#ndn things

[cupidsintern]

the ndn queer kid ‘keeping you hair long bc no one ever told you to cut it’ -> ‘keeping your hair long because your mom puts pressure on you to be feminine’ -> ‘cutting all your hair off in queer rebellion’ -> ‘repairing your relationship to gender in your decolonization journey’ -> ‘growing you hair out once again, but because you want to this time, and because you ancestor’s couldn’t’ pipeline :)

[skittlesfairy]

Sometimes i think about the photo my grandmother kept. It's a picture of one of her siblings, as a baby, maybe six months old, swaddled and placed with care. it's a death photo, and the baby had passed. but the picture, (from 1914) something very expensive, had the cardboard support cropped down into something small, around the picture.

Something that could fit into the palm of a hand, or be tucked into a bag or pocket so that the lost child would be kept close.

Sometimes I think about the things my ancestors have done and while it makes me sad, it also fills me with such awe, because yeah, child death was a much starker reality then, but each child was still cherished.

And then I think about how many kids were lost to the Residential schools and how many families didn't have that little piece to hold on to. And it makes me so much madder to hear about people talking about 'Death was common then so all those dead native kids didn't matter'.

Every child mattered.

Every. Child.

[fitzjerold]

I am one more white person saying “spirit animal”, making a ‘dreamcatcher’, or saying they're 1/320th Native away from my villain origin story.

[honeydipped-crystaltipped]

lol it’s weird/funny how this person whose book I had to read in school now follows me on instagram, and looks at my stories..like, they dont even know how much their book inspired me at the time, and now it’s like they know me as much as i know them. it’s still just a trip...but i guess i opened up that can of worms when I started following them first.