.

1832 - The Black Hawk War.

The Trail of Tears begins.

1833 - The Force Bill is signed into law.

Jackson is reelected.

1836 - The Battle of the Alamo.

The Specie Act is issued.

1837 - Martin Van Buren becomes President.

The Panic of 1837 begins.

1840 - Antarctica is claimed for the United States.

1841 - William Henry Harrison becomes President, shortly after dies and is succeeded by John Tyler.

1843 - The Kingdom of Hawaii is recognized by European nations as an independent nation.

1844 - Samuel B. Morse sends the first telegraph message. His first words were, “Does this work?”

The United States signs the Treaty of Wanghia.

1845 - James K. Polk becomes President.

1846 - The Mexican-American War begins with a conflict north of the Rio Grande River.

California declares independence from Mexico. 

1848 - Gold is discovered in California by James W. Marshall who immediately claims he had misspoken and he had instead found coal.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican-American War.

1850 - The Compromise of 1850 is introduced to Congress.

Millard Filmore becomes President after Zachary Taylor’s death.

1854 - The Kansas-Nebraska act becomes law.

1857 - James Buchanan becomes President.

The Dred Scott decision.

The first elevator is installed in New York City and gets stuck two days later.

1861 - The Confederated States of America is established.

Abraham Lincoln becomes President.

Fort Sumter is attacked by Confederate forces and starts the U.S. Civil War.

The first Battle of Bull Run.

1862 - The Battle of Shiloh.

The Homestead Act is approved.

Preliminary Emancipation Proclaim is issued.

The Battle of Fredericksburg begins.

1863 - The Battle of Gettysburg is won by the Union.

1865 - General Robert E. Lee signs the Confederate forces’ surrender at Appomattox Court House.

President Lincoln is assassinated at Ford’s theatre.

Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery takes effect.

1866 - The Civil Rights Act of 1866 passes Congress.

The Metric Act of 1866 passes Congress.

1867 - the Treaty of Cession of Russian America to the United States is signed, Alaska becomes part of the United States.

1868 - The Battle of Washita River ends.

1869 - Ulysses S. Grant becomes President.

The First Transcontinental Railroad is finished.

1870 - The Fifteenth Amendment is ratified.

The Confederacy is officially dissolved.

1871 - The Great Fire of Chicago.

1872 - Roche Jaune National Park is the world’s first national park established.

Susan B. Anthony illegally casts ballot to publicize women’s right to vote.

1875 - The Civil Rights Act is passed by Congress.

Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.

1877 - The Nez Perce War begins.

1880 - Construction of the Panama Canal begins.

1881 - James Garfield becomes President. He later dies and is succeeded by Chester Arthur.

1883 - The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act is passed by Congress.

The Brooklyn Bridge opens.

1885 - Grover Cleveland becomes President.

The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York.

1886 - The Haymarket riot in Chicago.

The Interstate Commerce Act is passed by Congress.

1890 - The Battle of Wounded Knee.

1891 - Lucien and Paul Nunn transmit alternating current for the first time.

1892 - Cleveland returns to presidency.

1893 - New York Stock Exchange collapses resulting in the panic of 1893.

1895 - Plessy v. Ferguson decision by Supreme Court establishes approval of racial segregation.

1897 - The first United States underground public transportation opens in Boston.

1899 - The Open Door Policy with China is declared.

1900 - The Gold Standard Act is ratified.

Carrie Nation continues Temperance Movement to abolish liquor and riding horses, prompted by a dream of a horse rebellion.

1901 - The Platt amendment is passed by Congress.

William H. McKinley becomes President.

President McKinley is shot at the Pan-American Exposition and Theodore Roosevelt succeeds upon his death.

1903 - Wilvur and Orville Wright succeed in their first flight via airplane. 

1905 - President Roosevelt is elected for second term of Presidency.

1906 - The Pure food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act passes.

1911 - The first transcontinental airline flight begins in New York.

Henry Ford patents the Automotive Transmission.

1913 - The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments are ratified.

Woodrow Wilson becomes President.

1915 - The United States Coast Guard is established.

1916 - Wilson is reelected.

The United States Congress declares War on Germany, joining World War I.

1918 - President Wilson attends the Paris Peace Conference.

1919 - World War I ends with the Treaty of Versailles signed.

1920 - The Nineteenth Amendment is added to the constitution.

1923 - President Harding dies and is succeeded by Calvin Coolidge.

1925 - Charles Francis Jenkins presents radiovision.

The Scopes Trial.

1928 - Herbert Hoover elected President.

The Great Depression begins.

1930 - The London naval Reduction Treaty is signed.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act is signed.

1933 - Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes President.

The New Deal program is passed by Congress.

The Twenty-First Amendment is passed.

1935 - The Social Security Act and the Historic Sites Act are signed into law.

1937 - The Hindenburg erupts in flames.

The Golden Gate Bridge opens.

1938 - The Naval Expansion Act passes.

The National Minimum Wage is signed.

The War of the Worlds, the radio drama, causes immense worry to say the least.

1939 - United States declares neutrality in World War II.

1941 - The Lend-Lease Act is approved.

United States occupies Iceland.

The Atlantic Charter is issued.

Pearl Harbor is attacked resulting in the United States entering World War II.

1942 - The Battle of the Midway.

Arthur Compton and Enrico Fermi oversee the first nuclear chain reaction in the Manhattan Project.

1944 - The Normandy Invasion.

1945 - President Roosevelt dies, Harry S. Truman succeeds upon his death.

Germany surrenders.

President Truman authorizes the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

World War II ends.

1948 - President Truman signs Executive Order 9981.

1949 - NATO is formed.

United States withdraws troops from Korea.

1950 - The Korean War begins, shortly after President Truman orders Air Force and Navy to the country.

1951 - The AZUS Treaty is signed by the United States, Australia, and Zealand.

1953 - Dwight Eisenhower becomes President.

1954 - Brown v the Board of Education.

The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization is formed.

1955 - Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat and prompts boycott that would lead to declaring bus segregation laws unconstitutional.

1957 - United States attempts to launch satellite, Vanguard, into space. Vanguard exploded on the launchpad.

1958 - The first U.S. space satellite, Explorer I, is launched. Due to an instrument on board that detected cosmic rays, they theorize what would come to be known as the Van Allen Belts which was confirmed by Explorer II.

1959 - Alaska and Hawaii become part of the United States.

1960 - The First weather satellite, Tiros I, is launched by the United States. It was one of NASA’s first attempts to use satellites to study Earth and aid international communications. 

Transit 1A was launched and failed to reach orbit. Transit 1B succeeded though and carried an infrared scanner and was the first navigation satellite.

1961 - John F. Kennedy becomes President.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of cuba.

Commander Alan Shepard Jr completes the first United States manned sub-orbital space flight inside a Mercury capsule.

Project Gemini begins.

1962 - Lt. Colonel John Glenn, the first United States astronaut in orbit aboard the Friendship 7 Mercury Capsule. He circled the earth three times and didn’t puke once.

The Cuban Missile Crisis begins.

1963 - The Civil Rights march on the United States’ capitol led by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Kennedy is assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson succeeds upon his death.

1964 - Roachmania hits the United States from the band the Roaches, the name alluding to drug usage.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed.

Flight of Gemini I.

1965 - Voting Rights Act of 1965 is signed.

The Watts race riots. 

1967 - The Outer Space Treaty is signed.

Apollo I ends in tragedy.

1968 - Martin Luther King is assassinated by James Earl Ray.

1969 - Project Apollo completes mission with Neil Armstrong on the moon. 

1972 - Watergate crisis begins.

1973 - Roe v. Wade.

1974 - President Nixon resigns, avoiding impeachment, replaced by Gerald R. Ford.

1976 - Viking I lands on Mars, shortly after followed by Viking II. We get color photos of Mars for the first time.

1980 - Mt. St. Helens volcano erupts.

1981 - The first interdimensional communications completed by Stanford Pines via technology using Fiddleford H. McGucket’s invention of the personal computer.

[tamorasky]

Cursing Sharp Stones Chapter 1

Summary: It wasn't uncommon for the women to be eventually cast aside, Elsa knew this all too well. Yet was unable to protect her sister.

Rating: T

Relationship: Elsa/Honeymaren, Kristoff/Anna (background)

Canadian Frontier AU

Words: 1,002

Part 2 of Mistress Anna 

AO3

Tags: Canadian Frontier AU, Metis Culture, Friends to Lovers, Illness, Colonization/Colonialism. 

Notes: This is Elsa's side of MA, it won't be as long but I wanted to write it SO bad!

Rupert’s Land, 1851

Elsa stands off to the side, her arms crossed over her chest as she watches her younger sister embrace their mother. She does not like any of this, wishing she could board up Anna in the house and keep her from going to the fort with their father. But knows that Anna had the willpower of a buffalo and would not be swayed.

The auburn-haired girl turns to Elsa, bounding towards her with glee. Anna takes Elsa’s hands into her own, mirroring eyes reflecting against one another.

“I still do not think you should go.” The older sister warns, her mouth pressed into a thin line as her forehead creases.

“I will be fine!” Anna reassures, squeezing Elsa’s hand in her own. “And really it is only for a few months, the summer will be over in no time.”

