[ariaqueiroz]

Hi, I have a problem. Please help me.

[solarpunkwitchcraft]

'Historic First': Nebraska Farmers Return Land to Ponca Tribe in Effort to Block Keystone XL

"We want to protect this land," said the tribe's state chairman. "We don't want to see a pipeline go through."

The transfer was celebrated by members of the Ponca Tribe as well as environmental advocates who oppose the construction of the pipeline and continue to demand a total transition to renewable energy.

“We want to protect this land,” Larry Wright Jr., the chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, told the World-Herald. “We don’t want to see a pipeline go through.”

“While TransCanada is trampling on Indigenous rights to fatten their bottom line, Native leaders are resisting by building renewable energy solutions like solar panels in the path of the pipeline,” said 350.org executive director May Boeve.

“Repatriating this land to the Ponca Tribe raises new challenges for the Keystone XL pipeline and respects the leadership of Native nations in the fight against the fossil fuel industry,” she added. “Tribal sovereignty is central to the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground and build a more just society for all.”

a good start to what should be a much larger movement of returning Indigenous lands

[fatfemmalewife]

reports of police launching a tear gas at protesters at the unceded Lakota territory known as mount rushmore. protesters had completely blocked the road, but anyone blocking it were threatened with arrest – several of which were made.

[the above image is a screen capture of tweets from @JoshuaPotash, which read,

“Protesters will reportedly be forced out in 10 minutes if they don’t clear out voluntarily. And many have expressed that they won’t leave.

(Also I’ve only seen one link to a bail fund so far and it hasn’t worked. Please send me info on a verified bail fund if you see anything)

All protesters blocking the road to unceded Lakota territory known as Mount Rushmore are now being arrested.” end of transcription]

[fatfemmalewife]

unicorn riot has done some live and ongoing coverage on their site and on twitter

[a screen capture of a tweet from Unicorn Riot @UR_Ninja, reading

20+ people total have been arrested (~30 minutes ago, as well as a few hours earlier). We just took the stream down.

As police were withdrawing, they took with them a riot shield that had been redecorated by a demonstrator to read “Land Back”. end transcription. the tweet includes an image of an officer carrying the aforementioned shield, spray painted with the words]

[fatfemmalewife]

Black Hills Bail and Legal Defense Fund

[ravingrayven]

Man yall really had to be dickheads and go fucking harass the OP of the W*ndigo post I linked, huh?

Another native who has nothing to do with RWBY and yall go misgender them in addition to harassment

Yall really lose it at being told that other cultures, sacred beliefs, and experiences aren't your playground, huh?

The fuck is wrong with you guys, leave them the fuck alone.

[fangirlinginleatherboots]

when canon gives you an underdeveloped character and you just have to make do:

[ousgoui]

[birdofprey1234]

Me with google

[coyotesmokebreak]

HOLY SHIT THIS KID IS SO TALENTED

[oopsprompts]

“Everyone’s a little in love with their best friend. Everyone wants to touch their hair and rub their neck and kiss them and wake up next to them and … I’m in deep, aren’t I?”

[6c617a]

[la-laborista-republiko]

[cryptiboy]

what if public libraries were open late every night so that:

- children and teens who cant get home until a later time have a safe, warm, well lit, populated area to socialize, charge devices, rest, etc

- children and teens have a safe place to go to stay away from danger

- people who have jobs that take up most of the day would still have time ANY DAY OF THE WEEK to go use the libraries facilities (printing, computers, etc)

[raptorkin]

This is exactly what public libraries are trying to achieve - public libraries as a third place is a whole thing - it’s just that the funding isn’t there (yet).

[captaindibbzy]

Libraries need and deserve so much funding

[entamewitchlulu]

I’m going to apologize if this post comes off as sounding very aggressive, but having just been through one of the most stressful experiences of my entire career in libraries: 

if you want this, you need to be at your local community government meetings. you need to be talking to your representatives.  you need to be out there Lobbying.

Just a few weeks ago, my library, me, my coworkers, we had to write letters, send emails, make phone calls, speak at council meetings, just to beg our aldermen to give us our usual funding. Which they didn’t even give to us last year.  Losing last year’s funding forced us to cut staff, hours, and all of our databases.  If we’d lost this year’s funding? two positions would have been gone and we would have likely had to close on Saturdays.  On Saturdays.  The day of the week most of y’all working M-F jobs actually have time to go to the fucking library.

And do you want to know how much money we were asking? We were asking for an increase of approximately 13 cents a person.

13.

Fucking.

Cents.

ACROSS AN ENTIRE YEAR.

No one seems to understand how libraries are funded.  It’s not just Free Stuff.  It’s your tax dollars being paid back into your community.  It’s crowdfunding.  The highest cost anyone in my community pays for the library a year is approximately $250.  Divide that up.  That’s just $4 a week.  That’s less than a coffee.  It’s the equivalent of purchasing about 10 hardcover books a year.  For that price, you could have access to every book that has ever been written, a place to go that’s not a bar, programs for kids, teens, and adults, educated staff that can help you find the answers to your questions, and so much more.

You want these late-night libraries?  You want all this stuff?  Start fighting for it.  Start showing up.  Start making phone calls.  It’s not going to come out of thin air.  Start fighting to erase the idea that taxes = evil.  Start fighting to spread the understanding that taxes are what help us build a better society.

Make sure the people who represent you know that you want this.  That this is where you want your tax dollars to go.  That this is what you want them to support.  That you are willing to see your tax bill go up a few more dollars for this.

Because otherwise?  None of this is going to happen.  Libraries are going to keep cutting their opening hours.  Keep cutting staff.  Keep cutting programs and databases and collections.

