"There's a lot of pain," he said. "I don't want you to agree with me, I want you to understand!"

from
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/burners-torched-over-native-party/Content?oid=1369150

http://www.native-languages.org/art.htm

a seemingly good site to get info about where to find 'authentic' First People's arts and crafts as well as books...

Feminist Intersection: On hipsters/hippies and Native culture

by Jessica Yee

April 20, 2010

by Jen Musari, on the Native Appropriations website

Kelsey pointed me to this post on Sociological Images last week which rounds up some of the latest and greatest of this ever continuing trend.

I know my parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles have had to deal with this in their time and it’s certainly not a new thing –but it’s 2010 and not only does it still continue strongly to this day – it’s taken some interesting turns down the erasure of true origins road. This isn’t a hate letter, or reverse racism (as if there were such a thing!). It’s also not an attempt to discourage you from finding out more about Native people – and in fact I strongly ENCOURAGE you to do some actual research and knowledge seeking so you might get our culture right and think twice about things like permission and respect before you act on your appropriation.

So to the hipsters/hippies who appropriate Native culture but aren’t First Nations/Aboriginal/Indigenous, I’m asking you nicely now, to PLEASE stop annoying (the fuck out of) me with the following:

The clothing. Whether it’s headbands, feathers, bone necklaces, mukluks, or moccasins – at least put some damn thought into WHAT you are wearing and WHERE it’s from. I know our people sell these things en masse in gift shops and trading posts, and it seems like it’s an open invitation to buy it and flaunt it, but you could at least check the label to see A. If it’s made by actual Indigenous people/communities B. What does this really mean if YOU wear it?

Organic living and environmentalism as “new” concepts. One of my friends jokes that all Native people should get green energy for free because that’s how we’ve been living for centuries and also taught the colonizers how to live (which may or may not have screwed us in the end). I really do love the resurgence of the green movement and how things are becoming more environmentally friendly – but I don’t need certain members of the movement pretending like they started this or ignoring extreme realities we’re facing like environmental racism and justice. I also think we need actual Native people being in charge of and leading the responses to environmental degradation that are happening in our own territories. It’s not to say we don’t need allyship and support – but it’s also rather irritating when I read an event posting for a cause of some sort for a First Nation where there’s like two Native people in the whole place (who either barely say anything or are supposed to go along with the way the hippies organize without complaint because they’re “doing something for us”).

The appropriation of and silence about our medicines and teachings. I see direct examples of this in some of the alternative feminine and menstrual cycle products that are on the market now. I’m not hating on the DIVA cup or suggesting that the “divine goddess” isn’t a great story to hear, but I am wondering where your assertion of Indigenous midwifery knowledge is – and that in fact the absence of acknowledgment of where periods not being a bad thing or the blood from our menstrual cycles being sacred originates, is a direct erasure of Indigenous truth. It’s not enough to romanticize our medicines and teachings about women’s bodies and power and say, “Look at how thousands of years ago they used to do that!” and then capitalize your product or book off of some ancient-seeming fluff you are trying to present as en vogue. No! We are STILL doing this, we STILL believe in this, and damn it, you need to HONOR where this comes from!

We’re all one race. I’m not here to burst your bubble of unity and friendship, those things are great – but I am here to remind you that while some of you want to be our friends and ignore so-called “cultural differences” – you can’t ignore the history and current day presence of colonialism and racism. I don’t need to list off the statistics of health disparities and poverty in Native communities today to prove this fact to you – just consult the facts. I don’t want to be the angry Indian you won’t be friends with, so do me a favor and when you talk about “earth-based” things and your “right” to participate in whatever culture you want because we’re all human, know that there is such a thing as cultural protocol and that many of us are in crisis now of how to protect Indigenous knowledge.

Your grandfather’s, sister’s, cousin’s great-grandma was a Cherokee princess. This is an old one that we’ve been hearing for decades now – but it’s especially bothersome when I’m on the plane and you want me to educate you about blood quantum systems and status for the next 2 hours of the flight. I won’t do this, and I’m tired of you getting upset at me if I don’t initially present myself as Native (because no, we don’t all have braids and brown skin) but then you look at my laptop stickers and are like, “Mohawk. Hey my third cousin’s sister’s best friend is Native!” and then I just turn the volume on my IPod louder because I don’t always have the answers to your incessant questions – which are really just one question to me – why are we so invisible to you?

an amazing blog on cultural appropriation

check it out...

http://nativeappropriations.blogspot.com/

A slice of Bolivia's Climate Summit

This clip has a really interesting bit about indigenous language, and I think he has quite a point in that the global north will have no choice but to listen to language they do not understand quite soon. Also quite a good quote on the value of land and territory over financial gain...

“The World Is Changing in a More Progressive Way, and It’s Taking Place Here”–Boaventura de Sousa Santos on Bolivia Climate Summit

Among the thousands of participants at the World Peoples’ Climate Conference in Cochabamba is Boaventura de Sousa Santos, an internationally respected scholar and one of the leading organizers of the World Social Forum. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and a distinguished legal scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/21/the_world_is_changing_in_a

Indian Country in the City by Clayton Thomas-Muller

This is just an excerpt from the entire article, which can be found here:

http://canadiandimension.com/articles/1718

"This migration phenomenon is directly connected to the harsh socio-economic realities our people face if they choose to stay in one of the more than 630 apartheid-style Indian reserves that were created by the racist Indian Act policy of the 1800s.

