Roman Chacon

34yo queer chicano, historian, folklorist, teacher, musician based in New York.

[iphigeniacomplex]

this meeting could have been a beloved folktale passed down orally thru generations

[llucerophotography]

Gullah demonstration & storytime

Middleton Place. Charleston, SC. September 2013. Photo by L.M. Lucero.

[somecunttookmyurl]

i can tell i’m sleep deprived bc i just made myself cry about tutankhamun and i have, like, negative interest in the kid

[somecunttookmyurl]

have now made the rest of the discord cry about this little boy who had multi-coloured ducks sewn onto a tunic that he loved so much he wore it to a Very Important Event because he was EIGHT and have you SEEN my DUCKS

[somecunttookmyurl]

sorry no i’m not done i’m gonna make you all cry some more i’m bringing you down with me

there was once a little boy.

he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he can’t walk properly the way the other children do. he doesn’t understand why. he’s a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.

somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.

the little boy is eight years old, and he’s going to be king now. there’s a big ceremony about it. he doesn’t really fully understand what’s going on, because he’s eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! aren’t they great?

he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.

as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. he’s not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.

he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.

and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.

there was once a little boy.

[somecunttookmyurl]

yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesn’t really click. it doesn’t seem real

but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didn’t develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.

tutankhamun was a child and he didn’t make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child

his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.

but he had brightly coloured little ducks on his favourite shirt, and he kept it.

[somecunttookmyurl]

and he did not just keep the duckie shirt either

tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chest… was carved with ducks.

and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.

but he was a little boy who thought ducks were just the best

[somecunttookmyurl]

WITH PLEASURE

(greyscale makes it hard but the duck head is on the right above the toe strap. always takes me a while to find it too)

[beggars-opera]

[libriamore]

Ok but this is how to teach history. This is how you get people to pay attention, to care. Find something small and make it personal, then zoom out to the wider context. History is best taught as a story, with people who lived their lives in ways that came together to create something remarkable that we still talk about today, but who were still just human at the end of the day. They kissed, argued, cried, and dreamed just like we do. And sometimes they really liked ducks.

[vintageeveryday]

Goodbye to Nedra Talley-Ross (1946–2026), the last surviving member of the iconic 1960s girl group The Ronettes.

[folkfashion]

Zapotec dancer's dress, Mexico, by Thomas Aleto

[phyllisdietrichsonswig]

Happy Appomattox Day ❤️

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[akm87]

[wolfythewitch]

Group projects are a humiliation ritual invented by Big Academia to suck you of your soul and fill you with the deepest forms of rage

[monkeyislandtwo]

i think "[sic]" is one of the funniest things of literature. like yeah this guy really wrote it out like that

[legendaryvermin]

For the uninitiated, you write [sic]—literally "this" or "so" in latin—to indicate that you haven't altered the wording or spelling. While it can be used to preserve a joke misspelling (aminals) or indicate that you know it looks weird (the Toronto Maple Leafs), it is also the most biting three letters that you can throw at a motherfucker who should know better.

[marlynnofmany]

Somebody made an error here and it sure wasn't me (derogatory)

[blackfolksintime]

25-year-old Cab Calloway photographed by Carl Van Vechten on January 12, 1933.

[professorerudite]

[folkfashion]

Venezuelan Diablos Danzante de Corpus Christi dance group, Venezuela, by Fundación Centro de la Diversidad Cultural

[tamamita]

I think people are kinda skimming over the fact that Greenland is colonized by the Danish, because many people seem to think that colonization can only happen when the Yanks do it.

[isuggestlandback]

Greenland Kalaallit Nunaat is Inuit land!!!

[iamheavymeta-lll]

Mardi Gra Indian Portrait

Eric Waters.

[thechanelmuse]

Remnants of the British Black Panther’s Lost Legacy

[clatterbane]

Britain’s black power movement is at risk of being forgotten, say historians

The Cambridge academic Robin Bunce said: “There is a fundamental danger of erasing the very notion of a struggle at all. I’ve been researching this for four and a half years and there have been so many occasions when people have said to me: ‘There was no black struggle in Britain. You’re thinking of South Africa or America.’“

The narrative that feeds it is the one that Britain is the utopia of fair play. We have such a commitment to individual rights, we have such a commitment to common sense and decency that there is no systematic racism in Britain.”…

Bunce said it was not just politicians, but wider British society that would rather not dwell on the less palatable.

[max1461]

I'm gonna reblog with some videos of people speaking various American Indian/indigenous American languages, because I think most people don't even know what they sound like. Not to be judgement of that—just, you know, I think people who want to be informed should know what they sound like!

[max1461]

Former president of the Navajo Nation, Joe Shirley, giving an address in Navajo.

[max1461]

Nora Marks Dauenhauer telling a story, "Raven and Deer", in Tlingit.

[max1461]

Albert White Hat, a well known Lakota teacher, translator, and activist, speaking Lakota.

[max1461]

This YouTube user, Grahm Wiley-Camacho, has uploaded a bunch of videos in Colville Okanagan Salish, but I'm not sure who all the speakers are.

[max1461]

Multiple people speaking Cherokee and talking about revitalization of the language.

[max1461]

This guy speaking Yucatec Maya (guest starring: adorable small child).

[max1461]

There's a ton of material in Greenlandic on YouTube, but it's hard for me to find, because the titles and other metadata are also in Greenlandic! Of course, this represents a huge win for the language, since this is a biproduct of being in vibrant use by a community of speakers. Greenlandic has been an official language of the territory of Greenland since 1979, and the sole official language since 2009.

Here are some proceedings of the Greenlandic parliament, the Inatsisartut, which are conducted in Greenlandic.

Here is a radio show in Greenlandic, from Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa.

And here is a video of Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam, Greenlandic MP in the Danish parliament (Folketing), causing some upset by speaking in Greenlandic instead of Danish.

[max1461]

Conversation between Loran Thompson and Francis Boots in Mohawk.

[max1461]

Interview with Yup'ik elder Raphael Jimmy about qaneryaraq "words of wisdom/right living".

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[insteading]

Vincent Medina, Muwekma Ohlone, telling a story in Chochenyo, and talking about the reasons to relearn a language: