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indigenous-gender · 2 years

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btw this page is a safe space for Black and Brown people of all religions and belief systems and practices and cultures. my people have a syncretic religion our indigenous practices woven with Roman Catholicism due to colonization. my people are so brilliant and have kept alive our practices within Catholicism in order to survive. I love our people and I love our practices. I love our culture. I am proud our people have kept alive our practices despite facing oppression and surviving genocide. if you’re a Black or Brown person whose culture has something similar, or you are just Christian or Catholic, you are safe and welcome here.

#indigenous #native safe space #syncretic religion #native practices #native cultures #Guam #Guam native #CHamoru #Chamorro #Chamorrita #Roman Catholic Colonized

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ojibwa · 1 year

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Monsheeda (Dust Maker), and his wife Mehunga (Standing Buffalo), of the Indigenous Ponca tribe, posed together in their wedding photo, circa 1900

#native history #indigenous history #indigenous culture #ndn #i just love this pic sm im sorry i had to post it #mine

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reasonsforhope · 2 months

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"Minnetonka first started selling its “Thunderbird” moccasins in 1965. Now, for the first time, they’ve been redesigned by a Native American designer.

It’s one step in the company’s larger work to deal with its history of cultural appropriation. The Minneapolis-based company launched in the 1940s as a small business making souvenirs for roadside gift shops in the region—including Native American-inspired moccasins, though the business wasn’t started or run by Native Americans. The moccasins soon became its biggest seller.

[Photo: Minnetonka]

Adrienne Benjamin, an Anishanaabe artist and community activist who became the company’s “reconciliation advisor,” was initially reluctant when a tribal elder approached her about meeting with the company. Other activists had dismissed the idea that the company would do the work to truly transform. But Benjamin agreed to the meeting, and the conversation convinced her to move forward.

“I sensed a genuine commitment to positive change,” she says. “They had really done their homework as far as understanding and acknowledging the wrong and the appropriation. I think they knew for a long time that things needed to get better, and they just weren’t sure what a first step was.”

Pictured: Lucie Skjefte and son Animikii [Photo: Minnetonka]

In 2020, Minnetonka publicly apologized “for having benefited from selling Native-inspired designs without directly honoring Native culture or communities.” It also said that it was actively recruiting Native Americans to work at the company, reexamining its branding, looking for Native-owned businesses to partner with, continuing to support Native American nonprofits, and that it planned to collaborate with Native American artists and designers.

Benjamin partnered with the company on the first collaboration, a collection of hand-beaded hats, and then recruited the Minneapolis-based designer Lucie Skjefte, a citizen of the Red Lake Nation, who designed the beadwork for another moccasin style and a pair of slippers for the brand. Skjefte says that she felt comfortable working with the company knowing that it had already done work with Benjamin on reconciliation. And she wasn’t a stranger to the brand. “Our grandmothers and our mothers would always look for moccasins in a clutch kind of situation where they didn’t have a pair ready and available to make on their own—then they would buy Minnetonka mocs and walk into a traditional pow wow and wear them,” she says. Her mother, she says, who passed away in 2019, would have been “immensely proud” that Skjefte’s design work was part of the moccasins—and on the new version of the Thunderbird moccasin, one of the company’s top-selling styles.

[Photo: Minnetonka]

“I started thinking about all of those stories, and what resonated with me visually,” Skjefte says. The redesign, she says, is much more detailed and authentic than the previous version. “Through the redesign and beading process, we are actively reclaiming and reconnecting our Animikii or Thunderbird motif with its Indigenous roots,” she says. Skjefte will earn royalties for the design, and Minnetonka will also separately donate a portion of the sale of each shoe to Mni Sota Fund, a nonprofit that helps Native Americans in Minnesota get training and capital for home ownership and entrepreneurship.

Some companies go a step farther—Manitobah Mukluks, based in Canada, has an Indigenous founder and more than half Indigenous staff. (While Minnetonka is actively recruiting more Native American workers, the company says that employees self-report race and it can’t share any data about its current number of Indigenous employees.) Beyond its own line of products, Manitobah also has an online Indigenous Market that features artists who earn 100% of the profit for their work.

