welcome to my blog, here I'm gonna blog about dark academia stuff but with a Native American twist. Stuff that may or may not include:
book/movie/show recommendations revolving around NDN actors/stories/issues
reblogging posts about NDN issues and activism, big and small (feel free to send mutual aid posts, always happy to spread awareness even if it's just one NDN person who needs some help with funds)
posts about academic/historical/anthropological topics revolving around NDN culture
general dark academia stuff
honestly just anything that involves dark academia and/or NDN stuff, it's my blog I make the rules
also will include occult/witchcraft/pagan stuff (from both Native and non-Native traditions)
feel free to suggest/tag me in stuff, trying to start an NDN academia movement
*NDN (not dead Native) = the original peoples of North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean
more about me and some boundaries under the cut if you wanna read that
About LUBU SUNQUYUQ:
24 y/o
he/she
mixed Quechua/Jamaican and 2spirit (qhariwarmi)
aspiring Grass and Jingle Dress dancer
BA in History
currently pursuing an MA in History and MS in Library Science
artist (digital, traditional, beadworker)
other interests include occultism, zoology (especially bugs and mammals), art and animation, horror, and certain fandoms/media
currently residing on Lenape land
speaker of English (fluent), Quechua (conversational), Jamaican Patios (conversational), and learning Spanish
interested in all things NDN, but especially NDN (and even more specifically Andean) spirituality/religion
gonna try my best to balance this blog, my other blogs/socials, school, work, and a semi-active social life, with time for hobbies
BOUNDARIES:
you don't have to be Native to follow/interact, just don't speak over NDN voices about our own issues
any age can follow/interact, I just would rather minors not DM me
speaking of DMs, I'm open to them, I'm always down to talk to people about whatever
no real specific DNI, just don't be gross/rude (some people are an automatic block, i.e maps, terfs, any bigot honestly)
with all that said, you can follow if I don't like you, I can't control who interacts with me, but I do block liberally
this is a safe place for the 2SLGBTQ+ community, racial/religious minorities, immigrants, disabled people, etc.
CURRENTLY READING:
Of Blood and Bone: Working with Shadow Magic of the Dark Moon by Kate Freuler
It is not nearly common enough knowledge that most Native tribes in the U.S. don't actually own all of the land within their reservation. There are millions of acres of reservation land that tribes don't legally own and they have no control over how that land is used. Like, there are a lot of different concepts tied in with the land back movement, but a major one is literally just getting reservation land back into tribal ownership.
Controversial opinion maybe but you don't actually have to come out to anyone if you don't want to. No one is entitled to that information. If you want to keep your identity to yourself, whether that's for comfort or safety or just because you feel like it, then that's your decision and your decision alone.
And if this doesn't apply to you, then you can reblog without commentary or scroll on. You don't need to add a "well actually—" or an "except for—" or whatever. You do not need to tell people their feelings or try to diagnose strangers. Just move on 🤷
Are you two-spirit? Or queer and indigenous? And 18+? We have the discord server for you! Celebrate and share our native cultures and history. This is also a space for people trying to reconnect (respectfully). We're also compiling resources for language learning and cultural research.
Check out the Circle of Genders community on Discord – hang out with 3 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
It feels like a convoluted form of infantilization of disabled people. Oh, I can watch a horror movie but can't read the word fuck? I can watch R-rated films, but I can't read the word shit?
It's one of two things:
1. It's deliberate infantilization of disabled people.
or 2. The puritanical impulses of American society are SO Fucking Off the Goddamn Walls at this point that most able bodied people can't recognize the cognitive dissonance of a film saying fuck but not letting the same exact adult audience read the word fuck.
i do actually get tired sometimes of having the same basic decency discussions around native culture. stop using the term spirit animal. don't use the skin word for shapeshifters. i saw a plushie kickstarter with the W word for a small skull deer plushie and it had already met it's goal. people just blithely repeating terms with no connection to their culture. actively profiting off of it.
yes! though "offensive" is a bit reductive; it's not a swear or a slur, it's just a concept that the navajo would prefer non-navajo not to talk about, both because of their belief about how using it's name invokes/summons the being in some way and because of the ongoing appropriation and erasure of native culture.
i came across a dog insta account w the description "is it a dog? is it a [redacted]?". finger on the block button i see the account is new and small and decided to reach out to the owner about language use. i sent a message in my friendliest tone informing them of the word's taboo and expecting to get blocked in return.
friends. they messaged back a thank you and they changed the word to "cryptid". instant follow.
so shoutout to this dog and their humans.
finally: some commenters have been pointing out that this reaction might be interpreted as mysticizing indigenous beliefs. "dont say the wrong word or the spirit will Get You" is the plot of many D horror movies. my intended sentiment is this: whether or not you think these beings exist, using that language as a non-native is disrespectful and appropriative and should not be done.
