Cultural Appropriation Cracker.

thegoddamazon: so-treu: colormeradical: magnius159: Mayan...

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:55:14 -0500

so-treu:

colormeradical:

magnius159:

Mayan Priests denied access to Guatemala ceremonial sites

Guatemala, the heart of Mayan culture, has started their festivities for the 13 Baktun - the last cycle of the Mayan calendar, due to end on Friday, December 21, 2012. But sadly the celebrations were dominated by staged government shows which were neither led nor shared by indigenous communities or spiritual leaders.

On stage, non-indigenous peoples were wearing indigenous clothes in a folklore show while non-indigenous attendees from the Guatemalan elites were in the most important ceremonial Mayan center, Tikal, waiting for the new era to arrive. Indigenous peoples were left outside, were they were demonstrating, playing the traditional instrument marimba.

Are you FUCKING kidding me?

wow.

…I’m…I can’t even express how angry this makes me.

jalwhite: obenibo: This is why I joined tumblr. Last week a...

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 22:45:12 -0500

jalwhite:

obenibo:

This is why I joined tumblr. Last week a friend asked me if she could borrow some “African clothes” (I’m Nigerian) for a Kwanzaa celebration and I declined, feeling uncomfortable about that. Turns out it was much worse than I thought. This is a picture of a kwanzaa party WITHOUT ANY BLACK PEOPLE. Cultural appropriation with smiles. I just know as soon as I call people out on it, I’ll be called a racist or oversensitive. I grew up with these people. You’d think that they’d learn after a year or so of college. I guess whiteness is stronger than that, huh?

These people are terrible. I feel very comfortable saying that.

first-nation-penatration: Saw a member of A Tribe Called Red...

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:15:07 -0500

first-nation-penatration:

Saw a member of A Tribe Called Red wearing this shirt, found out company etc and bought it. In case you dont know the story behind this shirt, there is a major league baseball team called the Cleveland Indians, …. now do you get it? Caucasions, im native? ahaaaaa.REDPOWER.

sheer-powder: “We’ve been ‘cool’ for a very long time, and in...

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 13:24:22 -0500

sheer-powder:

“We’ve been ‘cool’ for a very long time, and in that sense our culture has been taken for a very long time. How do we define when we’ve arrived? It’s not when a young, white girl in Berkley is wearing nice garlands or those nice buddhist beads, or wearing bindi. I don’t feel like my life in anyway has been improved because she has the ability to do that and thinks that’s okay. My life hasn’t improved. The life of my mother has not improved. Our voice as a community within this economic system has not improved.

A good friend of mine, she’s south Indian, and she grew up in Connecticut. Her mom would make her wear her bindi and go to school. She would get harassed by kids… she would be harassed so much that what she would do, is that because she was so ashamed to have that bindi on her head, she would leave her house, wipe it off… and then come home and put it back on.

To the point where a child would have to think about such a deliberate attempt to refute their own culture I think is pretty profound. If there’s a white girl wearing a bindi walking down central avenue in the heights, she’s not considered a dot head, even though she has a dot on her head.

For me, the feeling is disgust and anger. The way I look at it if I see it, I just get so mad because I think, how dare this person be able to wear that, or hold that, or put that statue in her house and not take any of the oppression for that. How dare they. That’s not fair. We have to take so much heat and repression for expressing ourselves.

I’m going to rip that thing off your head, and I’m going to scrub that mehndi off your hands, because you don’t have the right to wear it. Until the day when you walk in our shoes, and you face what we face… the pain, and the shame, and the hurt, and the fear, you don’t have the right to wear that. It is not your right, and you’re not worthy of it. I feel like it’s so superficial and it’s so disrespected. One day, wake up, be me, and then you’ll see how powerful what you’re wearing is. ”

—Raahi Reddy, Yellow Apparel: When the Coolie Becomes Cool

shonecakepastrypie: politicsofmylund: s-o-l-i-f-t-e-d: @astaud...