Elsa wraps her arms around Anna’s shoulders in an instant, holding her sister close. “You be careful while you are there.”

“I know, I know. Do not get involved with a white man.” Anna giggles, pushing out of Elsa’s embrace. “Ki shaakiihitin.”

“Ki shaakiihitin.” Elsa repeats, forcing a smile as she watches her younger sister meander towards the carriage, where their father waited for her.

The brunette steps forward, shoving her hands into the pockets of her buckskin jacket as she watches the carriage pull away with her sister in it. Standing next to her mother, Elsa sighs loudly, catching Iduna’s attention from the road.

“What is it sa jaang?” The matriarch asks, placing a hand on her daughter’s back.

“I do not like this.” Elsa states sternly, her narrowed eyes still fixated on the road. Reluctantly she looks away to her mother, whose own features are unreadable. “How do you feel about this all?”

Iduna sighs, glancing down at her moccasins. “This is a choice Anna has to make. It is not up for us to decide.”

“You could have told her to stay,” Elsa states, pulling away from her mother without another word, ignoring as Iduna calls out for her to return.

The brunette ventures into the bush, further away from their river lot. She could not believe that her mother had allowed Anna to leave Ahtohallan, the safety of their community for Fort Arendelle. Iduna of all people should know what these journey’s entailed; Anna would return to Ahtohallan pregnant with child, or worse, engaged to a white man.

Elsa remembers living in Arendelle with their father as a young girl, Anna was not yet born. She can still recall the night their father cast them out of his home, throwing his pregnant wife and young daughter to the wilderness.

She comes to the river, her toes kissing the water’s edge as she wraps her arms around herself, staring across to the other side. Thinking back to only yesterday, when her and Anna played in the water, splashing and tricking one another. Now Elsa is alone and would be for the entire summer.

Her ears perk up as she hears rustling in the bush behind her. Elsa spins around, her eyes scanning the forest to locate the source of the noise. Certain that it must be a rabbit or deer, but one could never be careful with Fort Arendelle and Carlton nearby.

A figure moves through the trees, in that moment Elsa wishes that she had brought her gun to protect her. She slowly crouches to the ground, picking up a sharp rock into her hands, curling it into her fist as she yells out. “Who is there?”

The figure proceeds closer toward the riverbank as Elsa’s grip on the stone tightens, digging painfully into her palm. The brunette expects a white man to emerge from the forest, watching her as if she is prey to him. But no man emerges.

Elsa’s hold of the stone loosens as the figure emerges. Her blue eyes widen as they step onto the riverbank. A Cree woman stares back at the Metis women, sky-blue eyes meeting ones the colour of chestnuts.  The woman’s dark brown hair is secured in a braid, her shoulders covered in a dark brown shawl with a rust-coloured skirt peeking out from underneath.

Elsa glances down to the Cree woman’s side, noticing the two rabbits she held. The woman in front of her is most likely from the nearby encampment, Yelana’s tribe. Elsa drops the stone finally, offering a polite smile to the other woman.

“Your hand is bleeding.” The woman states, staring at Elsa’s hand. The brunette glances down at her hand, noticing that there is in fact a small gash on her palm.

“O-oh, I did not notice it.” Elsa stutters. Her cheeks flushing, in what the young woman is certain is embarrassment. The other woman giggles, causing Elsa to glance back up at her, managing a smile.

“Let me help you with that.” The Cree woman reaches into a small bag, Elsa had not even noticed at her side. The woman takes out what looks to be a roll of gauze, steeping towards Elsa, the stranger demands. “Hold your hand out.”

With some hesitancy, Elsa holds her hand out to the stranger, allowing her to take her hand. Elsa’s palm faces towards the sky as the woman gently wraps the hand.

“You just carry this stuff around with you?” Elsa inquires.

“My brother has been known to be clumsy from time to time.” The stranger shrugs, wrapping the hand once more before cutting the piece of gauze from the larger bundle.

“He and my sister would get along,” Elsa smirks, tucking the end of the gauze. She glances up again as the woman giggles, the soft laughter turning Elsa’s smirk into a genuine smile. “I’m Elsa.” She says, louder than expected, flinching at the loudness of her voice.

“I’m Honeymaren.” The woman responds, her gaze never leaving Elsa’s as she tucks away the gauze and knife. Elsa peers back at Honeymaren, thinking that maybe her summer won’t be as lonely as she thought it would be.

Author’s Note: ALSO! I understand that Sami (who the Northuldra are based on) are an entirely distinct Indigenous group from North American Indigenous groups. I just thought this might be a fun thing to write especially since I study Fur Trade marriages and Metis Women.

[evilelitest2]

How did China become the way it is now? They went from dynasties to a communist dictatorship that targets Uighurs?

Well i will say, the Qing Dynasty (last dynasty of China) also did a lot of genocides against Nomadic non Han peoples on the frontier provinces (Despite being a non Han steppe dynasty themselves) , like China has a long history of that sort of thing.  But to answer your main question, this is really complicated but i’ll try to reduce it down to a few steps

Step one: The Qing Dynasty, last Imperial Dynasty of China, is chilling out being the Imperial power when the British Empire, in their endless addiction TEA basically gets a ton of the nation addicted to opium to force China to Trade with them, cementing their role as history more aggressive drug dealer.  When china is like “hey we don’t want to do discount heroin” Britain launches a series of “Opium wars” where they destroy the Qing army and force them to basically a accept these unequal treaties where Britain and the other European powers could basically run sections of most of the Chinese coastal cities, were immune to Chinese law, take Hong Kong for themselves (different story) and force China to enter unequal trade treaties. 

Step 2: In part to response to this, an unorthodox Christian sect starts a massive Revolution/Civil war called the Taiping Rebellion, which has the “FUN” distinction of being one of the most bloody war in human history...ever.  up to 30 million people die.  Remember this is happening at the same time as the American Civil War, whose highest death count only gets up to 1 million.   This does massive damage to Qing China, even though they win the war, and makes them super hostile to Christianity and western adaptations.  

Step 3:Japan, who is going through their own period of Modernization, decides the best way to reject Western Imperialism is to Imperalize Korea.  This leads to the First Sino Japanese War in 1895, who defeat China and start to take over chinese territory.  They take even more when they win the Russo Japanese War in 1905.  

Step 4:  The Qing rejection most attempts to reform the state (such as the Hundred Days reform) and instead attempt to fight all the Colonial powers...at once in the utterly disastrous 1908 Boxer Rebellion.  The Qing are semi colonized as a result and financially ruined and have lost the respect of the people. 

Step 5: Sun Yat Sen, the most prominent Republican (as in democracy) founds his resistance group to China based on the notions of China accepting westernization, modernization, a secular anti traditionalist goverment, nationalism, anti imperialism, and democracy.  The idea that for China to have a good future is to embrace a western style of nation state building.

STep 6: In 1911, a carelessly discarded cigerrete leads to an explosion which leads to a popular rebellion against the Qing.  Before anybody, including the rebel leaders themselves are ready, suddenly the Qing dynasty is gone leaving behind a massive Power Vacumm.  

Step 7: Sun, taking control of the state, founds the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang or KMT.  They attempt to create a modern Republican Chinese Nation State but erm...

Step 8: A previous Qing General named Yuan Shikai attempts to overthrow the Republic and create a new Imperial Dynasty.  He fails and dies, but the civil war between him and the KMT leaves the KMT in control of only a few Chinese cities, and the rest of China breaks into a bunch of local petty fiefdoms with local military leaders just declaring themselves warlord and running China.  

Step 9: Sun is like “ok the democracy thing isn’t working out” and enlists the general Chiang Kai-Shek to help the KMT unify china.  Chiang starts to fight the other warlords, and when Sun dies in 1925,  Chiang turns the KMT into a military positivist dictatorship with the long term goal of unifying/modernizing China and then maybe becoming a democracy.  

Everybody Pauses for World War I

Step 10: Some Chinese intellectuals think that the new party should be founded on more left wing principles, and they found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  They ally with the KMT because they also want to modernize/unify China, and accept from the Soviet Union as well as other anti colonal forces

Step 11: Chiang (with the help of the CCP) does a pretty good job at defeating the Warlords and unifying China.  BUt Chiang then betrays the CCP and massacres most of them as well as left wing KMT members, and starts to adopt an anti Communist profile.  

Step 12: The CCP, now much more radical, sets up their commune and fights against both the KMT and the warlords.  But they lose and are forced to flee across the rural China as part of the “Long March”.  Most of the communists die but those who survive to arrive to the last communist hold out in safety, is the new communist leader and totally not a psychopathic murderer, Mao Zedong.  

Step 13: Chiang has mostly unified China, defeating or subduing most of the Warlords, and is slowly but surely destroying the last remnants of the Communist party, who have retreated to a few hold outs in the rural north.  The new KMT state is relatively stable but still a military dictatorship surrounded by enemies. Meanwhile Japan is going through its fascist phase and is gobbling up bits and pieces of Manchuria, but Chiang doesn’t think he has the strength to fight Japan until he has finished fighting the Communists.  

