Black NDNs United

Black NDNs United is a place for Black Natives to share their experiences and thoughts. Please check out the links as well listed here: Askbox /About Us / FAQ / Mods / Watch List

[newyorkrhodeisland]

CAN☺️WE☺️STOP☺️ERASING☺️NON MONO☺️OR☺️WHITE☺️PASSING☺️NDNS?☺️IT'S☺️GETTING☺️OLD☺️

[fuckcolonialism]

“In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, “booming” state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.”

— John Pilger, ‘Mandela is gone, but apartheid is alive and well in Australia’ (via indizombie)

[newyorkrhodeisland]

sooooo….when are non-ndn operated museums and institutions gonna give back all the ndn artifacts they stole? Including bones?

[indigenouswisdom]

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this post contains images of people who have passed away. Tiwi men, Tiwi Islands, Australia.

[abausreligion]

Australian Aboriginals, the very first inhabitants of Australia, occupied and utilized the entire continent by the time Europeans settled in 1788. The Aboriginals first came from Asia between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago, using land only available during the Ice Age and now submerged underwater with only islands as proof of a land bridge. When Europeans first inhabited the continent, the Aboriginal population varies from 300,000 to more than 1,000,000 people. In 1788, there were more than 200 different Aboriginal languages and as many as 500 groups. Although some groups shared a similar language, that does not necessarily mean they are connected, only culturally similar. Since the beginning of time, the Aboriginal people did not grow crops or domesticate animals, sending out groups to hunt and gather food, but still being connected to the sites and areas in their home territory. Over the past couple hundred years, the Aborigines have struggled to maintain their culture and religion because of the European invasion and oppression.

            Overall, the different Aboriginal groups had similar religious beliefs, with some differences within ceremonies and stories in different areas in Australia.  Aboriginal religion does not have a known superior being who rules over the people constantly like most world religions, but ancient ancestors that created everything and then left. These ancestors, called Dreamtime beings, once inhabited the Earth, creating and naming all humans, animals, and plants and then moved on to the spiritual realm. The Aboriginal people were left behind with laws, ceremonial customs, songs, and dances keep the balance within the land. Each ceremonial custom, songs, and dances are different to each Aboriginal group, each group having their own Dreamtime story of creation. These ceremonies and rituals are performed regularly, believed to keep the Dreamtime beings calm and keep nature in balance. In each clan there are spirit beings, people who are messengers to communicate with the living and introduce new knowledge into human society from the spiritual realm. As the introduction of Christianity from British missionaries increased in the early 19th century, the known believers of Aboriginal religion has decreased, only about 20% of Aboriginals living in the old Aboriginal land and practicing Aboriginal beliefs.

            Since many Aboriginals have moved away from old Aboriginal land, finding and discovering more about certain Aboriginal groups has been very difficult. In the 1970s, the Australian Government gave back traditional Aboriginal land to the Aboriginals moved out of their traditional land. One of the largest Aboriginal groups in Australia is located in Arnhem Land in Northern Territory, Australia, called the Yolngu people. The Yolngu people’s culture continues to thrive, being one of the first group of Aboriginal people to speak out against the government’s oppression and paved a way for other Aboriginal groups to regrow. As the Yolngu people thrive, many movies and books are made about this specific group, showing the world about the diversity within Australia.

Photo Source: http://www.ruthdesouza.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/australia-map-aboriginal-nations.jpg

[saltwaterwoman-deactivated20140]

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are warned that this post contain images of deceased persons.

From Buzzfeed: A new play called Black Diggers sheds light on a neglected part of Australian history. Here are some of the true stories behind it.

[black-australia]

A list of all massacres of Indigenous Australians that happened in Victoria. I feel this information needs to be shared as people don’t know nearly enough about Indigenous Australians and do not know how horribly we were and still are treated. Nothing else needs to be said as the list tells it all. Click the photos to save a bigger image for reading the list clearly. 

Photo/display credit: Brambuk - The National Park & Cultural Centre.

[coolknifetricks-deactivated2024]

Creatures from native folklore that you shouldn’t be treating like cryptids

This is obviously not a complete list, this is just a quick list of creatures I’ve seen that get treated like regular cryptids with disregard for the cultures they come from.

Thunderbird (Algonquin, Ojibwe)

Wend!go (Algonquin, Cree, Ojibwe)

Moon-Eyed People (Cherokee)

Moon Rabbit (Cree)

Horned Serpent (Southeastern Woodland / Great Lakes tribes)

Skinwalker (Navajo)

Feel free to add

[mademoiselleclipon]

[huffpost]

In Canada, A Powwow Dancer Blazes Through Gender Norms

Nenookaasi Ogichidaa, or “hummingbird warrior” in Ojibwe, is a two-spirit powwow dancer who is Black, Ukranian and Ojibwe, a First Nation based in Canada and the U.S. Two-spirit is an umbrella term that Indigenous people from North America use to describe their place on a spectrum of genders and sexualities. Neno goes by two sets of gender pronouns: they, their and them, as well as she and her. For Neno, it’s important to be identified by those pronouns as they navigate the world.

