I got dressed in my traditional Indian regalia, but there was a man, he was the producer of the whole show. He took that speech away from me and he warned me very sternly. “I’ll give you 60 seconds or less. And if you go over that 60 seconds, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll have you put in handcuffs.”
- Sacheen Littlefeather in Reel Injun (2009), dir. Neil Diamond.
(Source: feu-follet, via mossflowers)
The term “Two-Spirit” is a word that resists colonial definitions of who we are. It is an expression of our sexual and gender identities as sovereign from those of white GLBT movements. The coinage of the word was never meant to create a monolithic understanding of the array of Native traditions regarding what dominant European and Euroamerican traditions call “alternative” genders and sexualities…
I find myself using both the words “Queer” and “Trans” to try to translate my gendered and sexual realities for those not familiar with Native traditions, but at heart, if there is a term that could possibly describe me in English, I simply consider myself a Two-Spirit person. The process of translating Two-Spiritness with terms in white communities becomes very complex. I’m not necessarily “Queer” in Cherokee contexts, because differences are not seen in the same light as they are in Euroamerican contexts. I’m not necessarily “Transgender” in Cherokee contexts, because I’m simply the gender I am. I’m not necessarily “Gay,” because that word rests on the concept of men-loving-men, and ignores the complexity of my gender identity. It is only within the rigid gender regimes of white America that I become Trans or Queer. While homophobia, transphobia, and sexism are problems in Native communities, in many of our tribal realities these forms of oppression are the result of colonization and genocide that cannot accept women as leaders, or people with extra-ordinary genders and sexualities.3 As Native people, our erotic lives and identities have been colonized along with our homelands
"—
Qwo-Li Driskill, Stolen From Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic (PDF)
ETA: I keep meaning to get around to writing something about how the way I perceive my gender changes depending on context. For now, let it suffice to say that it’s only when I’ve been immersed in the dominant culture—from elementary school, to now living in London—that other people have made me painfully aware that I just am not doing/being what they expect and insist on based on anatomy. In other contexts? I was vaguely aware that I just didn’t have an internal sense of gender that a lot of other people seemed to, but nobody even seemed to notice, much less attach weird significance to my gender presentation.
Coming to grips with multisexuality—even finding a reasonable non-binary term to describe it—has been a whole other story.
(via duyukdv)
(Source: clatterbane, via brujitaxicanita)
NATIVE YOUTH SEXUAL HEALTH NETWORK, North America (www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com)
Campaign Titled: Healthy Sexuality and Fighting Homophobia: Native Youth Photography Project
About the Project:
This is the first national campaign for First Nations youth across Canada to fight homophobia and normalize healthy sexuality!
First Nations youth from across Canada came together in March 2010 to create a national campaign about sexuality and fighting homophobia. These are the images created from the campaign which can be utilized as posters, postcards, as well as community newspaper inserts for articles and awareness.
About the Organization:
The Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN) is a North-America wide organization working on issues of healthy sexuality, cultural competency, youth empowerment, reproductive justice, and sex positivity by and for Native youth.
The reclamation and revitalization of traditional knowledge about people’s fundamental human rights over their bodies and spaces, intersected with present-day realities is fundamental to our work.
We work within the full spectrum of reproductive and sexual health for Indigenous peoples.*Connect with more QUEER STORIES from all over the world here!
(via zoeenuage)
“Stop sending expired food”….”fried chicken 64.99”
IQALUIT, Nunavut — A head of cabbage for $20. Fifteen bucks for a small bag of apples.
A case of ginger ale: $82.
Fed up and frustrated by sky-high food prices and concerned over widespread hunger in their communities, thousands of Inuit have spent weeks posting pictures and price tags from their local grocery stores to a Facebook site called Feed My Family.
Holy hell.
WHAT IN THE FUCK? This shit is not okay.
ughhslfkajsdlf gross gross gross
64.99?????
Reblogging for the extra articles.
Also… I might show up to this protest and support them.
Pay attention to this stuff, please, followers who haven’t heard about this! This kind of thing is completely erased in news media.
This is really important, especially the extra articles about conservationists. Also, it’s worth reading through the facebook group (lots of interesting discussion about “healthy” food and if folks should be buying soda or “snacks”) and the original article, which includes this quote:
“But Inuit don’t always have the skills to make the best use of the resources they’ve got, Wakegijig acknowledges. ‘There’s just been a whole shift in the food supply for people that are now living in communities. And that shift in food supply didn’t necessarily bring with it knowledge about or how to prepare southern types of food,’ she said.”