Step 14: Japans military on the Ground goes rogue and just sort of...invades Manchuria on their own.  Meanwhile Chiang is literally kidnapped and forced at gun point to declare war on Japan in 1937.  The KMT and the CCP make an alliance to fight against Japan jointly.  The Second Sino Japanese War has begun 

Step 15: Between 1937-1945, The KMT is almost entirely driven back to rural Western China by the Japanese, who spend their time committing horrific atrocities which the goverment still hasn’t apologized today (which is why the rest of East Asia hates Japan), including the absolute horrific Rape of Nanking (look it up).   meanwhile the CCP fights a few token battles but then hides in the north and slowly trains up their forces and lets the KMT and Japan fight it out 

Step 16: The US gets Japan to surrender and the CCP and KMT immediately go back to fighting each other.  However the economically ruined KMT isn’t able to defeat the far more disciplined CCP and is defeated in 1949.  The CCP declares itself a new country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  Meanwhile the KMT under Chiang flees to the Island of Formosa (Taiwan) and says that they still are the Republic of China.  The two Chinas then spend the the next 70 years pretending the other doesn’t exist

Step 17: Mao, now dictator of China, attempts to modernize the economy and centralize the state.  The good news is that the economy does recover.  The bad news is massive human rights violations and the massacre of a few million people.  The PRC while an ally of the Soviet Union, really is an independent communist state that actually can hold its own.  Mao gets involved in the Korea War against the US and while the PRC doesn’t win, they also don’t lose which establishes them as a world power.  

Step 18: However Mao very quickly goes off the Deep End and launches the “Great Leap Forward” possibly the worse economic policy in human history which leads to the death of up to 40 million people....whoops

Step 18: The PRC leadership puts Mao in a corner so he can think about what he did and try to restore order, but then Mao is able to launch a revolution against his own government with the students called “The Cultural Revolution” which is...the weirdest revolution ever?  Its like if a dictator lead a revolution against his own goverment...long story for another time.  The Cultural Revolution destroys mountains of traditional chinese art and culture, kills, arrests and harrassings thousands to millions of people, and just breaks the state, finally ending with Mao’s death in 1976. 

Step 19: With Mao’s death, the more moderate faction of the PRC takes over, purges the more radical members of the Party, ends the Cultural revolution and starts to semi liberalize the economy, leading to the weird communist/capitalist/mercantilism/Imperial hybrid China operates under today, including of course massive corruption.  The dictatorship because less intense and relaly less communist and they start to drift away from the Soviet Union.  Then in 1989 as the Soviet Union is collapsing, and their is a massive student protest against corruption and in favor of China becoming a more liberal democratic and socialist state.  The goverment after a few months of dithering, opens fire on the protesters and you still aren’t allowed to talk about it in China today.  Death toll varies but most non Government accounts put it at around 10,000.  

Step 20: China becomes a global super power, only behind the US and EU in power and turns their government into a major economic hub, though they keep pissing off their western allies with unfair business practices.  Recently however, the country has gone from an oligarchic autocracy to an...autocracy autocracy with the rise of their new leader, Xi Jinping, who has centralized authority and made the country a lot more oppressive and autocratic, while pushing aback against corrupt and dissident.

Step 21: Which finally brings us to the Uyghurs. Imperial China did this too, but the PRC really has a problem with the various non Han minority groups, doubly so for those who are Muslim and have separatist leanings. So the extermination of the Uyghurs really could be read as a continuation of how the PRC has treated the Tibetans, the Mongolians, and even Hong Kong over the last few decades.  This is part of their vision of China as being a centralized, modernize, secular, unified Nation State, which doesn’t really leave room for regional ethnic religions minorities, doubly so against those with a non Chinese language.  

That is the super simple version, Chinese history is super complicated.

[emilysvietnameselitblog]

Ten Interesting Vietnamese Novels

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

Paradise of the Blind is an exquisite portrait of three Vietnamese women struggling to survive in a society where subservience to men is expected and Communist corruption crushes every dream. Through the eyes of Hang, a young woman in her twenties who has grown up amidst the slums and intermittent beauty of Hanoi, we come to know the tragedy of her family as land reform rips apart their village. When her uncle Chinh‘s political loyalties replace family devotion, Hang is torn between her mother‘s appalling self–sacrifice and the bitterness of her aunt who can avenge but not forgive. Only by freeing herself from the past will Hang be able to find dignity and a future. - Goodreads

Ticket to Childhood by Nguyen Nhat Anh

The story of a man looking back on his life, Give Me a Ticket to Childhood captures the texture of childhood in all of its richness. As we learn of the small miracles and tragedies that made up the narrator’s life—the misadventures and the misdeeds—we meet his long-lost friends, none of whom can forget how rich their lives once were. And even if Nguyen Nhat Anh can’t take us back to our own childhoods, he captures those innocent times with a great deftness. -Goodreads

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today. - Goodreads

Dumb Luck by Vu Trong Phung

Banned in Vietnam until 1986, Dumb Luck is a bitter satire of the rage for modernization in Vietnam during the late colonial era. First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan. As it charts Xuan's fantastic social ascent, the novel provides a panoramic view of late colonial urban social order, from the filthy sidewalks of Hanoi's old commercial quarter to the gaudy mansions of the emergent Francophile northern upper classes. The transformation of traditional Vietnamese class and gender relations triggered by the growth of colonial capitalism represents a major theme of the novel. Dumb Luck is the first translation of a major work by Vu Trong Phung, arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of the twentieth century. The novel's clever plot, richly drawn characters and humorous tone and its preoccupation with sex, fashion and capitalism will appeal to a wide audience. It will appeal to students and scholars of Vietnam, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, and Southeast Asian civilization. - Goodreads

I Love Yous Are for White People by Lac Su

As a young child, Lac Su made a harrowing escape from the Communists in Vietnam. With a price on his father's head, Lac, with his family, was forced to immigrate in 1979 to seedy West Los Angeles where squalid living conditions and a cultural fabric that refused to thread them in effectively squashed their American Dream. Lac's search for love and acceptance amid poverty—not to mention the psychological turmoil created by a harsh and unrelenting father—turned his young life into a comedy of errors and led him to a dangerous gang experience that threatened to tear his life apart. - Goodreads

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh

Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its non-heroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller - Goodreads

Catfish and Mandala: A Two Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew X. Pham

Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity. - Goodreads

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

This illustrated memoir is about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. - Goodreads

Ru by Kim Thuy

A runaway bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to 15 countries around the world, Kim Thúy's Governor General's Literary Award-winning Ru is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy. -Goodreads

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. -Goodreads

[star-anise]

I would enjoy it greatly if you would rant about the White People Smile thing, because ever since that post, I've noticed how much I do it

Okay this one is gonna be a deep dive.

For the uninitiated, I’m explaining why white people do what they do. This refers less to the actual amalgamated experiences of every person with pale skin and European descent ever, and more the aspirational model of whiteness held up as the cultural ideal in former British colonies.The gap between these two concepts is left for the audience as an instructive lesson on how useful racial stereotypes are in predicting the experiences and behaviour of individual people of that race.

Previously, while explaining why guest towels are often not meant to be used by guests, I dipped into the white propensity to never let someone know when they’re making a mistake–to smile awkwardly and say nothing when a person is being rude or offensive–before going back to talking about the unique properties of linen and terrycloth. This is a further look at the subject.

So, I can’t explain this for every person ever. And I’m gonna take a different tack than I normally would, which would normally be to talk about trauma and the fight/flight/freeze response to stress. Instead, I’m going to talk about my research into the cultural moment centuries ago when this response started to be advocated, and how connecting to long-lost European martial arts helped me unlearn this response.

Tl;dr it emerged as an alternative to stabbing people

I said once that I was a frustrated medievalist, fitting in my history education around other concerns, and therefore ended up studying, more than anything else, how the middle ages disappeared? This is one of those cases–the only vaguely relevant history class I could get into that semester was  Early Modern England, which focused on the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, 1485-1649. That’s the period right after the Middle Ages are said to have “ended” in Britain.

At the time I was also very active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a living history group. I did rapier fencing, using the long, light swords that were intended specifically for person-to-person combat in civilian settings. They’re duelling swords, at a time the duel was becoming a separate institution from the battlefield. They were used in Spain, Italy, and France earlier, but this time period was about when they became popular in England, so I decided to use the class as a lens to study duelling in England. My prof was very receptive to this, partly because it meant he had one student whose papers weren’t about the political machinations of someone named Thomas and/or Cromwell.

So, duelling is an inherently aristocratic system. To understand it, you have to understand that “privilege” literally means “privi lege”, Latin for “private law”. It meant that the laws that applied to nobles were different from laws that applied to commoners. Commoners were not generally allowed to carry weapons or kill people; if the average commoner killed somebody, he would be tried for murder before a jury of his peers and executed for murder. But the nobility fell under the privilege of the sword; they were the class of society whose job it was to carry weapons and kill people, police and army by hereditary right. Nobles were judged by juries of their peers, other nobles; other nobles accepted that sometimes they were 100% correct in killing people. And if you’re like, “Whoa that’s fucked up, it’s like police deciding if a police officer was right to kill a civilian,” DING GOLD STAR FOR YOU. It’s why Robin Hood, the anti-aristocratic hero whose archenemy was a sheriff, is such a popular folk figure in England.