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:50:34 -0500

shonecakepastrypie:

politicsofmylund:

s-o-l-i-f-t-e-d:

@astauddd we some hindu niggas #bindis

panchod

chup kar

When I start my white people zoo, you’ll be the main attraction.

If you’re going to try and draw shit on your forehead, please be advised that fine-tip markers will get you a circle and not an oblong rectangle.

wifwolf: blackandwtf: 1890 This is the first known photograph...

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:23:45 -0500

wifwolf:

blackandwtf:

1890

This is the first known photograph ever taken of a surfer. Surfing was banned in Hawaii by missionaries in the 1700s for its “ungodliness,” but fortunately the natives didn’t pay much heed to that decree.

And this is an example of why it is offensive to appropriate Hawaiian culture. I’m not talking about surfing, I’m talking about the caption. This is why it isn’t okay for non-Hawaiians to have luaus, wear grass skirts and leis, have tiki bars, and get hula dancer tattoos.

Hawaiians were essentially banned from their own culture. The things you appropriate were things the Hawaiians were told were sins. My ancestors were told they were going to hell for their religion. The missionaries didn’t just bring protestantism to the islands, they also brought suicide. People felt so guilty about how they lived that they killed themselves.

The things Hawaiians were made to feel ashamed of, the things they had to atone for are now thought of as “kitsch” and “exotic” by non-natives.

This excerpt from a zine is quite fitting (even though it is about Native Americans, it applies here too): “Spiritual practices of Native peoples are particularly prone to appropriation by the dominant culture. It is exceptionally ironic, given that a!er colonization, it was not until the passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act that Native people in the United States were legally permitted to practice their traditional spirituality. Since the colonization of this continent by white settlers, Native people have faced monumental obstacles to the free exercise of their spiritual practices, including boarding schools, forced relocation, endless broken treaties, “kill the Indian, save the man” policies, and forced assimilation. So it is particularly insensitive for white people to attempt to justify their/our use of Native spiritual practices when Native people themselves have often been brutally persecuted for the same.”-Cultural Appreciation or Cultural appropriation

But anyway, this photo rules.

Do American Indians Celebrate Thanksgiving? - ICTMN.com

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 23:35:57 -0500

Do American Indians Celebrate Thanksgiving? - ICTMN.com:

adailyriot:

In thinking about my earliest memories of elementary school, I remember being asked to bring a brown paper sack to class so that it could be decorated and worn as part of the Indian costume used to celebrate Thanksgiving. I was also instructed to make a less-than-authentic headband with Indian designs and feathers to complete this outfit. Looking back, I now know this was wrong.

The Thanksgiving Indian costume that all the other children and I made in my elementary classroom trivialized and degraded the descendants of the proud Wampanoags, whose ancestors attended the first Thanksgiving popularized in American culture. The costumes we wore bore no resemblance to Wampanoag clothing of that time period. Among the Wampanoag, and other American Indians, the wearing of feathers has significance. The feathers we wore were simply mockery, an educator’s interpretation of what an American Indian is supposed to look like.

The Thanksgiving myth has done so much damage and harm to the cultural self-esteem of generations of Indian people, including myself, by perpetuating negative and harmful images to both young Indian and non-Indian minds. There are so many things wrong with the happy celebration that takes place in elementary schools and its association to American Indian culture; compromised integrity, stereotyping, and cultural misappropriation are three examples.

Jennie A. Brownscombe (1850–1936), The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth (1914). Oil paint on canvas. (Photo Credit: Pilgrim Hall Museum)

When children are young, they are often exposed to antiquated images of American Indians through cartoons, books, and movies. But Thanksgiving re-enactments may be their most active personal encounter with Indian America, however poorly imagined, and many American children associate Thanksgiving actions and images with Indian culture for the rest of their lives. These cultural misunderstandings and stereotypical images perpetuate historical inaccuracy.

