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Wally Dion, born 1976, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Fabric Star Quilts.

Wally (Walter) Dion is a Canadian artist of Saulteaux ancestry living and working in Upstate New York. Working in a number of media including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Wally explains:

"The first fabric star quilt was made as part of a 2022 residency at Wanuskewin Park. It was my way of reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plaines. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another... a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.

I was considering how all of these things worked together for thousands of years to create what is known as the 'prairie tall grass ecosystem'. A vast and fertile expanse of land stretching from the foothills of Alberta to the banks of the Mississippi. I wanted to highlight the invisibility of systems when everything is working well, as it should be.

I started with the green quilt because it is the colour of the sweet grass braid that is exchanged in ceremony and relationship building. I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric. I considered the act of offering fabric and adherence to tradition. I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence to protocols spanning decades. My thoughts travelled across the land, imagining the trees and rocks collecting these prayers like a bush of cloth, or an etched boulders."

prairie tall grass quilts, Bonavista NL, 2023 bison quilt, 2023. 127 ¼ h x 106 ¼ w. fabric, copper pipe. fire quilt, 2023

hellofursuits

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byjove

CNN has done this whole investigative scoop on how elderly retirees have been priced out of retiring to Florida and all I can say is good. That is better for the environment. That is better for maintaining a support system. Stay where your loved ones are. I hate the idea that the cost of living is so high that you cannot even afford to move to a shitty fucking red state but old people need to stop moving to Florida. I’m more concerned about the people living in Florida than the retiree/snowbird population, stay in fucking Ohio instead of moving into a condo shoddily built over endangered wetlands. There are constant natural disasters and ongoing environmental concerns, I don’t care if you wanted to retire to the beach. This is something I am so passionate about as a southeasterner even if I am not from an ‘ideal’ retirement area, moving across the country at age 65 is a terrible idea logistically speaking, moving towards family is one thing but moving to a ‘scenic vacation’ area and pricing out all the locals and then needing a caretaker while your loved ones are states away is so baddddd.

an-admiring-bog

we are crowded enough!! do not come to florida!!!

byjove

Not to mention that the elderly are more vulnerable to heat stress and less capable of evacuating during natural disasters, Florida is a terrible place to move to in your golden years.

byjove

I’m also from North Carolina and back in 2020, I was living in a trailer in an area that was the middle of fucking nowhere but has become a more touristy recreational area in the last 50 years and a lot of wealthy people from the research triangle had (temporarily) relocated there due to the pandemic and work from home mandates. The shit they would post on the previously very quiet Facebook group boggled my mind. “The nearest hospital is an hour away????” “There are no coffee shops or jogging trails?” “There are no municipal resources whatsoever?” YES, EXACTLY. EVERYONE ELSE IN THE COUNTY MAKES LIKE $40k A YEAR. GO HOME.

byjove

People in the Facebook group would be like “Is this a good place to retire to?” and locals would have to gently inform them that elderly residents in the region often have to leave the area because there are no doctors, no nearby hospitals, no home health aides and an overall lack of resources. It was so sickening.

thetetra

Keep in mind old people really like the heat. We should, as a society, setting up places for people to retire to. We should allow people to go someplace warm and safe and spend their Golden years. I don't understand why people think that they can just say "DON'T COME HERE" and not out any effort into making a place for those same people.

Anything less is pretty bleak behavior.

byjove

Nope. We’re experiencing an elder care crisis and the answer is not to export them to Florida as Florida is a terrible retirement destination for the reasons outlined above. An elderly person’s desire to live somewhere warm does not supersede the needs of the people already living there nor does it negate the fact that pretty much every gerontological study indicates that it is better for elderly people to remain in familiar locations where they have longstanding community connections. We need more nursing homes, we need more assisted living communities, we need them across the nation. We need less people retiring to Florida.

thetetra

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that Florida was THE only place, but this does need another aspect to it other than "anywhere but here" The whole gulf coast is fairly similar from my experience and we can spread people out in a much larger area than just Florida.

Again I apologize I didn't mean to communicate a "NO CHANGES ALLOWED" agenda, I was trying to get at 'You gotta offer up alternatives " adjustment to your plan

byjove

Nope. Gulf coast is bad for this. Someone mentioned that everywhere has natural disasters but I cannot stress enough that the frequent hurricanes, power outages and heat waves are terrible for aging bodies. It seems like a tropical paradise to these people and then they arrive and they are lonely and there is a lack of resources to care for them and they are pricing locals out of the places they’ve lived their entire lives. No public transportation, failing hospital systems, locals are struggling in many of these places and until the underlying systemic issues are fixed, making more retirement communities for out of staters will make everything worse.

I do think warning people not to retire to the southeast and to consider staying where they are is beneficial even if, I, a 25 year old barely scraping by, cannot offer them better retirement planning advice. Maybe someone will see me explaining why it is bad and think “Hmm. Perhaps I do not want to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from everyone who loves me to a place where the weather is warmer but far more violent and destructive and the land cannot support the population already living there and the medical care is poor. Maybe I should stay here where I am settled and opt for downsizing to a smaller residence, it seems like that would be more economical and less environmentally destructive than uprooting my entire life and going to a place where I am certainly not wanted.”

I do think these people are victims, I think they are sold this idyllic beach retirement future by property developers and many of them end up miserable, dying alone or eating into their savings. Countering this romanticization can be helpful. The Florida retirement dream is a bad idea.

syo!!!!!!!!!!!

shooo

Redraw of my decora inspired rival octoling from one year ago ! Shes gone crazier with the accessories...