White Bear Moccasins, a Native-owned-and-made brand in Montana, makes moccasins from bison hide. Each custom pair can take six to eight hours to make; the shoes cost hundreds of dollars, though they can also be repaired and last as long as a lifetime, says owner Shauna White Bear. In interviews, White Bear has said that she wants “to take our craft back,” from companies like Minnetonka. But she also told Fast Company that she doesn’t think that Minnetonka, as a family-owned business, should have to lose its livelihood now and stop making moccasins.

The situation is arguably different for other fashion brands that might use a Native American symbol—or rip off a Native American design completely—on a single product that could easily be taken off the market. Benjamin says that she has also worked with other companies that have discontinued products.

She sees five steps in the process of reconciliation. First, the person or company who did wrong has to acknowledge the wrong. Then they need to publicly apologize, begin to change behavior, start to rebuild trust, and then, eventually, the wronged party might take the step of forgiveness. Right now, she says, Minnetonka is in the third phase of behavior change. The brand plans to continue to collaborate with Native American designers.

The company can be an example to others on how to listen and build true relationships, Benjamin says. “I think that’s the only way that these relationships are going to get any better—people have to sit down and talk about it,” she says. “People have to be real. People have to apologize. They have to want to reconcile with people.”

The leadership at Minnetonka can also be allies in pushing other companies to do better. “My voice is important at the table as an Indigenous woman,” Benjamin says. “Lucie’s voice is important. But at tables where there’s a majority of people that aren’t Indigenous, sometimes those allies’ voices are more powerful in those spaces, because that means that they’ve signed on to what we’re saying. The power has signed on to moving forward and we agree with ‘Yes, this was wrong.’ That’s the stuff that’s going to change [things] right there.”"

-via FastCompany, February 7, 2024

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fuck-spock · 2 years

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okay some of yall are just ignoring natives at this point where is the outcry??? how loud do we have to scream? how many of us have to go missing or be found dead before you start screaming with us?

please sign the petition to let us keep our children! and educate yourself on the true history of turtle island: hint, you gotta talk to real natives to get the true story. history is written by the victors.

#im sick and tired of having to be so loud just tk be ignored #my people are being attacked #our children are being taken #it is legal for us to be killed by whites off the rez. please will you fucjing help us already?#ndn #native #i was stolen from my culture and trust me it leaves such a vacancy in your soul #every day i wake up thinking about how we were nearly killed out #and how our home has been over run and poisoned with chemicals #im gonna smoke some weed and calm down now but just know i am always angry aboit yhis #ughhhhhhh i need some peace

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delilahmidnight · 6 months

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#tiktoks #solidarity #palestine #indigenous peoples #native Americans #cultural dance

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propalahramota · 3 months

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A good old russian tradition of erasing Gogol's Ukrainian identity

#I guess it's kinda funny upholding the genocidal idea that Ukrainian identity is some artificially created whim from the XXth century when #One of the authors you stole from us uses the world clearly and not only the word but extensively draws from Ukrainian folklore and his #Native culture for his early works

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idkthisismyusernameiguess · 10 months

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Could the Ace Attorney fandom stop pretending that Phoenix Wright or Miles Edgeworth or any of the main cast is white? Idgaf if the localized version is set in America. Asian Americans exist. You are consuming a piece of Asian-made media, not everything is about white people

#I need y’all to stop thinking of white people as the default setting #The amount of people in this fandom that whitewashes Edgeworth is insane #Surprise Asians can wear clothes outside our native cultures #Asian characters shouldn’t have to act explicitly or stereotypically Asian for you to acknowledge their heritage #This applies to other pieces of media too #Asian characters can exist in a modern setting they can exist in a Western setting #Please get rid of your orientalist lens because we are literally just people #Ace attorney #miles edgeworth #phoenix wright #literally so done with how this fandom of an Asian game treats Asians

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thenuclearmallard · 3 months

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Important read.

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writingwithcolor · 1 year

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Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning

Last year, I made a very quick, basic post about thanksgiving: Indigenous Day of Mourning aka Thanksgiving. if you want the sources for what I’m about to say, check there.

This post will be about why you cannot just go “fuck the pilgrims, we deserve a harvest festival no matter the origin” or anything else that tries to sanitize the holiday.

You Are Still On Stolen Land

As a result, you are still actively profiting off the genocide the pilgrims committed.

I don’t care how educated about racial issues you profess you are. I don’t care how you behave the other 364 days of the year. If you try to distance yourself from the origins of Thanksgiving simply because it makes you uncomfortable to see the blood under the tablecloth, you’re not practised in sitting with actually being anti-racist. You know what to say, but you don’t practice what you preach.