Tolerance of mockery by teachers is a great concern to Native parents. Much harm has been done to generations of Indian people by perpetuating negative and harmful images in young minds. Presenting Thanksgiving to children as primarily a happy time trivializes our shared history and teaches a half-truth. And while I agree that elementary-school children who celebrate the first Thanksgiving in their classrooms are too young to hear the truth, educators need to share Thanksgiving facts in all American schools sometime before high school graduation.

Let’s begin with Squanto (aka Tisquantum), a Patuxet, one of more than 50 tribes who formed the Wampanoag Confederacy. Around 1614, when he was perhaps 30, Squanto was kidnapped along with others of his people and taken across the Atlantic Ocean to Malaga, Spain, where they were sold into slavery. Monks in Spain bought Squanto, shared their faith with him, and made it possible for him to find his way to England in 1615. In England he worked for shipbuilder John Slany and became proficient in English. In 1619 Squanto returned to his homeland by joining an exploring expedition along the New England coast. When he arrived at the village where he has been raised, all his family and the rest of his tribe had been exterminated by a devastating plague.

What about the Pilgrims? Separatists who fled from England to Holland seeking to escape religious persecution by English authorities, and who later booked passage to North America, are now called “Pilgrims,” though Americans did not widely use the term until the 1870s. In November, 1620, the Mayflower dropped anchor in present-day Provincetown Harbor. After exploring the coast for a few weeks, the Pilgrims landed and began building a permanent settlement on the ruins of Squanto’s Patuxet village, now renamed New Plymouth. Within the first year, half of the 102 Pilgrims who set out from Europe on the Mayflower had perished. In desperation the Pilgrims initially survived by eating corn from abandoned fields, raiding villages for stored food and seed, and robbing graves at Corn Hill.

Squanto was introduced to the Pilgrims in the spring of 1621, became friends with them, and taught them how to hunt and fish in order to survive in New England. He taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn by using fish as fertilizer and how to plant gourds around the corn so that the vines could climb the cornstalks. Due to his knowledge of English, the Pilgrims made Squanto an interpreter and emissary between the English and Wampanoag Confederacy.

What really happened at the first Thanksgiving in 1621? The Pilgrims did not introduce the concept of thanksgiving; the New England tribes already had autumn harvest feasts of thanksgiving. To the original people of this continent, each day is a day of thanksgiving to the Creator. In the fall of 1621, William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, decided to have a Plymouth harvest feast of thanksgiving and invited Massasoit, the Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Federation, to join the Pilgrims. Massasoit came with approximately 90 warriors and brought food to add to the feast, including venison, lobster, fish, wild fowl, clams, oysters, eel, corn, squash and maple syrup. Massasoit and the ninety warriors stayed in Plymouth for three days. These original Thanksgiving foods are far different from the meals prepared in modern Thanksgiving celebrations.

Squanto died in 1622, but Massasoit outlived the era of relative peace in colonial New England. On May 26, 1637, near the present-day Mystic River in Connecticut, while their warriors were away, an estimated 400 to 700 Pequot women, children, and old men were massacred and burned by combined forces of the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Saybrook (Connecticut) colonies and Narragansett and Mohegan allies. Colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured women and their children. Pequot slaves were sent to Bermuda and the West Indies. In 1975 the official number of Pequot people living in Connecticut was 21. Similar declines in Native population took place throughout New England as an estimated three hundred thousand Indians died by violence, and even more were displaced, in New England over the next few decades.

Looking at this history raises a question: Why should Native peoples celebrate Thanksgiving? Many Natives particularly in the New England area remember this attempted genocide as a factual part of their history and are reminded each year during the modern Thanksgiving. I turned to the Internet to find out what Native people think of Thanksgiving. Here are some of the responses:

I was infuriated when my daughter’s school had a mock feast complete with paper mache headdresses and pilgrim hats!

When they did that 2 my kids in elementary I TORE those items up and signed my kids out of school for that day.

For thanksgiving I was the Indian. Umm Go figure … .

