Came back to work from my lovely trip and on my first few days back I've had to deal with a regular who has begun spouting residential school denialism

there is a very specific inescapable grief that comes from being indigenous and hearing about yet another group of children's bodies being discovered under yet another church/residential school

May Sam is a respected Elder- she has been my teacher more than once. She is extremely giving and patient - even with oblivious White People like me.

this is a part of her story- it does NOT define her. But it was horrific

If you or your lovedones need support, please use these resources:

The Indian Residential School Survivor Society maintains a hotline for residential school survivors who are in crisis. The 24-hour a day crisis line can be reached at 1-800-721-0066.

Individuals impacted by the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls can contact the MMIWG Crisis Line toll-free at 1-844-413-6649.

First Nations, Inuit and Métis seeking immediate emotional support can contact the Hope for Wellness Help Line toll-free at 1-855-242-3310, or by online chat at hopeforwellness.ca.

Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada and that does not mean it's time for white people to sit back and do nothing but "reflect 🥺"

Yes, reflect, but reflect on how you can help indigenous people today. Every day.

Above I've pinned some resources other people have compiled. You can also:

-Support the land back movement.

-Research exactly who's land you're on. It's not enough to know that you're on Indigenous land, who's indigenous land are you on? I'm on mi'kmaq and wolastoqey land.

-Share any indigenous go-fund-me's and donation posts you see. Donate if you can but if even if you can't please reblog them. (Indigenous people, please feel free to add yours in the reblogs!)

-If your friends/family members say something racist, don't just sit there and let them! If you're in a position to do so, where it won't cause you danger, have those uncomfortable conversations.

Every child matters.

I know I don’t have a large following. I know this post will get lost in the sea of other posts. I know I don’t come on here often, and when I do I try to keep my page free from death and other serious topics. Yet, I think this is imperative to say, especially since I myself am of indigenous descent. I ask all of you to join me in solidarity.

Cole Brings Plenty, actor, model, and most importantly activist was found dead. He was assaulted in a club in Lawrence, Kansas. He was killed and his braids; a symbol of his heritage, of his Lakota decent, and a sacred symbol across many an indigenous nation, were forcibly cut.

I beg of thee and I plead with thee, spread the word. Do your part, however big or little, to bring light to this situation. Whether it be by reblogging this post or others alike, or by going out and making a stand. Do it.

Shed light on the situation. This goes beyond the death of one man. It is about the abuse and the destruction of natives and their communities. Of the killing of many an innocent soul. Of the brutalization of many First Nations.

We have seen time and time again, many indigenous people die by similar means. We need to bring light on the deaths of any and all indigenous individuals dead, missing or at risk. It is an epidemic, an assault, and a silent cleansing of many a nation.

Whether it be the estimated 6,000 dead at the hands of Canadian residential schools, the murdered and missing indigenous women and children, or the killing of an actor and activist, you cannot deny the sheer abhorrence of this problem. The problem of many Native American people dying, going missing and being abused, at an alarming rate. At a level unprecedented and unparalleled, at a level of which should not be kept silent.

Cole Brings Plenty, actor, model, activist.

Look at him and spread awareness for him and for many others befallen by the same fate.

Remember him. Remember all of the others. Let nobody else befall the same fate again.

He @staff why the fuck did I just see an ad for an honest to God active residential school??

I'm not expecting much at this point but fuck man

A high-profile Cree lawyer from Saskatchewan is calling for residential school denialism to be added to the Criminal Code alongside Holocaust denialism, in the wake of a recent interim report by Canada's special interlocutor on missing children and unmarked graves.

"It's the same," lawyer Eleanore Sunchild told CBC News.

"If you deny that that happened — if you deny the whole residential school system and its impact on Indigenous people and the trauma that was created from those schools and the deaths — then, of course, it should be seen as hate speech."

