"From researching historic twill patterns in museum collections to dyeing wool with Kool-Aid, Diné (Navajo) weaver and instructor Venancio Aragón interlocks research and experimentation to expand the visual and technical vocabularies of Diné weaving. Working on the Diné upright loom, Aragón is part of a generation of Diné weavers who reinterpret ancestral knowledge through experimentation, carrying the medium forward on their own terms. As he stated in our interview with him, “I am not a purist.”
Based in Farmington, New Mexico, Aragón is trained in cultural anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies, currently teaching at Diné College, the Navajo Nation’s tribal college. Before transitioning to full-time weaving and teaching, Aragón worked as an interpretive park ranger at the Mesa Verde, Aztec Ruins, Bandelier, and Petroglyph National Monuments, where he led tours and developed public education initiatives. He was born to the Tó’aheedlíinii (The Water Flow Together People) clan and born for the Naakaii (Mexican people). His maternal grandfather is of the Tsénahabiłnii (Sleeping Rock) clan, and his paternal grandfather is of the Naakaii (Mexican people)."
i am half blind. on my eighteenth birthday, a freak accident left me with a slashed retina, a temporary eye patch and a permanent loss of 86% of vision in my right eye. i don't talk about it much, and apart from the inability to drive a car, placing my notebook next to the desk instead of on it once in a while, and making me truly abysmal at beer pong, it has not impacted my life much.
except for the bittersweet fact that i can never show people how breathtakingly beautiful the world looks when you eyesight is fractured straight through the middle. i close what my opitician calls my good eye and the world explodes in colour, every pinprick source of light spreading out into iridescent flares into all directions culminating in bright circles at the edge of my vision. every star, every streetlight, multiplying into a tenfold symphony of colour and light.
it's so overwhelmingly beautiful. how can i ever explain this to people? that when they find out and look at me with pity they should be envious instead. what an immense privilege, to be able to look at the world and see it too.
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.
Next time you’re watching any news show or political coverage see how many of these you can spot:
Quick rundown of each propaganda technique:
• Glittering Generalities: Using vague, emotionally appealing words (like “freedom” or “justice”) that sound good but lack specific meaning.
• Transfer: Associating a person, idea, or product with something already respected or disliked (like using a flag, religion, or celebrity image) to carry over those feelings.
• Name-Calling: Attaching negative labels to an opponent or idea to create fear or distrust without real evidence.
• Card-Stacking: Presenting only positive information for one side and leaving out or distorting the negatives.
• Testimonial: Having a famous or respected person endorse an idea, product, or cause.
• Plain Folks: Presenting the speaker as an “ordinary” person to seem relatable and trustworthy.
• Band Wagon: Urging people to follow the crowd with the idea that “everyone else is doing it.”
reading about emi koyama and bell hooks' experience with racism in feminist/gender studies classes is really affirming for me having had my own experiences with transphobia in those classes. like i knew at the time that the cis woman professor who insisted i was talking over everyone and other students were intimidated by me and i was too advanced and too mean etc etc. was transphobic but its like. wow yeah that's just what those classes are like huh. so much noise made about being inclusive and anti-oppressive and then you try to slightly improve the class discussions by adding a smidgen of actual intersectionality, and suddenly you are the villain of the class because you didn't just regurgitate the cookie cutter white cis bourgeois feminism they wanted to hear.
from hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center:
In 1981, I enrolled in a graduate class on feminist theory where we were given a course reading list that had writings by white women and men and one black man, but no material by or about black, Native American Indian, Hispanic, or Asian women. When I criticized this oversight, white women directed an anger and hostility at me that was so intense I found it difficult to attend the class. When I suggested that the purpose of this collective anger was to create an atmosphere in which it would be psychologically unbearable for me to speak in class discussions or even attend class, I was told that they were not angry. I was the one who was angry. [...]
Often in situations where white feminists aggressively attacked individual black women, they saw themselves as the ones who were under attack, who were the victims. During a heated discussion with another white female student in a racially mixed women’s group I had organized, I was told that she had heard how I had “wiped out” people in the feminist theory class, that she was afraid of being “wiped out,” too. I reminded her that I was one person speaking to a large group of angry, aggressive people; I was hardly dominating the situation. It was I who left the class in tears, not any of the people I had supposedly “wiped out.”
from Koyama's "Racist Feminism at the National Women’s Studies Association":
It was during my second year of college I was first introduced to the writings of Audre in a Women’s Studies course. Throughout the academic term, students read several articles each week, discussed them in the class, and wrote journal entries that reflect on the week’s readings. Week after week, most of the assigned materials were those written by white, middle-class, straight (or sometimes “political lesbian”) women, and I was having difficulty relating to much of what was being discussed. I kept writing in my journal how I didn’t relate to the reading, but I did not realize it had anything to do with the selection of the materials. I felt bad about being so “negative” about feminism and feminists.