Someone took a picture of me in front of the class and to this day…it bothers me. Don’t get the whole making a fest in school.

Tonight I have to lead a children’s Bible class, and they want me to theme it around Thanksgiving. I will, but it’s not going to be about the happy pilgrims and all that stuff. Thankfulness to God is one thing, but elevating pilgrims to hero status is out of the question.

When my daughter Victoria was in grade school she had a teacher give them the assignment to write a report on Thanksgiving Dinner, and Victoria wrote hers as to why our family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Victoria got an F on the paper, and I threatened to go to the school board if the principal didn’t get it changed. Victoria got an A and the class got a lesson on Native American heritage.

Ignorance and not near enough education in the school systems! It is very sad that a majority of what is taught is very superficial and the dark aspects of our history are neatly tucked away. Very sad!

Considered a day of mourning in our house.

And,

For skins [American Indians], Thanksgiving should be The Last Supper.

The United American Indians of New England meet each year at Plymouth Rock on Cole’s Hill for a Day of Mourning. They gather at the feet of a statue of Grand Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag to remember and reflect in the hope that America will never forget.

Do I celebrate Thanksgiving? No, I don’t celebrate. But I do take advantage of the holiday and get together with family and friends to share a large meal without once thinking of the Thanksgiving in 1621. I think it is the same in many Native households. It is ironic that Thanksgiving takes place during American Indian and Alaskan Native Heritage Month. An even greater irony is that more Americans today identify the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday than as National American Indian Heritage Day.

Dennis W. Zotigh (Kiowa/San Juan Pueblo/Santee Dakota Indian) is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Clan and San Juan Pueblo Winter Clan and a descendeant of Sitting Bear and No Retreat, both principal war chiefs of the Kiowas. Dennis works as a writer and cultural specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Read more:http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/11/20/do-american-indians-celebrate-thanksgiving-146676 http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/11/20/do-american-indians-celebrate-thanksgiving-146676#ixzz2CpCuZN9G

strugglingtobeheard: zoezoloft: biculturallatina: girljanitor:...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:27:56 -0500

strugglingtobeheard:

zoezoloft:

biculturallatina:

girljanitor:

commanderbishoujo:

darkjez:

queerlytentacular:

this-is-not-native:

mitakuoyasin:

Am I the only one that things like this,
extremely pisses off and bothers?

It’s culturally demeaning and destroying.

Caught between the world of red and white, how will Grace Cummings choose?

A normal morning turns to disaster when a small war party attacks Grace Cummings’ family and slaughters everyone but her. She returns to the Lakota camp filled with hatred, anger and fear, but through the help of another white woman in camp, learns the Lakota way. When white soldiers invade the camp and presume to rescue Grace, she must decide where her heart lies.

Special snowflake attacked by evil savages. Special snowflake returns to kill the evil savages, but it takes another special snowflake of the we-all-bleed-red camp to show her that brown people aren’t all evil! Let’s appreciate them!

Guys, I think we’ve found our Save the Pearls.

what the fuuuuuuuck

no

I hate everything.

that cover tho

lmfao

everyone involved with creating this needs to DIAF

the fuck is this tho

U________U

The things white bitches fantasize about is sick. She serious too, how rude and what a fucking joke.

esmeweatherwax: howtobeterrell: reverseracism: drinkmehalfway:...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:10:09 -0400

esmeweatherwax:

howtobeterrell:

reverseracism:

drinkmehalfway:

how my mom dressed up for halloween…
as a black person.

:/

well your mom’s a racist bitch

No Natives Allowed: Over the last century, the conservation movement has created some beautiful parks - and millions of refugees.

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 23:27:41 -0400

No Natives Allowed: Over the last century, the conservation movement has created some beautiful parks - and millions of refugees.:

doveilmiosoldi:

elephantsandmangoes:

LAFAYETTE BUNNELL, AMERICAN explorer and wilderness romantic, first rode into the bucolic stillness of Yosemite on March 21, 1851. He was on a voyage of discovery. Once in the valley he thought he had arrived, if not in heaven, in Eden. “I have seen the power and glory of a supreme being,” he wrote in his journal, and “the majesty of his handiwork.”