Under section 319 of the criminal code, the wilful promotion of hatred or antisemitism, unless in a private conversation, could lead to up to two years in prison. This includes "condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust."

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

and remember! Colonial boarding schools still exist today and nobody talks about them!

People who advocate that religion should be 18+ only and that it's "abuse" to raise children, especially children from marginalized and ethnoreligious groups, in their family's culture and traditions really need learn about Residential Schools and listen to the stories of survivors and their communities. And yes, there are still survivors, the last one closed in 1996. It hasn't even been 30 years.

You are repackaging and advocating the same system with the same logic and same end goals: eradication of diverse cultures and beliefs that you feel are inferior to your superior, Eurocentric, fundamentalist and absolutist way of thinking because you have the Truth™️ so the ends justify the means.

Genocide in all of its forms, including cultural, is never benevolent. If you think there is ever an instance where it is justifiable YOU are on the wrong side of history.

Alright, why wouldn't Hekarro wanna use Carja glyphs as the Tenakth writing system? The Phincian alphabet is the basis for most of the writing systems in Western Europe - if you got a writing system that works, why not adapt it?

I'M FINALLY ANSWERING THIS ASK TWO MONTHS LATER 😂

For anyone who's curious, the context for this was a post I made a while back in response to an ask regarding whether the Quen might be able to read Chinese, since the Focuses they would have found in the Great Delta would plausibly have been formatted in Chinese. In the tags on the post, I remarked that I had a rant about Hekarro wanting to borrow the Carja writing system. Everbright has asked me to elaborate, and now I'll finally be writing the essay that's been sitting at the back of my mind for like a year LOL.

My thesis here is as follows: it's not the idea of the Tenakth borrowing the Carja writing system that bothers me, necessarily. I take umbrage with the fact that Hekarro seems to think the Tenakth are inferior to the Carja because they aren't a literate society. 

This post is going to get long, so I will put the rest behind a cut to give anyone a break who wants to scroll on past LOL. Also, please note: trigger/content warning for mentions of residential schools in Canada.

First things first: I'm writing this as a non-indigenous Canadian, so I may be writing with biases of my own that I will apologize for in advance. If any members of the cultural groups I'm going to mention should read this and take issue with anything I've said, please do feel free to write me a message here on Tumblr!

Okay, let me set the context here. When Aloy first meets Hekarro, a piece of their conversation is as follows, with the transcript to follow:

Aloy: I’m sorry about Fashav. He seemed like a good man. Hekarro: More than a man. A bridge between Tenakth and Carja. No outlander ever earned our respect as he did. I had hoped he would be my voice in Meridian. That peace with the Carja might become something more. A: An alliance? H: An exchange. The Carja have much we lack. Our deeds are written in ink upon our bodies. Our memories die with our flesh. But the Carja never forget. Their deeds are written in book and scroll. A:  You wanted to learn from them? H: As I learned from Fashav. He will be missed.

This conversational exchange has always bothered me, because inherent in this exchange is the idea that Hekarro views the Tenakth as being lacking compared to the Carja -- that the Carja are superior to the Tenakth because of the fact that they're able to read and write, rather than tattooing their history on their skin. This statement reflects a bias that feels very 'colonizer' to me in an icky way. Being a literate society does not inherently make you superior to a society that doesn't use writing, but that exact idea has been used tons of times in history to argue that the indigenous cultures of a place are less advanced/less intelligent/less valuable than the people who are coming in and trying to force their ideals, including literacy, on the indigenous group(s). In the context of Canada, for instance, Kirmayer et al. (2009) wrote that "aboriginal peoples were viewed as incapable of understanding and participating in democratic government, thereby motivating efforts to 'civilize' and assimilate them into mainstream Canadian society," with that mainstreaming process including residential schools: institutions that took indigenous children from their families and communities and placed them into segregated spaces where they were forbidden from speaking their native languages, practicing their traditional customs, and from contacting their families at all.