I think the key point in this quote is that “southern” food is not cutting it in Nunavut/for people who are Inuit. Thinking about how southern food (which, as far as I can tell, essentially means settler food — stuff imported from the southern parts of Canada to the Northern grocery stores) is insufficient brings up an interesting point regarding the “conservationist” efforts: these “conservationist”/”activist” type people (settlers) are cutting off people from Nunavut/people who are Inuit from traditional* food sources (they do this by trying to “protect” the whales, seals, etc. from hunters, mostly). By cutting off these food sources and making southern food the norm (stocking it in grocery stores, etc — there might even be something here that is a result of things like boarding schools and forced assimilation policies but I don’t know enough about Canadian history to say that for sure…though I believe that is the case in similar situations in the US) the “conservationists” and settler governments are impeding folks who are Inuit/from Nunavut from being self-sufficient while also not providing them with food to live on. This is (a grossly understated) example of the legacy of settler-colonialism. Settlers keeping the Indigenous/Native population oppressed and in limbo, this is Homi Bhabha’s “almost the same, but not quite” in action.
So. Just a thought or two. Don’t let this issue fall by the wayside, folks.
*this is a loaded word: in this little thought-train, all I mean by “traditional” is what is described in the article from the original post as “country food” (see: ”Nunavut’s larder of “country food” — caribou, seals, fish and other animals — is there for the taking, but only if people can afford the snowmobiles, gas, rifles, ammunition and gear needed to travel safely. Elliott estimates hunting costs about $150 a day.”)
Canada’s national Inuit group, Inuit Tapirisat Kanatami, reports 42 per cent of Inuit say hunting is too expensive.
(Source: , via postmodsexgeek)
Today in Rachel’s inbox a message from Change.org !
[tw:rape, full term carryout]
Rachel -
I’ve been taught all my life to be afraid of rape. I’m Native American and live on a reservation in South Dakota —which means I have a 1 in 3 chance of being raped, according to studies. Of course, I don’t need a study to tell me that. I just have to look at all the women I know who are survivors.
To make matters worse, women on my reservation — and many Native women throughout America — do not have reliable access to emergency contraception, even though the law says we should.
That’s because Indian Health Services (which is part of the US government’s health department) is notoriously bad at distributing emergency contraception. I’ve heard horror stories myself, but a recent report confirmed the worst: some women have even been lectured about how being raped was their own fault before being turned away from IHS clinics.
One woman has the power to solve this problem: Dr. Yvette Roubideaux, the Director of Indian Health Services. I started a petition on Change.org asking Dr. Roubideaux to order Indian Health Service to make emergency contraception easily accessible to Native women. Click here to add your name.
The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 requires IHS to make emergency contraception available over the counter to any woman who is 17 or older, just like in the rest of the US. But a recent study shows that IHS is refusing to ask its distribution centers to comply with the law.
That report said that IHS tells Native women we need prescriptions to get emergency contraception (not true) or that we need to drive an hour each way to different clinics (impossible since most of us don’t have cars). Living in terror of rape is bad enough without also knowing that if we are raped, we may not have access to basic health care.
I know that if thousands of people sign my petition, Dr. Roubideaux will see that it’s not worth a public relations nightmare to deny Native women health care we’re required to have by law.
Thanks,
Sunny Clifford
© Simon Moya-Smith and Indian Country Today
It was 1:30 p.m. April 19 when I received a frantic phone call from Colorado State Senator Suzanne Williams, D-Aurora, who said she had less than 24 hours to resurrect the Recognition of the American Indian Genocide resolution of 2008.
By noon the next day, the original draft of the new 2012 American Indian Genocide resolution, SJR12-046, was dead on the senate floor, and what was left was a watered-down euphemism that still reeks of sugarcoating and naiveté.
What was contentious to the republican state senators was the use of the word “genocide.” The bevy of right-leaning Reagan fans had nothing but acrimonious things to say about American Indians, including myself, who assert that genocide was inflicted upon the first peoples of this continent.
And the most boisterous polemic of the bunch that day was republican State Senator Ellen Roberts of District 6.
Her argument, which she repeatedly reiterated at the podium, was that she didn’t feel the death of millions of American Indians since Columbus qualified as genocide because American Indians are not extinct.