Bunnell’s attitude toward the people who actually lived in the valley was decidedly more ambiguous. At times he romanticized the lifeways of the Miwoks who had settled there some 4,000 years earlier. But he also said there was no room for them in the West, calling them “yelling demons” and “overgrown vicious children.” The whole territory, he wrote, should be “swept of any scattered bands that might infest it.”

Accompanying him that day was one of the most ferocious militias in western American history, the Mariposa Battalion, commanded by James Savage. A veteran of Indian wars, Savage was there with one blunt aim: to rid Yosemite of its natives. Bunnell, who is remembered today largely for his lyrical prose about nature, stood by and watched while Savage and his men burned acorn caches to starve the Miwok out of the valley. Seventy were physically removed. Twenty-three were later slaughtered at the foot of El Capitan, the towering granite obelisk that has become a totem of California wilderness. Although it took some years to complete the task of creating a fictional wilderness in Yosemite, all the valley’s residents were eventually evicted, and in 1914 their land became a national park - no natives welcome.

This tactic became known as “the Yosemite model” and was replicated around the country, and eventually around the world. At most of the major parks created in America - Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Mount Rainier, Zion, Glacier, Everglades, and Olympic - thousands of tribal people were expelled from their homes and hunting grounds so the new parks could remain in an undisturbed “state of nature.” In the century that followed, millions of tribal natives around the world were forcibly evicted from wildlife reserves and national parks such as the Royal National Park of Australia, Banff in Canada, and Tongariro in New Zealand. In East Africa, the Serengeti and Amboseli National Parks were formed this way; on the border of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Kenya, Batwa pygmy refugees still camp in hovels hoping one day to return to their forest homeland.

Refugees from conservation have never been counted; in fact they’re not even officially recognized as refugees. But the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century, in the interest of conservation, is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million in Africa alone. It is a sad history, and one that has forced conservationists to reevaluate the hero status of their movement’s founders, and to reconsider the idea of protecting biological diversity by removing humans from the mix.

Read more

overlooking the fact that conservation is logically flawed in at least three fundamental ways (humans are inseparable from nature, nature is not a static constant and indeed its only static constant is continual change, and removing ‘environmental spaces’ from capitalism is only made possible thru capitalism and is thus nothing but a base-level exercise in capitalist modes of (re)production), it should be obvious that all conservation areas (parks, preserves, etc) that are not tribally owned and regulated are colonized stolen lands, and are thus extremely violent and deserving of some massive critique.

it’s no coincidence that Redwood National Park’s boundaries butt up against the Yurok reservation, that nearby Patrick’s Point State Park is host to what was once a sacred village site (and now houses an uninhabited replica village that is used for gatherings on occasion but is primarily a tourist attraction that allows for continual desecration and disrespect of the site and the cultural morays governing how the space is used), that the US Forest Service and the Dept of Interior continue to have ongoing horrific records of relations with Native peoples…as this article points out, the forefathers of conservation were all elitist racist genocidal douches; conservation is an imperial-colonial weapon designed to facilitate genocide and violent expansion of capitalist exploitation.

apihtawikosisan: Warning…this is not even the worst of the...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:23:05 -0400

apihtawikosisan:

Warning…this is not even the worst of the pictures, consider whether you really need to click through or not.

thepitsshop:

Happy Columbus Day! Today America honors the slave trader, religious fanatic, gold seeker, and mass murderer Christopher Columbus. Happy Holiday from www.thepitsshop.com

I hadn’t seen this particular horrific picture before, so I googled it as well as clicking through to the linked page. It led me to many things, one of which is a partial list of “Indian Massacres“…the mass murder of indigenous peoples at the hands of colonizers. Reading the Bartolome de las Casas quote is one thing, “They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground, and by thirteens, in honour and reverence of our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive.”…but seeing it illustrated is something else. Fuck.

