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#thunderbird
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1977 Ford Thunderbird
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reasonsforhope · 1 month
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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.
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[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.”
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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.
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[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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tvneon · 5 months
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nocternalrandomness · 6 months
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Elvira posing on her 1959 Ford T-Bird Macabre Mobile
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neon-wonderlands · 9 months
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Artist: andyokay
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coolthingsguyslike · 26 days
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vintagelasvegas · 2 months
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Las Vegas Blvd, October 1974. The photographer is in front of Circus Circus. Travelodge, Thunderbird, Algiers.
Slide scan by Vintage Roadside
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oldwindowsicons · 7 months
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Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0
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me when companies try to force you to use their proprietary software
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anyway
Layperson resources:
firefox is an open source browser by Mozilla that makes privacy and software independence much easier. it is very easy to transfer all your chrome data to Firefox
ublock origin is The highest quality adblock atm. it is a free browser extension, and though last i checked it is available on Chrome google is trying very hard to crack down on its use
Thunderbird mail is an open source email client also by mozilla and shares many of the same advantages as firefox (it has some other cool features as well)
libreOffice is an open source office suite similar to microsoft office or Google Suite, simple enough
Risky:
VPNs (virtual private networks) essentially do a number of things, but most commonly they are used to prevent people from tracking your IP address. i would suggest doing more research. i use proton vpn, as it has a decent free version, and the paid version is powerful
note: some applications, websites, and other entities do not tolerate the use of VPNs. you may not be able to access certain secure sites while using a VPN, and logging into your personal account with some services while using a vpn *may* get you PERMANENTLY BLACKLISTED from the service on that account, ymmv
IF YOU HAVE A DECENT VPN, ANTIVIRUS, AND ADBLOCK, you can start learning about piracy, though i will not be providing any resources, as Loose Lips Sink Ships. if you want to be very safe, start with streaming sites and never download any files, though you Can learn how to discern between safe, unsafe, and risky content.
note: DO NOT SHARE LINKS TO OR NAMES OF PIRACY SITES IN PUBLIC PLACES, ESPECIALLY SOCAL MEDIA
the only time you should share these things are either in person or in (preferably peer-to-peer encrypted) PRIVATE messages
when pirated media becomes well-known and circulated on the wider, public internet, it gets taken down, because it is illegal to distribute pirated media and software
if you need an antivirus i like bitdefender. it has a free version, and is very good, though if youre using windows, windows defender is also very good and it comes with the OS
Advanced:
linux is great if you REALLY know what you're doing. you have to know a decent amount of computer science and be comfortable using the Terminal/Command Prompt to get/use linux. "Linux" refers to a large array of related open source Operating Systems. do research and pick one that suits your needs. im still experimenting with various dispos, but im leaning towards either Ubuntu Cinnamon or Debian.
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pinkiemachine · 3 months
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What up, Hogwarts?! Say hello to your new AMERICAN EXCHANGE STUDENTS!!! Don’t you ever come at me, OR my cranky Hufflepuff sister! Wizard Thug Life, fr fr.
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Alternatively, while at home in the good old U.S. of A: Don’t you mess with me and my Thunderbird homies, or my sis and her Pukwudgie squad! Ilvermorny, represent!
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Have y’all seen the new Thunderbird logo?
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Shit’s sexy as hell.
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thestonecuttersguild · 2 months
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Jimmy Stewart's Thunderbird. Oshkosh 2023
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1956 Ford Thunderbird
1956 Ford Thunderbird 2 door convertible
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darksilvania · 1 year
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STORMUR (Flying/Electric) the tiny bird pokemon
A solitary STORMUR is barely able to produce enough electricity to create sparks and crackling sounds, but when a large flock comes together, their energy combined is able to create giant thunderstorms wherever they go
STORMUR (Storm/Murmur) is similar to WISHIWASHI, a single small pokemon that merges with others to form a larger one, but insted of having the ability "Schooling" its ability is called "Murmuration"
It is of course based on a murmuration of birds, a large group of birds flying as a single mass, usually composed of Starlings, but other birds like robins and blackbirds can form murmurations
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The solo form is based on the Yellowheaded Blackbird, one of the species known to form murmurations
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Its murmuration form however is based on the Thunderbird from native american folklore. As its name suggest, the thunderbird is known for creating thunderstorms wherever it goes, with its wing producing the sound of thunder when they flap. Altough its name is "Thunderbird" many accounts of supposed sightings describe the creature looking very similar to prehistoric pterosaurs, with even some alleged photos of supposedly captured thunderbirds showing them like one, and that is why the murmuration form looks like a mix of bird and pterosaur.
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Its shiny colors are based on Northwest Pacific art, in which Thunderbirds are a very recurring theme
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rollerman1 · 1 year
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coolthingsguyslike · 2 months
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