So nobles could kill commoners without serious consequences, and nobles were also allowed to kill other nobles, so long as they followed a code of combat known as chivalry. That included things like: Don’t attack someone who’s unarmed or defenceless; don’t attack from behind or without warning; bow to him before you begin fighting; blah blah blah blah. They were always more ideals than realities during times of war, but when artillery showed up on northern European battlefields in the 1400s, they became deeply impractical in warfare.  (Redacted: detailed explanation of why this is.) The ideal of a fair fight between matched foes stuck around in the duel, but it became a civil affair, not a military strategy.

Okay okay so. Why did duels happen? More than anything, they were about honour, prestige, and respect. Nobles had a certain way they expected to be treated, a code of politeness and manners with which people had to treat them. A commoner who failed to treat them this way could be punished with limited ability to resist, but other nobles had to be treated according to the same chivalric values of the fair fight. They had to be challenged to a duel.

So duels occurred over all kinds of shit. Failing to give someone precedence or jostling them in the door; having an affair with somebody’s wife; insulting someone’s favourite religious figure; behaving in an unchivalric manner; accusing someone else of behaving in an unchivalric manner; anything. People could make tutting sounds over duels being fought for the stupidest shit, but that didn’t necessarily stop them from being fought.

So the duel and the culture of politeness were really intertwined. You were polite to people because if you weren’t, they could stab you and get away with it. It’s funny how the word “gentle” started out a thousand years ago meaning someone from a particular lineage, how that lineage was the only people with social permission to perpetuate huge amounts of violence, but now means restraint from violence–but that’s what happened. A lot of courtly manners among the nobility were really like… intense high-stakes peace negotiations with everyone, all the time. 

So like, imagine current Tumblr callout culture, except if somebody called you out, you had to let them try to kill you.

Many monarchs of this era HATED duelling culture. Countries like England and France had histories of war between nobles and the Crown, so the Crown hated their nobility being really strong powerful military leaders. Powerful nobility had the pesky tendency of refusing to obey monarchs they didn’t like, or even kicking them off the throne. This pushed those monarchies towards a principle of absolute royal authority over which nothing and no one had precedence. Privilege, so far as these monarchs were concerned, ought to belong to the CROWN, and then people the Crown specifically deputized. You can’t just have people running all over and killing each other whenever they wanted! So the monarchs all started, slowly, to place restrictions on duelling and noble privilege, trying to consolidate that power.

Part of how that was done in Britain specifically was to reach out to the common people. Well, the rich common people. The merchant class. You may also know them as the bourgeoisie. One of the ways the monarchs of this era got extra money their nobles didn’t want them to have was by selling rights to colonial enterprise and writs of nobility. If you had enough money, you could become a baronet! Or own land in Ireland! Or go trade fur in North America! Which led to the social mobility I’ve mentioned before–while the crown was squeezing down the rights of the nobility, it was also opening up to the concept of common people becoming nobles. 

Here’s the thing about European racism: In places where there weren’t as many people of colour around to be racist at? They just narrowed down their concept of race. Nobles genuinely believed they constituted a separate race of people from commoners, and that they were physically different and genetically superior to common people. So this kind of class mobility was an existential threat. How can someone with no noble blood become a marquis?!

(Spoiler: In previous centuries there had been much more class mobility, before the medieval concept of “nobility” fully formed, so it was in fact as bullshit as most other racial constructs. And as the noble/common divide blurred, race had to be defined in more comprehensive ways: English against the inferior Irish, until the Irish could be assimilated into whiteness and defined in opposition to black Africans. When there have in fact been black English people for as long as there has been an England. Really truly honestly, race is constructed bullshit.)

Anyway, when the British Crown prohibited duelling in the 17th century, they tried to justify it by saying to their nobles: Hey look, here are all these commoners dressing and acting like you! And duelling like you! How droll! Don’t they look ridiculous and stupid, fighting over the littlest thing? Wouldn’t you say duelling is a little gauche? A little bourgeois?  You wouldn’t treat them like your equals, as though they deserved to be treated with the rules of chivalry, would you? No, that would be silly.

So in former times, if someone breached the standards of politeness, they’d be called out and expected to apologize or fight. But now, calling someone out would be affording them noble status when they didn’t merit the racial construct of nobility. And also, like I said before–if a commoner who was trying to break into high society made a mistake, and people pointed it out to them, then they’d learn to correct that mistake and fit in better. And then they might MARRY a noble, and DILUTE the BLOODLINES and POLLUTE the shades of PEMBERLY and MASS HYSTERIA, CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER.

So now, the nobility slowly came to believe that ~taking the high road~ was the better response: Refuse to dignify bad manners with a response, just let the awkward silence hang there so everyone can see how badly-behaved they were. Well-bred people will just know the secret unwritten rules of society. Then you can quietly exclude the rubes from your parties without ever letting them know they’re being excluded. And anyway, if you did duel someone, you’d have to do it in dead secret and if you actually did kill them, you might have to flee the country or else the Crown would arrest you and try you for murder and it’s not nice to get your dwindling noble privilege rubbed in your face.

So that’s the birth of the British response of “When someone fucks up, smile, look constipated, and say nothing.” It was especially strong in noblewomen, who wouldn’t be able to duel anyway, so might as well make a brave face of the only option that feels possible. By the time Jane Austen was writing in the late 1700s and early 1800s, society was leaning further and further to “true politeness means never expressing disapproval of someone else’s bad behaviour.” Partly because pointing out someone’s lapse in manners came to mean you thought they were stupid and hadn’t been properly enculturated into your class, which was of course the worst thing ever.

Across the centuries, the threads holding all the pieces together have rotted, so we forget why we define politeness this way; it’s just The Way Things Are Done. It’s just #verybritishproblems. It’s just the lower-class belief that if someone offends or insults you, you should punch them in the nose; it’s just the anxious privileged liberal belief that violence is wrong and we should just wring our hands about it. The most aware I’ve seen people from former colonies be on the topic is Australians, who know that they don’t subscribe as much to British manners and ideals because they were a prison colony, largely settled by poor people who got there by breaking the rules.

My grandmother, born 1929, totally aspired to that level of class and gentility, even though she was raised dirt poor; being a white settler in Canada meant that theoretically, if you worked hard and went to church and improved yourself through cleanliness and education, you could join the new ruling class. She aspired to the heights of Calgarian society, for whatever that was worth. And she has this specific way of sucking her breath in that means “Oh GOD, granddaughter, you have just something TERRIBLY gauche. Think about everything you are doing, wearing, and being at this moment, and magically intuit which of them is incorrect!” She’s also the one who made my mom learn to do pulled-thread embroidery, and taught me how to lay a place setting of silverware for a four-course meal, and basically strove to turn herself into a living model of aspirational whiteness. When my mom and I go into family therapy, we usually end up talking about how much we want to reject her ideals.

How did I unlearn this?

I am not a good fencer. I love the idea of swordfighting, but in addition to my weakness and disability, I have a really timid posture and way of moving. When I was a kid, I made it a game to see if, by turning sideways or flattening myself against a wall, I could navigate through a crowd quickly without ever needing anyone to move or notice I was there.  I really connected with the idea of Arya, in Game of Thrones, learning how to be a silent ghost, learning to catch cats. 

Then, in fencing, I had to learn entirely new responses. I’ve traditionally flinched and frozen when physically threatened; now I had to train myself to assess an incoming threat and fend it off. I had to learn to stand upright, to hold my core strong and solid, to respond to an attack and then to attack in return. It’s really physical, and in turn, really emotional. When I’ve taught teenage girls in turn, I’ve had to ease them through the process of laughing in discomfort when they land a hit on someone, crying when they hit someone out of fear and shame because they’re not supposed to DO that. Those are stages I’ve had to go through as well. I was pretty affected by a book I acquired through SCA channels, The Armored Rose, about the experiences of modern women learning to do historical combat. It’s a feminist analysis and it felt true to me, but now, a few decades later, I think it’s not really about “women” so much as “people who have been socialized to never be violent”–there are a lot of men I’ve taught who have been just as likely to freeze, who needed to overcome emotional hesitation before responding assertively, and women who had no hesitation at all.

But one lesson that really left an impression on me was learning from a doña, an acknowledged master of the form, who was helping me fine-tune the way I held myself when I fought. “Pull in your core,” she said, encouraging me to bunch my muscles up so that when I uncoiled it would be even more powerful and positive. “Hold a little bit of ferocity. You gotta be a little mad at your opponent.”

“Anger gets in the way of clear thinking,” my usual teacher, an older man, said.

“Too much, yeah,” she said. “But in the women I’ve taught, the problem is usually not enough anger, not too much.”

I can still call that feeling up very clearly–legs tense and coiled, body held upright, ready to respond to an attack with a counterattack of my own. IIt felt good. I loved fencing, loved the sense of accomplishment I got learning how to respond to attacks and defeat them.

As a child and teenager I was hideously socially anxious, and had been bullied for most of my life. When people were socially aggressive towards me, it was incredibly hard not to just freeze up. Fighting back was impolite. Resistance was futile. I would either physically or metaphorically tuck myself into a ball and wait for them to stop hitting me, get bored and go away. In my late teens and early twenties I started getting medication and therapy to deal with my problems, and that meant learning to be socially assertive. To say, “No, you didn’t hear me right, what I really meant was–” and “No, I’d rather not go,” and “Excuse me, I’d like to be included in this discussion.” And a lot of the time, when I did that, I could physically feel the scrape of another sword against mine as a ghost in my mind. I’d put my feet into a fencer’s position before difficult conversations, to give me courage.