“When I look up the word ‘exterminate’ it is to destroy totally,” she argued. “And my problem with this resolution is I thank God that we have not destroyed totally the Native American people. And one of my challenges … is (the) wording; that is as if they are extinct, because they are not.”
It is curious then that the day prior Roberts added her name as cosponsor to Senate Joint Resolution 32 – concerning the declaration of April 16 through 22, 2012, as Holocaust Awareness Week.
Today, Germany is home to more than 200,000 Jewish people.
Jews are not extinct.
Then, on the same day Sen. Roberts voted down the American Indian Genocide Resolution, she signed on as cosponsor to Senate Joint Resolution 33 – Concerning the Colorado Day of Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.
Today, the Armenian population in Armenia is more than 3 million.
Eo ipso, Armenians also are not extinct.
So, naturally, I’m prompted to wonder: How could Sen. Roberts, based on her logic, support two resolutions that recognize the genocide of both the Armenians and Jews when neither group has been expunged completely?
Indeed.
State Senator Ted Harvey of District 30 was the second loudest to object to the use of the word “genocide.” He asserted that it was a disservice to those “who have actually died at the hand of governments” and to those that were lined up “at mass grave sites,” and were shot and murdered.
Sen. Harvey either hasn’t heard of (or possibly rejects) the reality of the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 when more than 150 Lakota men, women and children were brutally murdered by the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment and dumped into a mass grave near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Which is it, Sen. Harvey?
Soon after Sen. Harvey ended his pejorative diatribe, Sen. Roberts introduced an amendment that changed the language of the resolution from “genocide” to “atrocity.”
The new resolution passed 24 to 9 with the replaced phrasing, “Concerning the Remembrance of the American Indian Atrocity.”
“It’s contradictory that (Sen. Roberts) supported the other resolutions but jumped all over ours,” said Tessa McLean, of the Ojibwe Nation and senior at the University of Colorado Denver who attended the floor hearing. “She was denying the genocide against our people. I felt very angry and upset.”
Amanda Williams, 18, of the San Carlos Apache and Navajo nations and a University of Denver student, later cried in the office of Sen. Williams and said she felt personally offended by the arrogance of the senate republicans and their inability to recognize the systematic murder of American Indian peoples.
“I felt that it was a slap in the face and a further attempt at erasing the truth of the history of the native peoples (of the Americas),” she said.
The only conclusion I can come to is that our senate republicans suffer from blind patriotism. You can’t be the greatest nation in the world if you admit to genocide, right? Apparently not.
Simon Moya-Smith is a journalist and blogger from Edgewater and a registered member of the Oglala Lakota Nation.
(via jadelyn)
feministdisney | disneytrivia:
Pocahontas was harshly criticized by Chief Roy Crazy Horse as historically inaccurate and offensive for glossing over more negative treatment of Pocahontas and her tribe by the English. He claims that Roy Disney refused the tribe’s offers to help create a more culturally and historically accurate film.
You can read his entire statement on the subject, which includes the factual story of Matoka, or “Pocahontas” as she was nicknamed, here, on the official website of the Powhatan Renape Nation.
I recommend reading the above linked piece- it’s pretty short, but will give you a very clear understanding of the history/the accurate account v. the myth/Powhatan response to the movie.
Knowing the history is better than knowing the whitewashed fantasy.
(via telegantmess)
WASHINGTON – Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is expressing concern that tribal courts operating on Indian reservations will attempt to arrest and imprison ‘any American’ if legislation aimed at protecting Native women from criminal violence passes the U.S. Congress… .
Oh, yay, racist, xenophobic concern trolling in the US Senate. Of course the obvious victims here are the “American” (read: white) men who are committing violence against Native American women not the Native American women themselves. /sarcasm
(via karnythia)
Pictured: a letter to parents from Rev O’Grady regarding Christmas break at Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1948.
“It will be your privilege this year to have your children spend Christmas at home with you. This is a privilege which is being granted if you observe the following regulations of the Indian Department.”
A privilege. A privilege to spend Christmas with your children.
Never forget all of the privilege that we have today. That we can send our children to school and not be worried that they will be beaten, neglected, starved, raped, or killed there. That we can safely assume our children will grow up with the love and guidance of their own parents, and be allowed to speak their own language. A privilege is that we, as students, not only see school as a safe place but as somewhere we want to be.