The idea that non-police lynchings ever stopped in the US instead of whites just becoming craftier (evil) about it is so weird to me like
Sure they ain’t picnicking at a public hanging anymore but you seen how many more missing posters there’s been the past few years in particular right? How so many Black and Brown children are just fuckin disappearing too and never making anything more than a Facebook missing post?
We just only hear about them when someone cares about them enough to set fire to everything until it gets noticed.
Yes. Mainly by law enforcement or people working with them. We watch us disappear into human trafficking and mass graves and we can do literally nothing about it besides hope one of our loved ones wasnt one of them when we get news they’ve disappeared.
The law doesn’t exist to protect Black people, it exists to kill us.
The issue became national news when families said they waited months for word about missing loved ones — only to learn their relative had be
on the top of neolithic queerness; something interesting that has happened with Çatalhöyük is the evolution in our understanding from "omg stone age Fertility Goddess Birth Cult!!" to "actually a lot of the figurines aren't of humans, many of the ones that are anthropomorphic can't be gendered, and many of the "fertility goddesses" are likely more tied to the fatness associated with age rather than with pregnancy necessarily, which may have been seen as more of a liminal space between life and death than a purely life-giving act, and also these people actually seemed VERY into penises as a spiritual symbol, far moreso than the vagina"
& specifically i find it very interesting that realizing that penises were likely spiritually important did not automatically translate to gender inequality. like the assumption we tend to make is that Good Feminist Spirituality (tm) in a society where women are empowered will feature a lot of vulvas and menstruation and birth in the spirituality, whereas Bad Patriarchal Spirituality (tm) is very into the penis as a symbol of dominating conquering power and women can't access it.
but there's actually evidence that the people of Çatalhöyük viewed the penis as spiritually potent, while also not seeing that potency as exclusive to those born with penises:
On the basis of research in twentieth-century Papua New Guinea, Strathern proposes a non-Western concept of the person as “dividual” rather than individual: an entity at once more partial and more expansive than the modernist monad, and constituted through multiple heterogeneous incorporations rather than existing as a unitary essence. This notion can help us make sense of the sex of the Çatalhöyük body, especially if we concentrate on its parts.
Consider the penis. Meskell identified a number of the ceramic and stone figurines at Çatalhöyük as “phallic” – but she notes that these small objects are surprisingly ambiguous. Some are simultaneously male and female: when rotated, a penis and testicles become breasts or buttocks. This visual punning suggests an attitude that emphasizes the mutability, not the fixity, of bodily sex.
The little penises are usually pierced for wearing; they are detached body parts that can be attached to any kind of body, male or female, adult or child. Detachability of body parts and substances is key to Strathern’s theory, since it indicates a body that is partible rather than unitary. The detachable penis, like the bucrania [bovine skulls], does not inevitably serve as a metonym for a whole gendered person, for masculinity as an abstraction, or for “phallic” power. Instead, elements of maleness and femaleness may be intrinsically partible, inhering in the products of men’s and women’s labor, as well as in manufactured body parts. These detachable gendered objects and substances can be exchanged, ingested, incorporated, expelled, discarded, or temporarily held by “dividual” persons.
The idea of the body as partible is immensely helpful in understanding Çatalhöyük attitudes toward skeletons. Just as a female child might make and wear a clay penis, so too living persons at Çatalhöyük handled the bones of the dead.
(from "The Hau of the House" by Mary J. Weismantel in Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society edited by Ian Hodder)
remember gang, when people make extremely generalized statements about how "Our Ancestors" lived "back in Caveman Times" to explain modern Western gender roles through the lens of evolution, it is complete bullshit. and prehistoric & stone age humans deserve FAR more respect for their cultures and civilizations than they get.