When Nenookaasi Ogichidaa dances fancy shawl, it’s like watching a butterfly in flight, looping and spinning through the air.

Nenookaasi, or “Neno” for short, wear a yellow shawl, blooming with fiery wings that trails into fringes. On their feet are handmade moccasins, decorated with flames and enforced with reclaimed leather from couches dumped curbside.

A nearby Chinese lion dance performance begins and the sound of the pounding drums carry. Neno takes off in circles. The butterfly spins.  

“I missed this so much,” they say.

Neno is dancing in front of a Medicine Wheel outside Toronto’s City Hall. A recent addition, the wheel is a tribute to Indigenous peoples living on the land now known as North America.

For First Nations and Inuit communities, its four colors symbolize, among other things, the emotional, spiritual, mental and physical components of wellbeing.

Neno describes dancing as their medicine work and the joy it brought was essential to their recovery from a car crash in 2009.

Under their shawl, they wear a pullover hoodie. Across their chest are the words, “Resilient And Relentless” ― words that Neno embodies. Depending on how you meet the 37-year-old, you’ll see a different side to their resilience. How you refer to them may change, too. Neno looks at gender pronouns as descriptors of responsibility.

There’s the powwow dancer who blazes through gender norms. The mental wellness navigator who works with Black and Indigenous communities in Ontario. The artist standing alone on city streets at night. The queer woman in love, who gushes over her wife and three kids (four, if you count Ra, the recently adopted puppy who joins us for the day, too).

“Being two-spirit, it’s not about gender roles. It’s about the responsibilities that we play. And sometimes those responsibilities, ‘they’ is appropriate,” Neno says. “When I’m doing advocacy as a woman, that’s really important.”

Read more of the interview with Neno here.

[blacknativeproject]

Shonda Buchanan: Who is Afraid of Black Indians?

Shonda Buchanan of Choctaw, Coharie, Cherokee & African Heritage is an Award-winning Poet and Fiction Writer.

Shonda was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan where she spent much of her adolescence curled up in libraries, bathtubs, and on her front porch, reading. Her book “Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?” is a difficult yet beautiful collection of poetry that peeks into one American family’s cultural window.

“Trust the first drum, your heart, for all your answers. The ancestors will follow…” ~Shonda Buchanan

Wanting to forget the past, this chapbook of poetry explores the journey Shonda’s ancestors took from North Carolina to Tennessee, to Indiana and finally Michigan, and the flight and fight to escape racial persecution and racial classification.

Yet it is also a book about the recovery of an identity–the intersection of Blacks and Native American Indians in this country. Shonda and her family, like so many other “bi-racial” Native American Indians, suffered from not knowing their full roots, and the ills of assimilation, all the while and enduring society’s ever-evolving definition of them. This book will hopefully help other Black American Indians, as well as bi-racial and tri-racial peoples, research, reclaim and celebrate their multifaceted heritage.

Buy her book for kindle 

Full article at iloveancestry.com

[newyorkrhodeisland]

Full offense but, 1.7 Million Americans don’t have access to clean, running water and most of them live of reservations. That’s unacceptable.

[newyorkrhodeisland]

Start investing time in researching who you vote for. Start campaigning for funding towards both testing and remediation. Most importantly, keep the people in these communities at the center of your activism!

[aoca]

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq12qP4hT2y/

[gundulablumi]

[killdrae]

[rai-r]

@palamucella/instagram

[blackndnsunited]

Am I buggin' or has anybody else noticed that 99.9% of the time when nonblack natives discuss solidarity, they just want black labor and black (mainly African American) cultures? And African Americans are just expected to "share" as if it's an open all access thing u can walk into. And low-key guilt tripping from them ("They use rap/hip-hop to cope with what goes on in their communities!1 Can we live? We ~made it our own~") + A culture is like... A "debt" we "owe" them for residing here idk

Yeah....I reckon you’ve clocked it. Essentially I think it boils down to crabs in a barrel mentality where because a lot of the talk about race centers on white vs black a lot of non black ppl feel left out of the discussion. There’s some validity to that. However, it’s completely invalid, and I’d argue obtuse, to expect black people to pick up the slack for non black activists. I also wanna highlight the slight power dynamic at play there. Some nonblack people essentially feel that “we aren’t getting the shine we need and so you, black person, who has the most hypervisibility (which is often a curse not a blessing) should go out of your way to help us (to your detriment) so we can remain one step above you in this race against white ppl😊”

Mod n