We NEED your support, and we need more than just a post on Tumblr.  We need to see people show up and speak out. 

[cat-memes-only]

[defsbeom]

x

[ravingrayven]

source

[sirenofcolor123123]

This morning, the Supreme Court has decided that Eastern Oklahoma is still Native land

“On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever. … Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word,” Gorsuch wrote in a decision joined by the court’s liberal members.“

[ravingrayven]

Hey yall

So regarding The rwby grimm contest and the use of W*ndigo.

The artist (mayukitty) of the w*ndigo design and I talked.

They have apologized and willing to change the name to something else.

I'm not saying go vote for the design now. Do what you will with this new information. Vote for it or not.

[cyndigenous-deactivated20210204]

Reblog with the most infuriating cultural appropriation defences you’ve heard

-“we’re all one race…the human race”

-“culture is made up and everyone can do anything they want”

-“I was Native in a past life”

-“if I feel called to it, I can do it”

-“I’m appreciating, not appropriating”

[reclaimthebindi]

““Using someone else’s cultural symbols to satisfy a personal need for self-expression is an exercise in privilege.””

— a.k.a why cultural appropriation is a form of oppression, (Jarune Uwujaren)

[writingwithcolor]

Seeing as you already received an ask about Until Dawn, I wanted to ask you what your general opinion about the game and its use of the Wendigo is? I understand if the question has little to do with writing but I'd like your opinion before buying it in case it is offensive.

Until Dawn Game and Use of the Wendigo

From what I’ve gathered about the game, they didn’t have Algonquian people giving input to the story. While Wendigo legends have spread much farther West in modern times because of how much ecological destruction is happening, it’s spreading amongst Natives and is still staying mostly within Algonquin territory (the Cree are an Algonquin speaking people, and their nation is absolutely gigantic). 

While the game pays lip service to the original locations of the Cree, and it is remotely possible the Cree owned mountains, the thing about the bordering Cree nation is they are called Plains Cree for a reason. If you look at a map highlighting the Rockies, and you look at a map highlighting the territory of the Cree, the two barely overlap if they overlap at all.

Disclaimer: I am not Plains Cree— I am Mohawk, Mi'kmaq, and Wyandot— so I could be wrong. Plains Cree are more than welcome to correct me about ancestral lands.

However, the concepts taken from the game make me uneasy.

The Wendigo is not a random horror creature, as I have said before. It has been stolen and repurposed (before anyone comes at me saying that it’s part of their local mythology so it’s free for white people to use, allow me to explain that Native people were not free to practice their religions in Canada from 1884 and the ban lasted about a century; there was no room for there to be equal sharing of religions, because Natives had no ownership over their own). As soon as I see any Native ‘scary creature’ used, I am extremely wary. It is possible to use them respectfully, but more often than not, it’s just appropriation.

Even though the game pays lip service to keeping the Wendigo within the Cree, I cannot find a single piece of information that says the Cree were actually consulted for the game. And that’s a huge problem. The thing about the proper use of Native American mythology is it stays within our control, like the aforementioned Skinwalkers usage. It seems to me that they simply used the Wendigo for the old school horror tropes, which are inherently racist.I can’t seem to find any Native-written pieces about the game, either, which I would love to link to (followers, if you provide opinions, make sure they are either linking to Native-written works or you yourself are Native). 

But from my own glance at it, I don’t like their use of the Wendigo and I don’t like how I can’t seem to find any Native voices anywhere around the project.

~Mod Lesya 

[neechees]

Can I just say (as a plains Cree person) that Until Dawn is weird in how it portrays the native culture in this game? The creators have said that the game is set in southern Alberta, & that the Natives there are supposed to be Cree. But this is weird because Crees in Alberta could hardly get NEAR the mountain areas without some form of conflict because it was in Blackfoot territory, & they were our enemies for a long time. The plains Cree were nomadic anyway, & the only reason we might’ve even tried to go to the mountains was to follow the buffalo.

On the topic of the w*d!go, that representation of it is also strange. I’ve never played the game “until dawn”, but from watching gameplays of it, it seems that the monster only kills the characters for sport instead of eating them. The whole reason Crees feared the w*nd!go is because it ATE people; it was a person who turned into an evil spirit for practising cannibalism, & it never grows full. We’re not even supposed to say its name for fear of calling it forth (And so I have blocked the word thusly). So it kind of takes away from the whole cannibal part in ties with the spiritual part.

Aside from just that, they sort of went for a pan-indianism type of thing because there’s collectable “totems” and butterflies with different symbolic meanings based by color, but none of that is Cree from what I know. The totems are more reminiscent of western coast totems, which Crees didn’t have.

Mind you though, beliefs on this monster & the word itself might vary from band to band, but my information is based on what I know from being taught in mine.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

“Cultural appropriation is not simply the act of taking something away from a people, it is also using something in a way that is inappropriate, disrespectful, or distorted. How easy it is for a well-meaning outsider to interpret what he has seen and experienced, and in the process, misrepresent the knowledge and worldview of Indigenous people. How easy it is to study a ceremony, story, or area of knowledge out of its context, employing Western critical paradigms and values. In doing so one creates a profound distortion of its original meaning. In this way, after five hundred years of misunderstanding, the First People continue to suffer the denigration of their most sacred practices and the disruption of their ways of life.”

Blackfoot Physics, by F. David Peat.

[bihetndn]

stop telling natives that we should be happy with cultural appropriation because it “spreads our culture and keeps it alive”

appropriation will never benefit natives. stop pretending that it will

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Settlers destroyed our cultures, cherry picked what they wanted from the scraps, bastardized the things they took to suit their needs, then told us to be grateful because they’re “keeping our cultures alive”.

It’s evil. There is literally no other way to describe it.