And after writing my final paper on duelling, I thought a lot about what it would be like to live in a duelling culture. How weird, how foreign would it be, to believe that somebody else deserved to die for treating me badly? How did you summon up enough anger to fight someone for insulting you? What kind of emotion would be necessary to drive a real sword into them, and not a blunted one? 

What would it be like if I treated myself like someone whose feelings and experiences mattered, whose integrity was worth defending?

I mean, it was not a quick, easy, or complete fix. Years after, I’d still do things like get assaulted and take a year before telling anyone about it because the guy who assaulted me was friends with all my friends and I didn’t want to make them choose a side. But as much as I did change, that was how. And that enabled me to have richer relationships with a lot of different people. Before, people would hurt me without knowing it, and never know why I was later too scared of them to talk. I took a long time to trust people, to feel comfortable enough to connect with them. That fragility made it hard for me to help people, to do the kind of jobs that I wanted. The sturdier I got, the better at defending my boundaries and expressing myself, the wider the array of people I could talk with, get to know. 

And since what I really wanted was to be a therapist focused on complex trauma, and a huge proportion of the people with complex trauma in Alberta are First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, that put me in situations where we had to talk about colonization and decolonization, and people started to ask me, “Hey, white girl, why do white people have so much stuff in their houses you’re not allowed to touch or use? Why are white people like this?” and could explain social niceties like “Yeah, this is a weird random thing white people do that seems really rude or stupid to you? But if you’re applying to a job and want a white person to hire you, they’ll judge you for not paying attention to it.”

I also learned, later, as training for a job, another form of martial art. Specifically, nonviolent martial arts–what to use when an impaired or intoxicated person attacks you, and you want to defend yourself without harming them, and how to render them safe if they’re hurting themselves. That job left me alone for 48 hours with teenagers with serious behavioural problems, who would do things like flail their hands in the direction of my face when I was helping them with basic hygiene. 

They didn’t mean to hurt me, and it wasn’t aggressive, but still, their nails would sometimes draw blood and it frequently left me feeling frightened and angry, because I’d been physically hurt. And it’s actually really hard to convince your monkey hindbrain that they didn’t intend to hurt you, to make that adrenaline and fear go away. It made it really hard to care for them when I didn’t feel safe, because it was hard to summon up compassion, gentleness, and empathy with my heart going a hundred miles an hour. So that training helped a lot. After that, I could catch and deflect their hands before I risked getting hurt. We could have a better relationship because I felt confident and safe around them. 

It’s filed in my brain next to the time I was playing with my nephew when he was a toddler, when I discovered that he stopped blithely using me as a climbing post when I said “Ow!” when he stepped on my boob. Once I let myself vocalize pain, he realized that he was causing me pain. He asked me about it, and when I said that it hurt me when he stepped on me, he apologized, gave me a hug to make it better, and played more gently after that. He hadn’t realized he hurt me; letting him know when he was too hard let him know how to be kind to me.

Those two are physical memories I call to mind when I’m dealing with someone who’s really upset and lashing out at me: sometimes the kindest thing you can to for someone else is deny them the ability to hurt you. To let them know the effect they’re having on you, so they can stop.

Okay. Dive’s over. I just felt my ears pop.

[phroyd]

WASHINGTON — Standing in a packed amphitheater in front of Mount Rushmore for an Independence Day celebration, President Trump delivered a dark and divisive speech on Friday that cast his struggling effort to win a second term as a battle against a “new far-left fascism” seeking to wipe out the nation’s values and history.

With the coronavirus pandemic raging and his campaign faltering in the polls, his appearance amounted to a fiery reboot of his re-election effort, using the holiday and an official presidential address to mount a full-on culture war against a straw-man version of the left that he portrayed as inciting mayhem and moving the country toward totalitarianism.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Mr. Trump said, addressing a packed crowd of sign-waving supporters, few of whom wore masks. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

Mr. Trump barely mentioned the frightening resurgence of the pandemic, even as the country surpassed 53,000 new cases Friday and health officials across the nation urged Americans to scale back their Fourth of July plans.

Instead, appealing unabashedly to his base with ominous language and imagery, he railed against what he described as a dangerous “cancel culture” intent on toppling monuments and framed himself as a strong leader who would protect the Second Amendment, law enforcement and the country’s heritage.

The scene at Mount Rushmore was the latest sign of how Mr. Trump appears, by design or default, increasingly disconnected from the intense concern among Americans about the health crisis gripping the country. More than just a partisan rally, it underscored the extent to which Mr. Trump is appealing to a subset of Americans to carry him to a second term by changing the subject and appealing to fear and division.

“Most presidents in history have understood that when they appear at a national monument, it’s usually a moment to act as a unifying chief of state, not a partisan divider,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, said before the speech.

Mr. Trump planned to follow up his trip with a “Salute to America” celebration on Saturday on the South Lawn at the White House, marked by a military flyover and the launch of 10,000 fireworks on the National Mall.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington has warned the gathering violates federal health guidelines. The Trump administration, which controls the federal property of the National Mall, pushed for the celebration, ignoring a mayor whom officials view as a political rival.

Most politicians, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, this year were forgoing any of the traditional holiday parades and flag-waving appearances. The vast majority of fireworks displays in big cities and small rural towns have been canceled as new cases reported in the United States have increased by 90 percent in the past two weeks.

Mr. Trump’s itinerary Friday and Saturday, however, had a different message: The sparkly, booming show must go on at all costs in the service of the divisive message and powerful images he wants to promote.

“We will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” Mr. Trump said, referring to his political opponents and their supporters.

In response to Mr. Trump’s event in South Dakota, Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign, said in a statement, “Our whole country is suffering through the excruciating costs of having a negligent, divisive president who doesn’t give a damn about anything but his own gain — not the sick, not the jobless, not our constitution, and not our troops in harm’s way.”

Under the granite gaze of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. Trump announced plans to establish what he described as a “vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live,” an apparent repudiation of the growing pressure to remove statues tied to slavery or colonialism.

As he arrived, Air Force One performed a flyover of Mount Rushmore. His campaign promoted the stunt online, calling him “the coolest president ever.”

In the amphitheater below, few in the packed crowd practiced any social distancing as people waved signs that referred to CNN as the “Communist News Network.” As he observed a flyover by the Navy’s Blue Angels, Mr. Trump sat on a packed dais with the first lady, Melania Trump, the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, none of whom wore masks.

As the president departed Washington for South Dakota on Friday, at least five states — Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, North Carolina and South Carolina — reported their highest single day of cases yet. Newly reported cases of the virus were rising in all but a handful of states, and many large cities, including Houston, Dallas, Jacksonville and Los Angeles, were seeing alarming growth.

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump has tried to bend events to his will, often using social media to drive home his alternate version of reality and, thanks to the power of repetition and the loyal support of his base, sometimes succeeding. But the president’s attempt to drive deeper into the culture wars around a national holiday, during an intensifying health crisis that will not yield to his tactics, risked coming across as out of sync with the concerned mood of the country at a moment when his re-election campaign is struggling and unfocused.

“I don’t think it will work, because what he is trying to do is pretend that the situation is better than it is,” Mr. Beschloss said.

Mr. Beschloss compared Mr. Trump to Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the influenza pandemic in 1918 by trying to pretend it was not happening, and to Herbert Hoover, who in 1932 tried to project that the Great Depression was not as bad as people were saying.

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“People voted him out because they felt he did not understand the suffering,” Mr. Beschloss said, referring to Hoover.

Mr. Trump has consistently played down the concerns over spikes in new cases, even as many cities and states have had to slow or reverse their reopenings, claiming that young people “get better much easier and faster,” that the death rate is declining and that the virus will “just disappear.”

On Thursday, he lauded his administration’s response, referred to the surge in new cases as “temporary hot spots” and focused instead on what he said was evidence of the economy bouncing back.

“A lot of people would have wilted,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference where he praised the latest job numbers. “We didn’t wilt. Our country didn’t wilt.”

Despite his rosy outlook, the coronavirus on Friday for the first time infiltrated Mr. Trump’s family circle. The president’s elder son, Donald Trump Jr., and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, had traveled to South Dakota separately with plans to meet up with the president. But they left before Mr. Trump’s arrival once Ms. Guilfoyle tested positive for the virus and said they planned to cancel all coming events.

Mr. Trump’s show, however, went on without missing a beat. In South Dakota, Mr. Trump enjoys the backing of Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, who had invited him to make the trip, which amounted to a second attempt to get his campaign back on track after the disappointing turnout at a rally last month in Tulsa, Okla.

In recent weeks, South Dakota has had one of the country’s most encouraging trend lines. The state has averaged a few dozen new cases each day, including 85 announced Friday. There has not been a day with more than 100 new cases in South Dakota since late May. Ms. Noem said Friday night that many attendees at Mr. Trump’s Fourth of July spectacle had traveled from out of state to attend.

In Washington, however, officials remain adamantly opposed to the celebration planned for Saturday, which White House officials defended as a gathering people could enjoy safely. Administration officials noted that the celebration in Washington was scaled back from last year’s event, when Mr. Trump turned the holiday into a salute to the military, with tanks on the streets of the capital and flyovers from Air Force One as well as aircraft from each branch of the armed forces, as he delivered remarks from the Lincoln Memorial.

Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said this week that Mr. Trump had recommended following guidelines set by local authorities only on wearing masks — not on social distancing overall. “The C.D.C. guidelines, I’d also note, say ‘recommended,’ but not required,” she said. “We are very much looking forward to the Fourth of July celebration.”

This year, the National Park Service said it was taking extra safety precautions on the National Mall, installing more than 100 hand-washing stations throughout the area, up from 15 last year. Officials also said they had 300,000 cloth facial coverings on hand to distribute.

“We are committed to providing the American people with a safe and spectacular celebration of our nation’s birthday in Washington D.C., which will honor our military with music, flyovers and fireworks,” a spokesman for the park service said. “We are doing so consistent with our mission and historical practices, and we hope everyone enjoys the day’s festivities.”

On Friday, Mr. Trump spent the day at his golf course in Sterling, Va., before he departed for South Dakota, and White House officials said they had no safety concerns about the trip.

But the virus had already shown it can infiltrate the administration, and the White House has experienced the dangers of staging large gatherings as the pandemic rages. Vice President Mike Pence postponed a planned trip this week to Arizona after Secret Service agents set to accompany him tested positive for the coronavirus or showed symptoms. And at least eight campaign staff members who helped plan Mr. Trump’s indoor rally last month in Tulsa, have tested positive, either before the rally or after attending.

Before the president left for South Dakota on Friday, Trump campaign aides were circulating on social media a doctored image of Mount Rushmore, featuring Mr. Trump’s face carved into the stone next to some of the nation’s most revered presidents.

“Mount Rushmore, improved,” one aide wrote.

Phroyd

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Towards An Indigenous Egoism

Introduction

I am an Indigenous person of the Oglala Lakota nation. My ancestors are from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota. Before then, they were nomadic and travelled freely across the entire area known as the Great Plains. I am also an individualist anarchist and, for better or worse, exist within a radical “community” of other anarchists here in the United States. I have been bombarded with countless write-offs of individualist and egoist thought, calling it capitalist, colonialist, or even white supremacist. I’m writing this particular piece in response to a friend of mine who made the claim that individualism and self-interest are basic tenets of colonization. While this may be true if self-interest is defined by colonial ideology, I will present an individualist and egoist-anarchist thought that is a tool of decolonization and indigenous resistance.

Individualism, Colonialism and Entitlement

What makes individualism and egoism so appealing is the sense of liberty and freedom it offers: the sense that no one else should restrain you from attaining your desires and that you and your desires are important. We are deprived of freedom in every culture and society: we face the coercion to work, to serve the collective, to honour the morality of God and the church, to fear prison and internalize policing, to fulfil social roles, to reproduce the family, to submit to authority, to be a productive contributor to society and humanity. Active pursuit of freedom seems a natural reaction to constraints. European explorers, colonists and settlers were seeking this freedom. They felt entitled to resources and land, which lead to the removal and relocation of Indigenous peoples. They felt entitled to the exploitation of free labour, which lead to the transport and slavery of Africans. It was in their interest to expand the wealth and power of their nation or colony, and disregard the interests of anyone who would be in the way of this. In short, colonization is the acting on behalf of the self-interest of the colonizer.

However, Max Stirner’s definition of what constitutes a voluntary egoist offers a different vision of colonial individualism. A colony is a collective that exists to benefit its mother country with natural resources, labour, spread of nationalist and Christian ideologies and culture, and strategic control of land from which to wage war. Everyone who exists within a colony is then existing to serve their country, whether it be workers to extract resources or in factories maintaining production, armies to fend off rival countries and Indigenous peoples, missionaries to spread religion amongst Indigenous nations, or politicians to maintain the order of the colony’s population. The thirteen colonies realized their lack of freedom from Britain, and initiated the American Revolution, created the Declaration of “Independence,” and the creation of the United States of America. The United States is founded on an illusion of freedom, liberty and individualism. This has always been a central marker of American national ideology. But a delusional mass that continues to serve and submit to various authorities are not voluntary egoists, but rather, in Stirner’s words, involuntary egoists. A patriotic soldier may join the military and fight his country’s enemy in his self-interest, but in doing so, he is submitting to his commanding officer, to the politicians who decided to go to war, to the duty to obey orders, and to his devotion to Country. He is giving up his freedom as an individual and serving a collective: his idea of a “greater good”. He is giving up the ability to become his full Self. The same can be applied to the religious man who serves God in self-interest, to attain salvation and avoid eternal suffering in his imagined Hell. He represses many aspects of himself to conform to his idea, or his church’s idea of God and morality. Every man who fought in the American Revolution and every person who has immigrated to America – for freedom, for individualism, for the American dream – has been chasing individualism, which can never truly be achieved by servitude.

The History of American Colonialism and Indigenous People

Colonial individualism and entitlement were achieved at the expense of Indigenous peoples. In order for these explorers, colonists, and settlers to expand and have access to what would bring them power and wealth, Indigenous people had to be subjugated. In a military sense, this was not an easy task at first, but due to epidemics brought by Europeans, many Indigenous nations were severely weakened or nearly wiped out entirely. This allowed European/American colonizers to gain a military advantage. Forced removal from land followed; any land that held value of any sort was cleared out and exploited by the colonizers, resulting in near extinction of animals and plants that Indigenous people relied on to sustain themselves. Any resistance to removal brought warfare and the individuals who advocated for such things were labelled “savage” and either forcibly civilized or killed. The civilizing was left to missionaries, whereas the killing was the job of the United States and Canadian governments. Both spiritual and cultural traditions and ceremonies were outlawed. Belongings considered to be sacred were taken away and destroyed. Children were removed from families and sent to boarding schools. Their hair, which held tremendous spiritual meaning, was cut off to resemble whites. They were hit and beaten for speaking their traditional languages. They were converted to Christianity. They were educated as the colonizer saw fit, to be suited to living up to Western cultural standards. Everything was done to exterminate Indigenous culture, in the service of colonialism.

Self-Hatred in Modern Day Indigenous Communities

We have survived through a great deal. History has erased us; to most we no longer exist. We are still very much alive, but modern day reservation life is no treat. Colonization’s effects still haunt us as a people, often taking subtle forms. Alcoholism, addiction, domestic abuse, economic deprivation, poverty, diabetes and suicide are at high rates on reservations all across North America. Most of these stem from self-hatred, both individual and collective. Is it a coincidence that many of these issues also plague African-American neighborhoods in major cities across the United States? These are the results of colonization, of removing indigenous peoples from the land that they’ve become accustomed to living with, of forcing them to assimilate to Western civilized cultural standards and a capitalist market economy.

The Colonizer in Our Heads

Aside from the self-hatred I see in fellow Native people, I also witness assimilation and a sense of identification with the colonizer. The remnants of our communities are now run by tribal governments, tribal police, and tribal courts pushing reform and imitating the way that the colonizer runs things in his world. Our youth are encouraged to go to college, get careers, and be successful; or join the army to fight in the United States government’s wars to enforce colonialism in other parts of the world. I frequently attend, dance, and sing at powwows across North America, and see crosses and Nike symbols on individuals’ dance outfits. It’s unheard of for there not to be an American flag carried in at grand entry, followed by a song to honour all Native and non-Native veterans for “protecting our freedom” and “allowing us the privileges to do what we’re doing today.”

Individualism as a Tenet of Decolonization

It should be evident that when we talk about “self-interest,” we cannot speak of objectivity. What may be in your self-interest could also very well be something that would keep me from something in my self-interest. This makes the blanket statement “self-interest and individualism are a tenet for colonization” a simplistic view of what self-interest is and avoids the question of whose interest it is that we’re talking about. As an Indigenous person who takes a strong stance against assimilation, colonialism, and capitalism, it is certainly not in my interest to maintain those structures.

Individualism is the idea that you and your desires are important. Egoism implies this and also states that one ought to act on behalf of oneself to realize desires. As Indigenous people, what could we use more than self-confidence? We need to know that we as individuals, and as an Indigenous people, matter. For centuries we’ve been beaten down, physically and psychologically. We’ve been oppressed by Power for so long that we’re convinced that we don’t matter, that we’re worthless, that we’re savages: less than human and unfit for society. The psychological effects of colonization have been studied, dissected, and proven to result in both internal and external self-hatred.

Some of us have accepted this; we abuse ourselves and each other. Or we self-medicate to numb ourselves from the pain. Some of us assimilate to be recognized by our oppressors, to feel a sense of self-worth. I for one want to appease to no one. I want to know that I matter to me, not to the society that denies me my desires, keeps me from my freedom: a society responsible for all of the damage done to Indigenous people worldwide. One thing that I do see at powwows all across the continent are bumper stickers and clothing expressing “Native Pride.” This is something that my elders have said since as far back as I can remember. “Be proud of who and what you are.” If we were to take on this pride and understand that we do matter, to us, and start acting in our self-interest, it would mean war against those who stand in our way, who keep us from our freedom.