Holy shit this series of pictures is disturbing beyond belief. And the thing is…Bartolome’s account has been available for hundreds of years, yet for all that time, the story has been…we are the savages. Somehow, someway, this is all ‘justifiable’.

Fuck.

for the record, i’ve closed both asks and submissions...

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 02:34:54 -0400

for the record, i’ve closed both asks and submissions since I:

have several hundred of them
have no interest in answering the person who asked me out on a coffee date
do not want to see anymore pictures of nasty dreads.

And for the record, the last question in asked me how big my penis was and I can only answer that it can only be dwarfed by the lack of insight Mitt Romney&Co had when he decided to tan his face before speaking to Latin@ voters.

Seriously that's like saying that Catholics vs. Protestants is "racism".

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 02:26:13 -0400

It’s tumblr. Someone will believe this and run with it.

READ ABOUT THE HUTU AND TUTSI. goodnight.

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 02:25:11 -0400

You said goodnight, then kept responding.

Also, you mean the war generally resulting from class warfare and not race constructed in anyway similar to what Europeans had constructed?

You left me 10+ messages which are out of order, have very little continuity (missing words and whatnot), and are generally boring. Go to bed, and stop playing around on anon. Or at least take a sociology course.

okay no karma. christian? do not do unto others as you would not wish to be done to yourself. islam? eye for an eye. same principle. natural laws of cause an effect that exist everywhere. if you want to be effective you should understand how energy works. what you give out, is what comes back. studies prove this. the evidence accumulates everyday. so for as long as you are hateful you will receive hate. you open no doors to love or peace through hate.

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 02:23:13 -0400

If that’s all you learned in your religions classes, you’d best get a refund.

And excuse me but that has nothing to do with the laws of Thermodynamics. Where are your studies?

You think I don’t know the old college trick of “studies proven” aka, “bullshit mode set to high.”

OH and the sunni vs shiite muslims.

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 02:16:19 -0400

And what does religion have to do with race?

no, wait i have another point. because you are Indian/part Indian does this make your life 'exciting'? is this what your comments about my "boring" white lifestyle were meant to imply? i am not bored, are you? i study all cultures because how boring to only care about my own. i am a deeply motivated person to understand people of all conditions, races, and backgrounds. what can you say for yourself?

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 02:16:03 -0400

It’s “white bread” lifestyle.

Google it.

CLASSISM NOT RACISM. I agree with many of your arguments, but at some points you let your own narcissism and racism shine through. The skinheads of the Native American culture. It is a defense mechanism that you continuously use to justify your obnoxious attitude ( does fighting fire with fire help?). The pain you would feel from admitting to yourself that you are just as racist as the people you try to call out is almost unbearable. So, like a victim, who has become the perpetrator, youignoreit

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:26:05 -0400

no, but really. your whitebread lifestyle is still boring.

narcissism is you spamming my inbox weeks after i stop updating like i give a shit about your feelings.

Treat others as you wish to be treated. If you wish for racial equality, give it. Your superiority complex, due to your extremely obviously low self esteem makes you NO better. Karma is something you write about. Karma is a natural law of cause and effect. If you give hate in order to change something you deem as hateful, then you will only get hatred back. Open your mind. There are other ways to help people to realize their ignorance. You say intentions mean nothing, intentions mean everything.

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:24:30 -0400

karma? wrong indian.

CLASSISM. Your problems are not with white people, THEY ARE WITH THE GOVERNMENT. The people who RUN this country. Which may I remind you of all of the people of different races who are considered "elite". Guess what? Many white people SUFFER at the hands of our government as well. I have been without food and water, have you? I have had no electricity, have you? I am just as fed up with the system! AND I AM WHITE. I am a student of religions in an accredited college. Does this mean I appropriate

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:24:16 -0400

do you realize you sent me five asks in a matter of ten minutes about your boring white bread lifestyle?

also why did you waste college learning about religions?