This is especially irksome to me because the Tenakth tradition of tattooing (or "ink", as they call it in-game), is based on tattooing traditions IRL with an extremely rich historical and cultural background. The most obvious similarity is to Polynesian tattoo (or "tatau") practices, which I'll focus on here, but similar methods with equally rich histories exist in the Philippines and in Japan. 

One of the most striking things about Polynesian tatau practices is that it's not just the act of striking ink into the skin that matters; it's the meaning behind the act of getting a tattoo, and the embracing of community and identity inherent in the practice. As one Samoan tatau artist said, "it's important to know the meaning behind the symbols of our traditional tatau so you have a deeper understanding of the significance of what you're wearing. Each 'maman' or each pattern has its own meaning and story behind it." Polynesian artists also highlight the fact that these traditions are passed through the generations for thousands of years, and that those who wear tatau are "wearing the maps of our ancestors." As another artist said, Polynesian tatau is "a reconnection to all my ancestors and everybody behind me, because I'm not only speaking for me, but a whole generation of kids that are like me, that are getting Polynesian tattoos to reconnect." 

Tenakth tattoos, like Polynesian tattoos, are a way of recording history and lore -- not only one's own stories and victories, but those of the people that are important to a warrior, as evidenced by Kotallo stating that he plans to ink Varl's deeds on his own skin in tribute. I also personally think that it's culturally fitting for the Tenakth to record important history on their bodies, since the Tenakth place such emphasis on physical strength. It makes logical sense that they would record their proudest deeds on the thing that they view with such pride, i.e. their physical bodies. Hekarro's statement that the Tenakth are "lacking" because they don't record their history "in book and scroll" feels like a devaluation of the Tenakth's culturally-specific method of recording history, much in the way that colonizing societies have devalued the oral traditions of North American indigenous groups. Oral traditions are an extremely important aspect of many indigenous cultures; a group that provides indigenous culture training has stated that "certain stories are never written down, which preserves the tradition of sharing knowledge, culture, and history orally. These stories are the fabric of the community’s history, knowledge and culture, and some are thousands of years old. In some cultures, if a story is written down it is degraded." By ignoring this rich tradition and imposing written records of those stories, they would be degraded and rendered less than what they're meant to be.

Now, some of you might be asking whether it was an oversight/mistake on the part of the Guerrilla Game writers that Hekarro made this accidentally-denigrating comment toward his own tribe. Honestly, I do think it was an oversight, and one that I find disturbing, because it seems to stem from a blind spot that GG isn't aware of. This isn't the only time that content coming from the Horizon world seems to follow this 'colonizer'-like idea of certain societies being more advanced and superior to others. In the concept art book for Horizon Zero Dawn, for instance, there's a description of the Carja as follows (p. 47), transcript below:

 [Transcript: Among all the tribes of Horizon Zero Dawn, the Carja Sundom boasts the most advanced culture. Using the advantages of their geographical position, the Carja have developed agriculture and trade while other tribes still rely on hunting and gathering. The Carja's impregnable capital, Meridian, provides security for a civilized population. Artisans and traders flourish here, serving sophisticated, well-to-do citizens. Carja civilization towers over the other tribes, just as the Sun of their religion rises above the horizon of their mesa valley.]

Even worse, there’s this passage from p. 48, where the non-Carja tribes are called “primitive”.Transcript below:

[Transcript: Through ages of perfecting the techniques of machine plate-working, the Carja have developed the most sophisticated way: to apply the materials of mechanical fauna. While more primitive tribes would roughly affix more or less useful machine parts on their garments, Meridian artisans interweave fine fitted machine elements into comfortable and functional pieces.]

Quotes like this make me worry that there are people at GG who aren't recognizing their own bias inherent in the description of the Carja compared to other tribes. There seems to be a lack of awareness here about the dangerous underpinnings of seeing one culture as more "advanced" than another just because it is more dominant or mainstream. As Shaw (2001) states, "in not according recognition, let alone respect, to the distinctive linguistic and cultural identities that have shaped First Nations peoples, the majority culture continues to exert a significantly negative influence on identity, on self-esteem, on pride in one's cultural heritage, and on one's sense of self and of place in the broader society."

To summarize to some degree: I don't have a problem per se with the Tenakth borrowing the Carja writing system. My qualms come from the idea that the idea of the Carja being superior will come along with that borrowing, thereby devaluing the rich tradition of Tenakth tattoos. As Hale (1992) states, "while it is good and commendable to record and document fading traditions, and in some cases this is absolutely necessary to avert total loss of cultural wealth, the greater goal must be that of safeguarding diversity in the world of people. For that is the circumstance in which diverse and interesting intellectual traditions can grow."

TLDR: Tenakth tattoos are just as valid and important a method of recording lore and history as Carja writing, and the Tenakth are not inferior or primitive for not having a tradition of reading/writing. I think Hekarro's comment about the Tenakth being "lacking" is reflective of a blind spot at GG that I hope will be addressed in future games. 

If you came this far, THANK YOU FOR READING and accept this cookie as thanks for staying with me! 🍪😂 A friendly final note: do be warned that any replies or comments to the effect of "but literate societies ARE inherently better than illiterate ones" will be removed and the writers of such comments may be blocked, depending on their intentions as I read them. 🥰

-- love from your friendly neighbourhood Pika xoxo

“We were in the mountains and returned home at the end of summer, just before school started. My gram/tupa always had a coffee tray next to her rocking chair. It had her coffee, roll-your-own tobacco, and on the other side of her chair was her 30-30 rifle; her gun was always next to her.

They came again end of summer, and she said, “No you’re not taking them."

She took a stand, I’m sure, because of her own boarding school experience. People knew who the strong ones were, and they knew: Don’t even try to take her grandkids, you’re not gonna get past her.

My gram/tupa was my hero, I lived with her most of the time. She lived alone for about 35 years after her second husband died. She did her own hunting, and she said she was the first woman to get a cougar in our community.”

Found on Facebook (Moneyless Society)

Hi! I'm trying to branch out in my writing, and something that I'd like to try writing or at least explore with characters is generational trauma. How would you write such a topic and are there any resources to find more information on this?

Thank you.

Writing about Generational Trauma

Start by researching generational trauma in general to get a better understanding of what it is, how it works, why it happens, and how people can heal from it.

Next, think about the specific type of generational trauma you want to write about. Having done your research, you will know what these different types are. I would suggest choosing something that you can relate to in some way or that affects a group that you are a part of, and I would suggest avoiding writing about generational trauma that effects groups that you are not a part of. For example, if you are not Indigenous, it's not your place to tell the story of generational trauma due to colonialism and residential schools. Once you have chosen the type of generational trauma you want to write about, you can Google for specific resources and organizations dedicated to educating society about this type of generational trauma and providing support for those who experience it.

Ma’am, what is your full name? Patri... Patricia Little Bird. Little Bird. Hey, Mrs Little Bird, we’re child case workers with the child protective services in Saskatchewan, do you understand? We’re here to determine if you are a fit mother.

LITTLE BIRD  (2023) ｜ Episode One directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers

Residential school deniers tried to dig up suspected unmarked grave sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, not believing a May 2021 announcement from the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc that as many as 215 Indigenous children had been buried there, according to a new report. "Denialists entered the site without permission. Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to 'see for themselves' if children are buried there," said a Friday report from Kimberly Murray, the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian Residential Schools. She did not say who the denialists were or when they came to the site. But the unauthorized visits to the site are the work of a "core group" of Canadians who continue to deny, defend or minimize the physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse inflicted on Indigenous children in the Indian Residential School System "despite the indisputable evidence of survivors and their families," Murray said at a Friday news conference. [...]

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Tagging: @politicsofcanada