As if.

Superficial Space Cadet | Indigenous & Ambitious | NavaJew

[babeimgonnaleaveu]

James Baldwin photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1955.

[shmisks]

fun fact: i live on occupied narragansett & wampanoag land. do you know whose land you live on?? | #pvd #nativeamericanheritagemonth (at Providence, Rhode Island)

[shmisks]

west coast best coast. | 🌊 | #hella (at Ocean Beach)

[shmisks]

perfect places. | #dinétah (at Cameron, Arizona)

[shmisks]

"will the U.S. government recognize that the founding fathers (you know george washington & all those guys) are this country's first illegal aliens." | #mercilessindiansavages (at The White House)

[shmisks]

wtf r perfect places anyway!? | #azlovin (at Lee's Ferry)

[shmisks]

fun fact: my grandpa wasn't born in a hospital, doesn't even speak english & never went to school cause coyotes crossed his path on his way over, so they turned around & didn't go. tbh tho, he still probably has 90147491x more knowledge than me/anyone i graduated with. | 🤷🏽‍♀️ | feeling super grateful/love for all my family/home tonight. thank you for all your words & support since day one. blessed that my roots were planted in dinétah & all i could ask is to make ya proud. | ❤️❤️❤️ | #home #indigenousrising #diné (at Cameron, Arizona)

[shmisks]

today at baccalaureate, dean jane shaw acknowledged the muwkema ohlone, their elders past & present, & all native students. to quote @tbilley10, we're paving the way for our nieces. | 💖 | #strongresilientindigenous #rockyourmocs (at The Quad)

[goparks]

“I feel strongly about the fact that it takes a certain amount of privilege for many of us to put life on hold and get outdoors, so I also share photos of my experiences in the outdoors to include those who couldn’t come along.” 

We want everyone to have the opportunity to explore the national parks. In the meantime, Ambreen Tariq of @BrownPeopleCamping gives us a little glimpse of her adventures.

[jacquelinesfernandez-deactivate]

[ginkotree]

when you’re having a bad time but you’re trying to be positive about it

[dimir-charmer]

I’ve found it. The epitome of terrible ally culture. This is it. Jokes on them, they were using water cannons  to break up a pride parade but lol they made rainbows!! A victory for The Gays, what do you mean state-sanctioned violence and police brutality? It’s symbolic!

[pelicanhypeman]

White Women Drive Me Crazy

White women are so dangerous because they’re allowed to be so soft — innocent until proven innocent.

White women, do me a favor and read this.

This line, in particular, gutted me:

We eat eggs and I tell Y about how when I was 8 years old, I taught my white friend, B (actually called Becky), how to count to 10 in Urdu. How at school the next day she looked at her feet as she shuffled past me, and the white teacher pulled me aside and asked me why I was bullying Becky, because Becky’s mum said I was bullying Becky, and that maybe it would be best if I didn’t sit next to her anymore. She suggested this with the kind of half-arsed, sad-eyed, apologetic shrug that white women perform when it is less of a scene to administer psychological warfare against a brown child than it is to challenge your fellow white woman.

That was my entire childhood.

[amazinghowyoulove]

I remember well the acute shock and confusion of that day. I had been so damn sure Becky and I were having a good time. I felt so guilty, despite my mother’s insistence that Becky’s mother was a racist bitch and that I had done nothing wrong. I felt frightened of myself and my potential to hurt innocent white girls without even realizing it.

We are taught to walk home with our keys between our fingers for protection from men in the night, but no one tells us how to defend ourselves from the white women who will try to ravage us from the inside out, with a smile, a comment, a betrayal, a vital inaction, a look. How they will choose comfort over effort, how they will read this and think I am talking about someone else, another pardon.

[marcinthelotus]

K so I’m not done.

This is the year 2017 and I’m still having to yell about how ridiculous Maya extinction myths are and tell people we are ‘Maya’ not ‘Mayan’. I’m not saying shame shame if anyone reads this and didn’t know. I’m so angry concerning how slowly these issues are being picked up by educational institutions, at how often I have to bring these things up to higher education professors.

