#native perspective

[galleryyuhself]

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GUAMA the 22-minute TV Documentary version tells the tale of the often unsung hero - the Great Cuban Taino Chief Guama, and leaves you wanting more,

Hatuey (Supreme Taino Chief in Cuba in the rebellion against the Spaniards in 1512)Caonabo & Mayneri (the destroyers of the first Spanish settlement of La Navidad in Hispaniola)Mabey (Hispaniolan Taino leader who fought Spaniards in Cuba)Luquillo (one of the last Taino Chiefs in Puerto Rico to wage war against the Spaniards)Guayacayex (Taino Chief in Cuba who successfully massacred the Spaniards in 1510 in a revenge attack for Spanish atrocities) Guatiguana (the first Taino Chief in Hispaniola to organize a rebellion against the Spaniards)Guarocuya (Enriquillo - leader of a Taino rebellion against the Spaniards in Hispaniola)Agueybana II (leader of the Taino Rebellion of 1511 in Puerto Rico)

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[wiisagi-maiingan]

In the books about Judaism I've been reading, there's a repeated emphasis on Jewish history being taught as something that happened not just in the past, but also to the people telling the stories in the present. The narrative is "it happened to us, to me" as opposed to "it happened to them."

This is something I've also noticed a lot in Native communities. They massacred us, they took our children, they banned our traditions, they forced us off our lands. There's no distancing ourselves from our ancestors, from the Native people of the past; their suffering is ours, their grief and pain and fear live in us.

I think this is a vitally important part of how certain groups interact with history; when your people are constant victims of extreme hate, of prejudice, of violence, you cannot afford to distance yourself from the past. The moment you do, you forget and you relax and you aren't prepared when that violence rears its head again. Because it will. If our history has taught us anything, it's that periods of quiet and "peace" (in the loosest sense of the word) for our people are the exception, they're temporary, and we need to remember that to survive.

[isolatedcorner]

No but not enough English speakers understand that the peak term of endearment in Chinese is to call your partner by their full name. “A-[name]” and “[name]-er” are grammatically correct terms of endearment and so is “lao gong/lao po” but you know what makes me SURE a couple is TIGHT? If they call each other by their whole ass government names.

[royalarchivist]

[A sad violin song plays over an image of a sad hamster]

Pac: This doesn't have anything to do with me – I wear a blue sweatshirt, you're crazy, this mouse doesn't even have a sweatshirt, this hamster! [Reading chat] Am I a depressed hamster?

[ Transcript continued ↓ ]*

–

Pac: Actually– that's fine! I embrace that idea – of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy? [He hits his desk, then starts counting off people on his fingers] Fit is gone, Richarlyson is gone, Ramon is gone, Bagi and Empanada who were always there when we were there are also gone, I haven't seen them! It's just me and Tubbo, and sometimes Philza shows up.

Pac: I lost Chume Labs, I lost the Favela, I lost Murder Mystery, I lost Ilha Chume Labs, it's crazy! Look at how much I've lost, and I've gained nothing! Of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy?! How am I supposed to be happy?!

Pac: [Reading chat] "You have us Pac," that's true, thank you. No, that's true, sorry.

* NOTE: Please note that this is an incomplete transcript, as I was primarily relying on Aypierre's translation mod at the time and if I am not confident of the translation, I do not include it. As always, please feel free to add on translations or message me corrections.

[intermundia]

living in the american west gives you a very strange perspective on space in comparison with europe. i was reading about monaco and then broke my brain realizing that my family's farm is much larger than the footprint of the entire principality. what am i supposed to do with that information. i don't know. in one area of the world, someone managing this much land makes them a prince. here it deeply and truly does not. just very strange

[nordic-language-love]

You know one thing I love about Japan? Everyone responds to me saying "I speak Norwegian" like it's really fucking cool. I tell people in the UK that I speak Norwegian and they're just like "why? You know everyone there speaks English, right? There's literally no point in learning it." But I tell people over here and they're like "no way, that's amazing! And you learned by yourself? You're so clever!"

[sourstiless]

i think my biggest gripe with the comparison between zuko and john smith and zutara as a whole to pocahontas is that john smith was an active colonizer. he was a grown man who chose and was proud of what he was doing. he didnt even believe the act of colonization was wrong. yes, he tried to end the violence in the movie, but he still lived with the belief that his people deserved to and were entitled to co exist on that land with the indigenous people.

zuko was an active participant in dismantling a hundred years of colonialism and colonization and genuinely wanted to fix the problems that his ancestors had left for him. it wasn’t easy and he wasn’t a perfect leader, but he was genuinely trying to make decisions that would be for the better of all the people, not just himself or his people. where john smith thought that indigenous ppl needed the white people’s help to become “more civilized” because he viewed them as inferior, zuko sought to give those that the fire nation had hurt their autonomy back.

that’s not to say that it isn’t a valid reason to dislike zutara, and if the idea makes you uncomfortable that’s fine and i respect it. i realize that the ship doesn’t appeal to everyone and that’s okay, but i just hate the comparisons because john smith was genuinely just an awful person who never should’ve been glorified in a disney movie.

[divine-construct]

i am taking oppenheimer away from the public until everyone learns how to read and understand media because my god the public’s media literacy when it comes to oppenheimer is terribly bad.

[dykedvonte]

The Khans - My Introspective

I don't like the Military and I don't support a lot of the actions the NCR does to the Mojave in New Vegas but in terms of the Khans I feel like the fandom infantilizes or diminishes the fact that they are or at least one of the most violent raider groups in the Mojave.

What happened at Bitter Springs was a tragedy, innocent lives were lost and the fact that the NCR swept it under the rug and continued to hunt down Khans that are truly trying to back down and resettle is horrendous, but there is a history to the NCR's aggression towards them.

The Khans first appear in Fallout 1, the main faction of raiders in the game besides the mentioned Vipers (who don't actually appear if I remember correctly). They came from Vault 15 along with the members that would form rival groups; The Vipers, The Jackals, and Shady Sands. They are a very large and foreboding raiding party, known for burning towns and encampments they attack and taking survivors as their slaves or slaves to sell. They are a big reason why the Jackals and Vipers are actually so small in New Vegas, they wiped them out.

Their main targets where Shady Sands and Junker town, the former of the two would be what became The New California Republic. This explains a big part of their animosity towards the Khans, only furthered by the fact the Khans kidnapped Tandi as a young girl, the girl that would go to offically found the NCR out of Shady Sands. When the dweller saved her and killed much of the Khans, this allowed the NCR to develop into what it currently is as they no longer needed to focus on fighting off constant raids.

When the Khans became the New Khans in Fallout 2, they barely resembled the Khans as they were led by Darion, Garl Death-Hand's son (former leader of the Khans). They were smaller and refortified vault 15, still planning to take down the NCR (at this time nowhere near as imperialist as they are in FNV) as mostly a revenge/power ploy. They manipulate The Squat, a group of y'know squatters, that lived in the upper levels, promising and lying about repairing the vault and offering them ransacked caravan resources if they kept the NCR away. Being their only life line The Squat had no choice. Still the chosen one got rid of them and they left New California for the untapped Mojave.

The Great Khans, the most current iteration, continued in the path as the original Khans, regrouping and gaining information from the Followers who hoped they'd use their new medical knowledge to heal themselves. They gained more members and a substantial part of Vegas territory before they were run out by the three families. They were pushed to Bitter Springs where they first and foremost continued to pick off and attack NCR settlements, most of which consisted of caravans, towns, and camps as they saw them as easy like in their old days. It was the killing of four influential Republic members (non-military) that brought on Bitter Springs.

Bitter Springs was the result of years of hatred and animosity and likely the goal to send a final message to the Khans. It does not excuse the fact that innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered with few survivors. It does not excuse the fact that the NCR has yet to make amends for this and continues to try and persecute the Khans even in moments of surrender.

This post is not to defend what happened but to give a quick rundown of the Khan's history and their history with the NCR. It's to remind people that the NCR is not just their military power but an actual group/settlement of people that were also attacked indiscriminately by the Khans. It's to point out that the Khans were not a band of indigenous people (no matter the comparisons) driven from their homes but raiders who fed into the brutal cultures of the west coast wasteland and were in turn treated to the same things.

My frustration comes from the fact that FNV has so many comparisons to indigenous struggles but the groups it chooses are not comparable at all. Their oppression hinges on not being familiar with their past, which explains why they have the reputation they do in canon. The "tribes" are often not even groups of minorities or have goals/desires out of acquisitions of power and I feel like it is important to both acknowledge that this is bad indigenous rep because it is not supposed to be. It is supposed to be a comparison of the in-game groups and how they all do the same things and justify it in their own fucked up ways, some better at it than others.

FNV of all the Fallout games (in light of it being heavily Western based) distastefully uses indigenous imagery and theming for groups that are sad mimicries of American indigenous cultures at best and outright offensive at worst.

[vogelmeister]

maybe i should start doing video essays.

[wykart]

I think it's time to revisit my Bioshock Infinite rewrite...but first must assemble a reading list so I don't sound like an idiot. The bar is very low, of course, but I have to do this right. So time to learn US history I guess.

[ashtrayfloors]

Monsters

People who deny the persistence of settler colonialism are like the heroes in American horror films, astonished that the monster would have trouble with them. Denial is a key component of the plotlines, the evil might get you if you look too deeply at the horror. You can only look between fingers on a hand that covers your eyes.

The promise of heroic resolution is a false assurance. Revenge films provide another more useful storyline for addressing the following questions: What is a monster? (A monster is one who has been wronged and seeks justice.) Why do monsters interrupt? (Monsters interrupt when the injustice is nearly forgotten. Monsters show up when they are denied; yet there is no understanding the monster.) How does one get rid of a monster? (There is no permanent vanquishing of a monster; monsters can only be deferred, disseminated; the door to their threshold can only be shut on them for so long.).

—Eve Tuck and C. Ree, from "A Glossary of Haunting"

[cynicallyscorned]

so here's a fun (but kinda sad) aspect i thought about regarding cynic's dimension,

i like to think that you can just tell that something is off when you go there. the color in the trees and the flowers and the forests are less... vibrant. the sky and the seas are less blue. the birds don't sing as loud. even the people are a little less high spirits. even the badniks are a little less emotive. its as if something's missing. it's as if something is... wrong. :)

[a-lil-strawberry]

I love twilight but why'd she have to make it racist tho

[touchlikethesun]

"i don't like atyd because it's too americanized," aka how to tell someone you've never been to england before in your life...

[thisgodwontforgiveyou]

i dont really know if they know that they made a complete mockery of their movie or not which is not a unique experience but what is weird is how that matters so little for this movie