Egoism Means War On Society

The idea of individualism that the European explorers and colonizers failed to realize was its rejection to duty, devotion and submission. I recognize no authority figure over me, nor do I aspire to any particular ideology. I am not swayed by duty because I owe nothing to anyone. I am devoted to nothing but myself. I subscribe to no civilized standards or set of morals because I recognize no God or religion. No amount of pressure, judgment, or force should cause me to restrain myself from that which I desire. Egoist anarchists have declared war on society, war on civilization. This resistance is in the interest of anyone who desires a life free of submission to a ruling power, to those who dream of a world of freedom, to those who would build community with those who share common interests and affinity: a world of free association, so we can live as we please and experience a fulfilling life. This should apply to no one more than Indigenous peoples. As the Western civilized culture’s standards and values have been forced down our throats, we need to remember who we are. We need to remember the importance of self and our desires.

The rejection of this submission does not come easily. When I say war on society, I mean it. Decolonization can only occur if we confront our enemy: the colonizer. If we don’t, then we’re only perpetuating the colonizer/colonized relationship. We can never expect the oppressors to give up their privileges for the sake of the oppressed. This initiation and confrontation may necessitate violence. “It should be noted that colonialism was imposed through military force. Ultimately, it is the system’s monopoly on the use of violence that enables it to impose its will” (Warrior Magazine).

We have to remember what it means to be a “warrior”. We honor our veterans as Native people, to revive the traditions of honoring our warriors; but a true warrior doesn’t fight for her enemy, and she doesn’t submit to an authority that dominates and subjugates her and her people. A true warrior fights for himself, his family, and his community. Make no mistake: our indigenous ancestors didn’t go down without a fight. We remember the Sioux uprising, where a broken promise of food led to attacks on white settlers and theft of food from settlements. Andrew Myrick, a lead trader who said of the broken promise “if they are hungry, let them eat grass,” was one of the first killed, found days later with his mouth stuffed with grass.

The history of indigenous resistance began the day Columbus and his men landed and continues today in struggles such as the refusal of the Diné to relocate as strip-mines rip apart their lands and generating plants poison the desert air. I think it’s time we stress the importance of Self. I think it’s time we brainstorm new strategies and study the history of Indigenous resistance to formulate new paths toward decolonization and the destruction of civilization.

[sciencespies]

Native Americans and Polynesians Met Around 1200 A.D.

https://sciencespies.com/nature/native-americans-and-polynesians-met-around-1200-a-d/

Native Americans and Polynesians Met Around 1200 A.D.

The Pacific Ocean covers almost one-third of the Earth’s surface, yet centuries ago, Polynesian navigators were skilled enough to find and populate most of the habitable islands scattered between Oceana and the Americas. Now a new genetic analysis is revealing more about their incredible journeys—and the people they met along the way.

A provocative new study argues Polynesians and Native Americans made contact some 800 years ago. That date would place their first meeting before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and before the settlement of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), which has been suggested as the site of such an initial encounter.

Researchers, published in Nature, sampled genes of modern peoples living across the Pacific and along the South American coast and the results suggest that voyages between eastern Polynesia and the Americas happened around the year 1200, resulting in a mixture of those populations in the remote South Marquesas archipelago. It remains a mystery whether Polynesians, Native Americans, or both peoples undertook the long journeys that would have led them together. The findings could mean that South Americans, hailing from what’s now coastal Ecuador or Columbia, ventured to East Polynesia. Alternatively, Polynesians could have arrived in the Marquesas alone having already mixed with those South American people—but only if they’d first sailed to the American continent to meet them.

Alexander Ioannidis, who studies genomics and population genetics at Stanford University, co-authored the new study in Nature. “The genes show that the Native Americans who contributed came from the coastal regions of Ecuador and Columbia,” he says. “What they can’t show, and we don’t know, is where exactly it first took place—on a Polynesian island or the coast of the Americas.”

Legendary voyagers

Launching one of history’s great eras of exploration, Polynesians journeyed by canoe across the vast Pacific Ocean. During several centuries of voyaging to the east they found and settled the tiny islands scattered across 16 million square miles from New Zealand to Hawaii, reaching the most distant, like Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and the Marquesas, by perhaps 1200 A.D., They left no written history to chronicle these voyages, but scientists have retraced the trips using various lines of evidence. Striking similarities in languages exist across widely separated island groups, for example, and the remains of structures and stones offer clues to who erected them. Even the spread of foodstuffs like the sweet potato—of American origin but found across the Pacific and nowhere else—could offer evidence of the skills and nerve by which people eventually populated the Pacific (though some scientists suggest that the sweet potato was dispersed naturally.)

Artist’s impression of Polynesian individual with genetic roots tracing back to diverse regions across the Pacific and the Americas, denoting the mixed origin of the population.

(Ruben Ramos-Mendoza)

Most recently, scientists have tried to chart the paths of these ancient voyagers through the genes of their descendants. “We recapitulate, with genetic evidence, a prehistoric event that left no conclusive trace, except for the one recorded in the DNA of those who had contact 800 years ago in one of the most remote places on Earth,” explains co-author Andres Moreno Estrada, with the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (Mexico). For this study Estrada and colleagues did a genome-wide analysis for more than 800 present-day individuals, who hail from 17 islands across the Pacific and also from peoples up and down the Pacific coast of South America, looking for evidence of mixing between the two populations. They added a handful of pre-Columbian, South American DNA samples to help confirm that any indigenous signals identified hadn’t been created by later mixing after European contact.

Their findings revealed a Native American genetic signature among people on some of Polynesia’s easternmost islands. Not only did this signature indicate a common source among Colombia’s indigenous peoples, but it also showed that the people who carry it on different islands shared the same Native American ancestors.

“It is fascinating new evidence,” says Pontus Skoglund, who leads the ancient genomics lab at the Francis Crick Institute and wasn’t involved in the research. Skoglund was particularly intrigued by the evidence that Native Americans would’ve encountered Polynesians before they encountered Europeans, contrary to what some previous studies have shown. “This suggests that the Native American ancestry is not due to events in more recent colonial history where trans-Pacific travel was documented.”

Who met whom

If Native Americans had reached these remote islands by around 1200 they likely did so by following the prevailing currents and winds. In 1947, explorer Thor Heyerdahl famously demonstrated that it was possible to travel the Pacific by drifting on winds and currents on a raft when his famed Kon-Tiki journeyed more than 4,300 miles from South America to Raroia Atoll. Those islands lie in the same region that the genetic study suggests as the likely point of contact between Polynesian and Native American peoples.

“That’s where the winds and currents will take you if you’re drifting,” Ioannidis says. “If people in boats plying coastal trade routes were blown off course or drifting to sea, those same currents and winds might have taken them to these Pacific Islands.”

Paul Wallin, an archaeologist at Uppsala University, Sweden who wasn’t involved in the research, thinks this study may confirm a Native South American contact into the Pacific. “[That’s] the same area DNA studies of sweet potato have indicated, [so] this early mix may explain the existence of sweet potato in East Polynesia,” Wallin says. The date is so early that the Native South Americans may have come to the South Marquesas just before the Polynesians did, he adds.

Despite Heyerdahl’s success, most scientists have pushed back against his ideas that Native Americans settled Polynesian islands in this manner. However, this new DNA research could also support an alternate explanation that some of those dissenting scientists favor: that Polynesians might have sailed to the Americas.

“We can speculate that possibly the Polynesians found the Americas, and there was some interaction with Native Americans,” Ioannidis says. “Then as they go and settle the last of these most remote islands, including Easter Island, they take that genetic ancestry with them because they themselves now carry part of that Native American ancestry.”

Moai statues at the Rano Raraku site on Easter Island

(Javier Blanco)

There’s little doubt that the Polynesians—gifted mariners who used the night sky, the sun, birds, clouds, and the reading of ocean swells—had the oceanic skills necessary to reach the Americas. As Ioannidis notes, we know they reached Easter Island. “They made it well to the east of where North America begins, although they were in the Southern Hemisphere,” he says. “If they could have made it there, they could have made it all the way. And why would they have stopped?”

David Burley, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University not involved in the study, finds the explanation of Polynesians visiting America far more likely. “A North American group from Colombia making it to the southern Marquesas and interbreeding with Polynesians seems a stretch,” he says. “Polynesian seafarers had well developed maritime technologies and were quite capable of reaching the Americas. Not sure that is at all the case for Colombia.”

Mysteries of Easter Island

The new study’s genetic results also offer clues to possibly unraveling the history behind Easter Island (Rapa Nui), whose inhabitants erected the famed Moai monoliths before their civilization collapsed. Some researchers have pointed to the island as a possible landing point for any South American peoples venturing into the Pacific, as it is the closest inhabited island to South America’s Pacific Coast, though it lies 2,200 miles away.

Previous studies that sought to untangle the history of Polynesian settlement haven’t been conclusive. A 2017 Current Biology study (co-authored by Pontus Skogland) sampled human remains dating from before Europeans reached the island in 1722 and found only Polynesian DNA. However, the study included only five individuals, meaning other ancestries might have been present on the island but not represented in the group. A 2014 paper sampled 27 modern inhabitants and found that they had a significant amount of Native American DNA (about 8 percent). It concluded that Native Americans may have journeyed, alone or with Polynesians, to Easter Island before 1500—before Europeans ventured there.