We are a massive massive group of peoples. One of the largest Indigenous groups in the Americas. Wikipedia cites 7 million or so of us total but honestly that’s way off because that’s about how many Maya folks there are in Guatemala alone.

We’re not dead. The Maya did not ‘mysteriously disappear’. We did not ‘fall’. We did not fade into obscurity. We’ve led revolts and rebellions against colonial powers for hundreds of years. We’ve had a big hand in shaping legislative definitions and protections for Indigenous Peoples in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

We haven’t lost our cultures. We’re constantly threatened and experience a lot of violence and have our resources stolen but we are still very much alive and our cultures have persisted.

And don’t even try me with the whole “Oh well we mean your CIVILIZATION disappeared, not you.” The structure of our societies and layout of our network changed and decentralized in many areas. That didn’t make us turn invisible. That didn’t make us not still be large in numbers with a relationship with our lands and lose influence in the areas we live. We still held power in large cities way after what people like to cite as “the fall of the Maya Civilization” (around 600-900 A.D. when we still had cities that we held power of until nearly 1700 when the last was “conquered” by Spain.)

Which brings me to the next issue. Being “conquered” or having a colonial government installed does not erase Indigenous societies or civilizations. That’s an extremely eurocentric way of thinking. We didn’t suddenly turn into Spaniards. We still had massive amounts of towns and villages with leaders. We still had our cultures, our trade, our networks, our influence, while Spain focused on putting up flags in our cities.

So yeah. All your history books have you all convinced that an extremely large group of people, with a greater population than more than half of the countries in Europe, all died out 1100 years ago.

Now try to imagine what kind of shit Indigenous Peoples with much less numbers and much lower access to resources go through.

[marcinthelotus]

This has gotten A LOT of attention so I figured I’d add a few links to some more recent Maya history:

Caste War of Yucatán

Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Maya Farmers & Beekeepers vs. Monsanto

Indigenous Textile Protection

[marcinthelotus]

TO HISTORY BUFFS/HISTORIANS/ANTHROPOLOGISTS, read this first before commenting or sending me asks.

You will be blocked if:

- You think it’s your place to educate me on my own people and culture.

- You infer in any way that I am not educated enough to criticize the way my people are framed and discussed in mainstream social studies or to criticize academia in general.

- You think you need to explain to me what civilizations or empires are or the popular social structure categories. If I didn’t know them I wouldn’t be criticizing their definitions/use/focus.

- You come at me with “not all history books”, “not all historians”, “not all professors” to dismiss my point about a broad institutionalized issue. If you can’t get past that someone saying “you all/y’all” doesn’t mean every single person everywhere then I don’t know how to help you.

- You compare us… to the Roman Empire or the British Empire to try to explain to me what a fall of a civilization/empire means. In fact with this one I require a 10 page paper explaining why you think we’re equatable including your evidence of a singular Maya Empire.

[marcinthelotus]

This gets mentioned/asked a lot so a quick factoid:

We are a group of Peoples. Plural. Maya Peoples/Pueblos. We have different names. I am Maya (Maaya, Yucatec). My great grandmother is K’iche’. I have Tzeltal cousins. I have Mopan, Tzotzil, and Mam friends. We’re all Maya.

I do suggest reading the links provided as they name some different Maya Peoples.

[lagonegirl]

#RichardCollins 

[lagonegirl]

👆🏾 THIS 👆🏾 

[itschinyere-deactivated20200201]

Racist white lady calls in and tells Native Hawaiian to stop blaming the white man for taking their land, especially since the Japanese are doing it too.

[theblacksophisticate]

This succinct READ though? COME THRU!!!

[heyisfur-at-gmail-dot-com-deact]

1) How did she do that? It was like magic… 2) I see so many videos like this from TV shows, and it makes me wonder why daytime television doesn’t have real and intelligent guests anymore… This is something we would NEVER find on TV in 2016.

[veryfemmeandantifascist]

can someone tell me who this is and where this video is from?

[swampthing]

her name is Haunani-Kay Trask! From what I know this was a segment from the TV Show “Island Issues”. She’s a Hawaiian activist as well as an academic professor and author.  She wrote the book From a Native Daughter.