You Are Eating Our Food

Pumpkins/squash, beans, turkey, cranberries, potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, pecans, maple syrup?

Those are all Native American foods that we taught you how to grow and harvest.

You wouldn’t have any of your traditional Thanksgiving foods without us. The ideal meal of Thanksgiving is ripped right from Indigenous practices and cannot be separated from it.

The fact that these foods have been taken out of Indigenous hands and appropriated by colonizers as the bounties they somehow deserve for landing here is a tragedy, and people need to remember where their food comes from and who had been growing it for thousands of years.

You Had So Much Because Of Massacre

Thanksgiving became an annual tradition after 700 Pequot men, women, children, and elders were killed, freeing up acres of land that colonizers promptly took over. The sheer amount of extra acreage that colonizers had because of their genocide contributed to the excess of food experienced during Thanksgiving. That land had been structured to support more people originally.

Colonizers had never, ever, deserved that much food. They were taking more than they needed, not leaving much behind for the animals that depended on a balance to be held with humans. They took far more than was needed, throwing the balance off in nature.

Maybe I’m reaching. But I think that if you suddenly had 700 less people in the area, after all of the growing and planting for the total population had been done, you’d have excess food? Or even before the growing, you’d have land set up to support 700, that I’d assume you’d still use, when you were a much smaller population?

Sit With Your Own Grief

If this makes you feel bad and that you shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving? Sit with that.

I’m not telling you that you have to give up Thanksgiving traditions. I’m telling you that you cannot divorce them from Indigenous people.

You are giving thanks for our massacre. You are giving thanks for stealing so much from us that you had this excess.

Yes, you can need a break; yes, you can need time with family and friends. None of this is inherently bad.

It’s not even bad to eat local food from Turtle Island! Part of having a sustainable diet is eating locally, in time with the seasons.

But remember, it is Indigenous people who first gave this to you—and then you stole far more than you ever needed from us, killing us to get what you felt you deserved.

Do not divorce Thanksgiving from Indigenous people for your own comfort.

We are still here. We must live with the aftermath of colonizers stealing from us every single day.

If you feel this way hearing about our history, imagine what we feel like living it.

Donate to a local org/Indigenous person this Thanksgiving

I (again) don’t have the spoons to compile a list of vetted charities, but look for local tribe language revival programs, COVID relief funds, and activism around the Indian Child Welfare Act currently in front of the Supreme Court.

Pay reparations for what you have taken, and remember. It is also Indigenous Day of Mourning.

Indigenous people, drop your links below.

~Lesya

#thanksgiving #native american #Holidays #ally #Indigenous day of mourning #genocide #cultural appropriation

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tepehkwi · 2 years

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culturally-specific orientations and gender identities are real and they exist whether you want to validate them or not. terfs and truscum refuse to accept these facts because their ideologies can only be defended by racist and colonialist arguments, such as insisting that gender is biologically-dictated or that your gender is not real unless you experience gender dysphoria and pursue medical transition with hormones, surgeries, and legal document changes.

biological essentialism, cis-normativity, and the pathological idea of ‘transgenderism’ are racist, they’re concepts made up by colonizers that are violently enforced by christianity and white supremacy. when we say “gender is a social construct” we mean “the gender binary and the idea of transness, as it is defined by western standards, are ideas constructed by a white christian society.” i am ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ only because i am considered trans and queer by white christian standards. in my own culture, i would not have to ‘transition’ because my gender would simply be accepted.

colonizers force upon us their concepts of gender, biological sex, and sexuality while they continue to erase ours. you cannot separate the extermination of our culturally-specific sexual orientations or genders from the violent genocidal destruction of our cultures. the words that once existed for our concepts of gender and attraction were erased when our languages were banned and we were punished, beaten, and tortured for teaching them.

my own two-spirit identity can only be labeled using the language of my oppressors because the words for what i am are no longer spoken.

#xe speak #130k notes later i am deciding to remake the post in a more concise way #if you're not native i still encourage you to reblog this (without commentary!) (even in the tags!!)#my language here is vague because this applies to EVERY indigenous culture #not just first nations on turtle island!#ndn tag #indigenous #twospirit #two spirit #genocide mention

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alinahdee · 6 days

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