This comic - across all platforms - has gotten the most hateful & racist responses than any I’ve done thus far. (And also so much love & support, bless) I’m impressed & glad to have made so many people uncomfortable in the hopes that some gears are turning.
The most common response is the most tired of all, the same one I’ve been hearing since grade school (where the logic should’ve stayed): that “natives ALSO did x historically bad thing / fought over territory” as if that justifies their ongoing oppression. (These replies are a great example, thanks guys)
There’s a vast difference between modern borders & ancestral tribal territories, disputed or otherwise. To focus on the US, our borders on a modern scale look like:
- indigenous families separated from their children and kept in cages to be - at best - irrevocably traumatized or at worst, systemically abused, and/or sometimes even dying in custody.
- US authorities spraying peaceful protestors with water in freezing temperatures so they can clear way for another oil pipeline across Sioux land (whose path was originally going through a white community! but they moved it because of the dangers oil pipelines bring)
- the forced assimilation boarding schools of the 1800s - 1970s, which like ICE’s detention centers of today were also rampant with physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
- the derelict reservations many nations have been relegated to.
- the huge numbers of battered, murdered and missing indigenous women every year.
And that’s just modern day. Nothing indigenous people did to one another, not even the brutal rule of the Aztecs compares to the scale of the genocide and attempted cultural erasure of Native Americans by European settlers under colonization and Manifest Destiny. (And even if they did, we still have the very not okay present…? Like… what is the logic in continuing such utterly pointless cruelty?)
If some of you quit regurgitating the typical kneejerk settler response to try to justify the horrific history and present of US policy towards indigenous ppl and actually checked out the info provided instead (which is literally all indigenous and / or black run), you might learn a little on what it means to right these wrongs.
The US has been really shitty to a LOT of people. It doesn’t mean it has to keep being so shitty. Why is this so hard to grasp.
Otherwise save yourself the mental gymnastics of pretending to give a damn about native folks and just sidle next to those just leaving slurs and/or fun white supremacist phrases like “you got conquered, get over it” so you can all admit you’re sad lil’ people whose only sense of pride bewilderingly comes from your fake ethnic group committing atrocities against others just because they could. I sincerely hope you can live a life more fulfilling than this. It seems exhausting.
from a very much alive (and daresay thriving) person with indigenous roots in the American southeast, who has (also very alive) indigenous friends, family, and colleagues. we’re still here. 😘
p.s. I know many of the abbreviations are wrong & that Iowa is missing. I was rushed & didn’t expect this to blow up the way it has! Many people have expressed interest in purchasing a zine or children’s book on this, and of course then I’d triple check for accuracy. Thanks again for the support. <3
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