Toward the end of the term, one week was dedicated to the work of “women of color” (yes, a whole week–woo hoo!). If I remember correctly, it consisted of selections from the anthology This Bridge Called My Back (Combahee River Collective statement, and I think one of the Cherrie Moraga’s pieces) and Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. For the first time, these articles spoke to me. They gave voice to my feelings of alienation and frustration that I could not point a finger on. And even though it was just a week out of the entire term, and it is possibly the worst form of tokenism within the discipline, they anchored me to feminism and Women’s Studies to this date. Without Sister Outsider, I may not have been a feminist today.
But one week was not enough for me to gain the confidence and strength it took to speak out when I find myself surrounded by white middle-class feminists who seemed oblivious to the emotional pain and sadness their racist or classist statements and actions caused. It was not enough to just read things written by Audre and others like her; I needed to actually construct a support system around me, people of all races and genders who are passionately committed to justice in all aspects of society and to empathically holding each other accountable.
It was I who left the class in tears, not any of the people I had supposedly "wiped out".
mild preface: I don't need to personally relate to somebody else's struggles in order to find that person worthy of protection or defense against injustice, but obviously there is something extra about finding points of relation to fundamental human emotions that can be very powerful when talking about injustice. at the end of the day, we're all the same species. we all still bleed. we all still cry. we all still feel.
something I've often struggled with, being somebody who was taught that my anger deserved punishment and contempt (and who has spent the past few years trying to relearn how to feel angry at all, and not just divert that emotion into sadness or whatnot), when any sort of injustice is spoken on... there's a really big emphasis placed on anger towards mistreatment. there's this desire to paint people suffering from injustice as strong, capable, fearless, courageous, etc. and the anger is seen as part of the persona of strength used to reclaim the powerlessness often projected onto marginalized people.
but the stories that have always had the strongest impact on me have been the stories of these (see quote) type of emotions. the feeling of being ostracized. the feeling of "why doesn't anybody like me? what did I do that was so horrible that everyone hates me? what is so wrong about me that everyone treats me this way?". feeling misunderstood and unheard and spoken over, not as this angry justified archetype, but as the human capable of feeling pain and hurt in a much more vulnerable way that doesn't try to pretend that it doesn't hurt (not that that's always the case when people put up a strong fight, it's just that often it feels very much like they're trying to look strong so that enemies don't see them as weak).
there is something very human about breaking down, and I wish there were more people talking frankly about that. I don't think it is helpful to always pretend that we're strong 24/7. and especially when it comes to Black women, that stereotype often leads to people assuming that they need no support. no one to ask them if they're okay. no one to help them in times of need. it reminds me of that photo that went viral recently about the white supremacists on the bus, the photographer more concerned about snapping a photo than asking that Black woman if she was okay. of helping her at all. assuming that she's not terrified and that she doesn't need help and that she's not in danger.
My new favorite genre of picture is a very special thing that most animals (and humans!) do: face nuzzling as an act of greeting/comfort/intimacy. thank God that this is happening all over the world right now
i never really got it when people made posts about light pollution and seeing all the stars for the first time and crying. i always assumed that everyone has gone on a road trip to a bortle 1.0 place and seen stars like that, and it's fantastic, but not like life changing. and then i went to europe last month and was in a mountaintop village of like 300 people and could see about 5 stars in the sky. like fewer than i can see from my home in a big metropolitan city.
my apologies to the non-africans, i did not realise how fucked your sky is
BY BEING A DISGUSTING TRAITOR WHO LETS HIS CONVICTS ESCAPE, AND INSTEAD OF SUBMITTING TO EXECUTION LIKE A GOOD QIN DYNASTY CITIZEN, HE DECIDES TO FREE THE REST, AND LEAD THEM IN A REBELLION AGAINST THE STATE!!!!
this is a call out post for @emperor-gaozu-of-han!!! liu bang is nothing but a traitorous PEASANT who is totally UNQUALIFIED for the role of EMPEROR. he might have hoodwinked the uneducated masses with his tax breaks, exemptions of corvée labour, making peace with the xiongnu, and founding China's first gold age ect ect but I expect my LOYAL MINISTERS to know better!
Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do.
glossary:
eek also
and even
tho at the time
prys great value
wonder a cause for astonishment
nyce stupid
spedde succeeded
You know the form of language, too, can change.
Within a thousand years, even the words
that were most precious then, seem strange
and foolish to us; yet they spoke them so
and did no worse in love than we now do.
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