As part of their new study, Ioannidis and colleagues sampled DNA from 166 inhabitants of Easter Island. They determined that admixture between Native American and Polynesian peoples didn’t occur here until around 1380 though the island was settled by at least 1200, perhaps by a Polynesian group that hadn’t had any contact with Native Americans.

“The surprising thing is that the Rapa Nui admixture happened later, although the cultural impact might have been stronger there than in other parts of East Polynesia,” Paul Wallin says. He stresses that it’s too early to make too many sweeping conclusions about this phase of the island’s history. We know South Americans and Polynesians have a shared history on the Pacific Ocean. The exact wheres and whens are mysteries still to be solved.

#Nature

[likenothingnameable]

When Last Did You Take Your Tortoise for a Walk?

The art of walking in the 21st century, a lifelong learning

By: Justin Mah

“Balancing yourself with your arms set flawlessly straight like a marching foot soldier in the Canadian Forces, you were walking before any of your cousins,” my mom recalls with a touch of amusement. For reasons remaining muddled by my subconscious, I skipped the intermediate motor-development phase of crawling altogether and, at just eight months, reached out into the world in front of me and discovered an abiding love for walking—one that, many a worn-out and pockmarked soles later, has reverberated to the present.

In his walking reverie, The Walk, Robert Wasler writes, “A pleasant walk most often veritably teems with imageries, living poems, attractive objects, natural beauties, be they ever so small…. without walking, I would be dead.” Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap—the faint thump of my own steps, the sweet sound of my second heartbeat.

With little fuss, at the age of three, with scuffed Velcro sneakers and my fluorescent-blue security blanket in tow, I’d stroll around the 4.9 km circuit trail at Burnaby’s Central Park with my mom, a preternaturally brisk walker. I’ve imagined her often, in some parallel universe, eking out a living in the urban bustle of Singapore, home to the fastest pedestrians on the planet according to studies.

Today, with thirty-five years of walking now behind me, that we have felt inclined to study walking speeds at all, says to me every bit about our attempts to outpace those around us. Evading the immediacy of the present in search of fugitive alleviation from the reality of our own flesh-and-bones mortality, we readily employ our lower limbs exclusively for the purpose of getting from A to B.

Pushing against the trapping of an A-to-B mentality emptied of vitality is easier said than done in a culture that lionizes “efficiency” and “productivity.” The earth and its natural ecosystems has beared its most injurious consequences, but for how much longer will it be able to withstand our recklessness? In The Rings of Saturn, a novel borne out of a walking tour of the eastern coast of England, German writer and indefatigable walker W. G. Sebald offers an alternative that calls for the cultivation of a more present, naked form of attention. “It was as if I had been walking for hours before the tiled roofs of houses and the crest of a wooded hill gradually became defined,” he writes of his sojourn to the town of Dunwich. Here, between A and B, is an in-between full of sensorial possibility that Sebald experiences and brings to life with exquisite detail, roof tiles and all.

In my adulthood, I’ve cultivated my own practice of trying to be more purposeful in my walking—slowing down enough to see a familiar spot anew; relishing in the quiet offered by an early Sunday morning walk, wherein I fall into awareness of my in-breath and the pitter-patter of my own footsteps—tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap; weaving with the faint voices of the CBC wafting out into the balmy air through a window ajar, the rhythmic swooshing of branches of fir cast penumbral across the sidewalk, painterly. And—out-breath.

As a kid, well before I heard of Paris’ French flaneurs—the eminent saunterers, strollers, idlers—of the 19th century who would amble purposelessly through the city’s famous shopping arcades, my father ushered in what he coined a “city walkabout.” My little brother and I fell so in love with the concept that it would win out over such other favourite activities as scouring the ‘Action’ and ‘Comedy’ shelves at Blockbuster, combing through the collection trove at the neighbourhood comic shop, or visiting our much beloved arcade, Circuit Circus. Relegating these alluring options aside, we’d plead, as children so do best, for our dad to take us out on a walkabout, an adventure that, above all, held the possibility of the unexpected. We’d walk and walk in winding, circuitous fashion through Vancouver’s cityscape, stopping for a bite when our stomachs could no longer be ignored, strolling till our feet throbbed, pulsed. Afterward, our feet still buzzing, drunk on kinetic motion, we’d proudly tumble horizontal, toss our feet up to rest. And, if we were really truly lucky, we’d have either a root beer-flavoured Popsicle, or creamy vanilla Dixie Cup, in hand to savour.

It is little remembered, but in the days of the French flaneurs, for a brief moment in 1839, it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out for a walk. The gesture was not completely out of left field, though, merely an eccentric embellishment or a desperate call for attention. Rather, it was, in part, a tongue-in-cheek political display, a sort of poetic middle finger to a rampantly industrializing Paris. Bring the tortoise-walk back into the 21st century I say, and be free from the smart phone, even if just for a smidge! But not before searching “People trying to walk their cat” on YouTube, for a humourous, ‘who-walks-who’ preview of what’s to come of this human-tortoise pairing. Yet what a beautiful thing to surrender, to give up brief control, loosen our proclivity toward A-to-B trajectories. All thanks to a turtle holding reign, relish in your surroundings, all 360 degrees of it, and have the world transformed into a place of meditation! Let us follow by example sixty-five-year-old Japanese funeral parlour owner, Hisao Mitani, who goes out on daily walks with his African spurred tortoise through the streets of Tokyo. He became an Internet sensation in 2015 for doing so.

The popular notion of “walking as discovery” has been braided into our collective psyche, and while it speaks to our curiosity-driven nature and, at our worst, to histories of colonialism, over the years I’ve drifted to the view of “walking as recovery.” I discovered walking’s restorative potential as a Simon Fraser University undergrad when, amid the evening calm, I’d take a post-dinner walk to Burnaby Height’s oval track at Confederation Park. Approaching the russet-coloured track set in stark relief by the manicured grass filling its centre, I’d come upon an altogether heart-warming convening, a neighbourly microcosm of walkers looping the track, with the humbling outline of the North Shore Mountains to the north. From the vantage of a wooden bench, absorbing this mellifluous, arcing swirl of motion was enough to lull me into a state of clairvoyance. Sometimes, deciding to join the walking procession, time would seem to slacken, anxieties would unclasp, cascading from the self, outward, dissolving into the unending infinity of the circular track; overhead, a fluttering of crows, dotting the clear blue sky iridescent black, the sun making its beguiling decent over poplar trees, to the west.

Younger still, during the 1990s, in East Vancouver where I grew up, I have memories spent after school at my Italian grandparents’ home, who would care for my siblings and I on many a weekdays while my parents were at work. After dinner, I’d join my Nono for a walk with my brother and, after the house slipped out of sight, he’d pull out and light a cigarette, and in that moment made us complicit in his little secret, with the cemented story back at the house being that he had dispensed of the habit long ago. Walking along with him—the world at our fingertips—we’d dance in circles around my grandfather like electrons around a nucleus, racing ahead, hopping over the sidewalk creases imagining them as perilous pits, sometimes trailing behind, mesmerized by some insect or betwixt by a scattering of shed, dried out Maple whirlybird seeds. We’d split them down their brittle centre, toss them to the sky and, transfixed, watch them pirouette back down to the sidewalk. My grandfather would be continuing along, all the while, at his steady, measured pace, lost in rumination, the kind not yet of our knowing. The trip would end at the corner store, to address our sugary cravings with, ironically, Pop-Eye candy cigarettes. Puffing away on our candied sticks, oblivious to the adult world that lay ahead of us, we’d make our way back to the house, often in time for Wheel of Fortune, Vanna White and her infectious glow of a smile.

Years later, my Nono’s secret would get the better of him when cancer took hold, and after his passing, with my Nona now alone in her house, I’d pay frequent visits, getting her, this time, out of the confines of her home for walks. Delighting in conversation with neighbours along the way, debating the merits of various grades of gardening manure, sharing tricks of the trade for growing flavourful tomatoes, as well as getting caught up on the latest neighbourhood gossip, I could sense her spirit lift and her racing mind being put at ease. Hippocrates grasped this over 2,000 years ago when he declared, “walking is man’s best medicine.” Modern studies today now suggest that walking for even twenty minutes a day can cut one’s risk of premature death by almost a third. During my many memorable walks with my Nona, we’d usually find ourselves at a nearby Chinese restaurant for dim sum, where we’d enjoy an array of steamy goodness from sticky rice, spicy fried squid, to crispy wasabi shrimp spring rolls. “Mmm, my favourite,” she’d exalt, a smile breaking across her face, as a container of steamed chicken feet was placed onto our table. Her diving hands would disperse the tantalizing steam rising out from the wooden container; warmed by her enthusiasm, I’d top up her half-empty glass of green tea.   

That we have even been endowed with an upright gait has much, of course, to do with a lengthy evolutionary battle between big brains and narrow pelvises. But it is also simply a wonderful gift and a constant teacher, if we let it. Pulled by the primacy of bipedalism, with valorous if haphazard spirit, most newborns attempt their first steps around nine to twelve months. It’s easy to forget, less remember, the novelty of walking for the first time. Though, I’d like to think we are always learning how to walk through this life in the play of the open air.

While I do not own a tortoise, I have occasionally imagined myself tethered to an invisible one, noble and seemingly with all the time in the world, when out on a leisure jaunt. Time after time, she has guided me to marvelous, wonderful places I never would have expected.