Og here

dogpuppy

r2x2

The Amnesty International report that JK Rowling is trying to censor through legal threats.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

cbarc

Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.

thekalpar

My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.

The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.

This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael's or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It's the jeans problem again.

fagstaynight

heartwarming: transfem named mary sue and transmasc named gary stu have had a beautiful nonbinary baby named donut steel

aberrantemotion

Always funny to me when indie devs who already sell games for dirt cheap participate in steam sales with like 90 percent off. Like. "Yeah this game is three dollars but you can have it for one right now." Like your game costs as much as a pack of m&ms and youre selling it for the cost of a pack of m&ms in the 1950s now? Okay

odddogs

Lea is a delightful 10-month-old female cross-breed dog.

this dog would be fun to animate, those big floppy ears wiggling and i know she prances

hk-does-stuff

Color practice for another piece

I wish we could see the shopkeepers cooking and doing stuff outside of splatfests man

marxism-transgenderism

What always gets me about learning about settler colonialism is how once you learn about it you cannot unsee the violence to the land itself. My home state was previously nearly 100% wetlands, apart of the wider Ohio river valley whose biodiversity supported such large populations of hundreds of different species that many contemporary source from settlers describe it as like the garden of Eden.

The Indigenous people who farmed and hunted here (and still farm and hunt in what land they have been able to keep and reclaim) were able to grow miles of upon miles of crops with multiple harvests a year, encouraging this biodiversity by creating forest gardens with incredible amounts of food from staples like corn and squash to local fruits like pawpaws to European imports like apples alongside controlled burns which allowed fields and buffalo ranges to expand.

Nowadays my state is known almost exclusively for its fields of nothing but corn and soy beans. Driving through in between the comparatively small cities you'll see nothing but fields where the plethora of different trees and plants were chopped down mile by mile, the remaining wetlands drained and flattened, and the rich black soils robbed of their nutrients through decades upon decades of monocrop agriculture now preserved through the life blood of petrochemical fertilizers which destroy the surrounding environment.

This process was done mile by mile as the tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed and displaced by settlers and the US army, the land measured and sold acre by acre to white settlers who raped the land as described, filling the pockets of wealthy land speculators (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who bought the land directly from the government in schemes so corrupt historians have dedicated entire careers to mapping out their dramas.

It's like learning about commodity fetishism and suddenly seeing hundreds of strangers in the products that surround you. Once you learn how the land was destroyed for profit you'll never look at the miles of fields or the cracks in the concrete of buildings built on wetlands or the stench of now obsolete canals built solely for a once boat-dependent economy with no care for the environment the same.

mountain-spirits-deactivated202

There were many reasons why I stepped away from archaeology & academia just 16 months post-PhD but the one that still angers me most today has to be the ways in which the Institution™ categorizes folklore vs science when it comes to Indigenous people. Ancestral knowledge of the ‘Old World’ is seen as a form of early science—curiosity leading to rigorous study and eventual advancement—with their fairytales and folklore viewed as purposefully allegorical. The Indigenous people of Africa, Turtle Island, and the rest of the so-called Americas never got that same respect. Outside of a handful of tokenized and understudied societies, most Indigenous ancestral knowledge is viewed through the lens of folklore—and no grace is given to allegory or metaphor or philosophy, either. The assumption is that our people can only think in literal, concrete terms. And it’s fucking insulting. There’s this joke in academia that if archaeologists don’t know an artifact’s usage they’ll deem it as ‘ritualistic purposes’; and it’s funny or whatever but nine times out of ten those artifacts are from [insert literally any Turtle Island or Mesoamerican nation] and not from much-older Greek civilizations. But it’s not well-studied because we’re not well-respected, and therefore nobody bothered to ask our still-living people who are very much aware of what said artifact was meant for (spoiler alert: not ritualistic).

Early on in my first Master’s program I got into a huge fight with a white professor who wanted to use a widely misinterpreted SuPeRsTiTiOn from MY tribe as an example of a persistent folktale. The folktale being that: Chiricahua Apache women don’t take baths during pregnancy bc we think the water is evil. It is true that, after being moved onto the rez, birthing + postpartum women were becoming ill when they bathed. This isn’t some ancient happening stoked by mythology—this is 100 years ago to recent times; midwives saw it happening and acted by cautioning against bathing. My grandmother, an Indigenous midwife, saw it play out and is very hesitant to recommend bathing to pregnant women on the rez today. This isn’t because she or any other Chiricahua thinks water is evil; it’s because water quality has been so horrific that it quite literally was infecting the womb at its most vulnerable time. Had this been a European society, this knowledge would be considered evidence-based but since we’re Indigenous, they slap some contrived faux folkways mythos onto it and call it superstitious.

This is just one example of what happens on a constant basis when it comes to communities who are being oppressed by the same systems that set the standards for what science, history, and art are.

It’s maddening and sickening to me to this day.

(Tangentially, the next time I see a non-ndn upload or reblog our artifacts and crafts and tag it as “primitive art”, I’m going to scalp you. You’ve been duly warned)

mountain-spirits-deactivated202

Just figured I’d throw out a related book recommendation on the subject: Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith should be required reading in any research program, but especially in the realms of anthropology and history, and double especially when the cultures of study are Indigenous. It de-centers Western imperialism and gets to the root of how even just the word ‘research’ itself is a vector for continued European colonialism.

evelynstarshine

that book is slowly becoming required reading for research

mythawolf

And she wonders why people hate her?

villainessbian

sex criminal j k rowling bullies amnesty international into retracting unbiased report about genocidal risks, after paying for the manufacture of a scottish devolution crisis over the same issue

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