I will never forget that my own grandmother, my own moshum and kookum where denied this privilege. I will never forget that my own loved ones were taken away from each other to be brought to this place they called a “school”; a place that our ancestors fought to provide for us during treaty negotiations, but a place that the Canadian government and the Catholic Church did not deem us worthy of having, in a true sense. Rather than to schools, my family was sent to a place, as children, that sought to “kill the Indian” within them. In a country that belongs to them, they were taught to be ashamed of who they were. To regret the colour of their skin. To fear “God”. That they were less than human.
And it was called a privilege.
I will never forget the day my dad drove me to where St. Henri Indian School used to stand.
“Jess, I know your grandpa’s pretty rough, but you have to understand…”
…and I don’t think I ever will. Not fully, but I’ll be damned if I ever forget, and I’m not sure I’ll ever have it in me to forgive.
God this fucking tears me up.
Chilocco Indian School.
That is the reason my family fled Oklahoma.
(via polerin)
NATIVE YOUTH SEXUAL HEALTH NETWORK, North America (www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com)
Campaign Titled: Healthy Sexuality and Fighting Homophobia: Native Youth Photography Project
About the Project:
This is the first national campaign for First Nations youth across Canada to fight homophobia and normalize healthy sexuality!
First Nations youth from across Canada came together in March 2010 to create a national campaign about sexuality and fighting homophobia. These are the images created from the campaign which can be utilized as posters, postcards, as well as community newspaper inserts for articles and awareness.
About the Organization:
The Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN) is a North-America wide organization working on issues of healthy sexuality, cultural competency, youth empowerment, reproductive justice, and sex positivity by and for Native youth.
The reclamation and revitalization of traditional knowledge about people’s fundamental human rights over their bodies and spaces, intersected with present-day realities is fundamental to our work.
We work within the full spectrum of reproductive and sexual health for Indigenous peoples.
(via lgbtqyouthspace)
This bill will force the Navajo and Hopi nations to give up all water rights to the Peabody Coal Mining Company and the Salt River Project and other owners of the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) in exchange for no compensation. It also will prevent any litigation by the Navajo and Hopi nations should they incur any future financial losses or physical harm as a result of water loss and / or water contamination.
(via polerin)
Or how about this. I am really Native American. How do I know? I’ve always felt a special connection to animals, and started building tee pees in the backyard as soon as I was old enough. I insisted on wearing moccasins to school even though the other kids made fun of me and my parents punished me for it. I read everything I could on native people, started going to pow wows and sweat lodges as soon as I was old enough, and I knew that was the real me. And if you bio-Indians don’t accept us trans-Indians, then you are just as genocidal and oppressive as the Europeans.
Gender is no different. It is a class condition created by a brutal arrangement of power. I can’t fathom how mutilating people’s bodies to fit an oppressive power arrangement is frankly anything but a human rights violation. And men insisting that they are women is insulting and absurd.
"—
This is why I can’t really take Derrick Jensen seriously (I see quotes of his randomly about tumblr), mostly because he hangs out with this fucktwat.
(via moononwaters)
Yeah, I think Derrick Jensen has some important things to say in regards to how fucked up capitalism is and the nature of violence in our society, but he completely fails at so much. The fact that he can’t call out his friend on this really horrible bullshit (I have even personally emailed him about it with absolutely no response from him, yet all other emails I sent to him I received a response) tells me all I need to know. It sucks because his books did inform me of a lot of things, but now he’s just a big old disappointment.
(via megachiropteran)
Wow.
(via youarenotyou)
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!
(via dopegirlfresh)
Keith is an old, transphobic, transmisogynistic radical feminist. That Jensen can’t at least say he doesn’t support her bullshit is ridiculous and shitty of him.
(via dopegirlfresh)
"In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.” - Andy Warhol
Hi, I'm Lucy. I am, among other things, a white, kinky, polyamourous, trans, queer former dyke, an American non-binary femme with invisible disabilities, a feminist who finds a lot of problems with feminism and many feminists, and a bunch of other things.
This tumblr is NSFW as it is fueled on lust and rage. Well, more or less. Sometimes I am thinky, sometimes I am silly, sometimes I am angry, sometimes I just want to look at attractive nude people who may or may not be shagging. Sometimes there is less than a minute in between those 'sometimes'.
I mainly talk on Twitter and have a neglected thinky blog.
My pronouns are ze/zir/zirs/zirself.
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