Many people do not understand that attached to Canada’s shameful apartheid reservation system is a national economic development policy that disproportionately sites the most harmful forms of development on or near our Indian communities. If you take a map of all Indian communities in Canada, and then overlay a map representing the siting of all of the mega-hydro, oil and gas, mining and forestry developments, pipelines and transmission lines, you will see that most of these industries operate within fifty kilometres of a First Nation or an Inuit or Metis settlement. This has led to a situation of environmental racism and cultural genocide. In many of our communities, unemployment rates reach staggering levels in excess of seventy per cent during winter months. Most of our people face limited opportunities if they stay home, and, as a result, many leave to find opportunities in one of Canada’s many urban centres.

Out of Canada’s 1.8 million Aboriginal peoples, 75 per cent are under the age of thirty, which means that we are in the midst of a profound generational shift of power. By 2016, one out of every four people in Canada’s workforce will be a Native person. This group has more capacity than any other generation before us in terms of colonial analysis and education. Many of our Indigenous prophecies speak about this time we live in, including the prophecy of my own people, which talks of a seventh generation born free of the colonial mind. Children born in the seventh generation are ready to step up and assert their right to community self-determination."

installation ribbons

Someone was asking today where the information printed on the ribbons outside of the RR is from. Some of it is from different performances and conversations, but a vast majority of the words and quotations and history was found on the website of the Indian Residential Schools Survival Society: http://www.irsss.ca/history.html

great article on whitenessssss

SOME interesting anecdotes from the lengthy but worthwhile read:

In “On Being White…And Other Lies,” James Baldwin argued that America had, really, “no white community”- only a motley alliance of European immigrants and their descendents, who made a “moral choice” (even if they didn’t realize it) to join a synthetic racial elite.

In “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness” David R. Roediger stated: “It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false…Whiteness describes…not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.”

Kanata

went to the launch of this awesome publication the other night. the painting on the cover you may recognize as local artist extraordinaire Jeska Slater's portraiture, part of her project Young Artist Warriors, a project that "wishes to reveal that our paintbrushes, microphones and chisels are the new weapons against cultural oppression and racism."
You can find out more about this incredible empowerment project at http://youngartistwarriors.blogspot.com/

the launch of this journal was full of music, I was bummed to have missed rapper N3mo, who you can also find on the youngartistwarriors blog, but I was really moved by a beautiful rendition of a song sung by a man native to Hawaii, he had a voice that really cut through into another world. And there was harmonica playing, poetry and story reading, and more song. I was reading pieces of the journal as I dyed some weavings today, and really enjoyed what I read... some honest shit.
I was especially fond of Hayden King's piece entitled Reflections on the Utility of Color & Possibility of Coalitions (or Are White People Evil?)... He starts out with a poem from Leslie Marmon Silkoe's book "Ceremony" :

The wind will blow them across the ocean
thousands of them in giant boats
swarming like larva
out of a crushed ant hill

They will carry objects
which can shoot death
faster than the eye can see

They will kill the things they fear
all the animals
the people will starve

They will poison the water
and they will spin the water away
and there will be drought
and people will starve.

quite true though tragic prose, I just was reading yesterday that the mercury count in Grassy Narrows is higher than ever... and the Tar Sands continue to pollute every living being in their radius, not to mention steal the water for miles around just to turn that sand into oil...

King goes on, though, to clarify what he believes, which is not that white people are evil, per se, for who are white people, what is identity, etcetera etcetera, but that the mentality that came with colonization and that maintains itself in "those who express their fear, ignorance and arrogance openly...and the more benign, oft allies" aka the people who tolerate but do not value other ways of life, stories, histories. . . he suggests we all get brown in our minds. I kinda loved it. He refers to a question posed by Leah Whiu "what affinity can we share with white people if they refuse to acknowledge and take responsibility for their colonialism?" and goes on to acknowledge the potential to build coalitions and to work together with those whites who acknowledge that responsibility. he quotes Harold Cardinal, telling whites wanting to work with natives to either "get Brown or get lost". essentially, strive to understand our perspective and critically reflect upon your own, or just go away.

I recommend this journal, as this was only one of many thought provoking essays and I hardly even fleshed it out. not out to blame anybody, what i have read in this journal is all about expression, moving forward and working together towards that goal. this second issue is focused on the Oka crisis.

“alien within” some thoughts on white Canadian identity

From Terry Goldie's essay The Representation of the Indigene

“The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But the Indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien. But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada?

There are only two possible answers. The white culture can attempt to incorporate the Other, superficially through beaded moccasins and names like Mohawk Motors, or with more sophistication through the novels of Rudy Wiebe. Conversely, the white culture may reject the indigene: 'This country really began with the arrival of the whites.' This is no longer an openly popular alternative...

...The importance of the alien within cannot be overstated. In their need to become 'native,' to belong here, whites in Canada, New Zealand and Australia have adopted a process which I have termed 'indigenization.' A peculiar word, it suggests the impossible necessity of becoming indigenous.”

he goes on to talk of the way whites described themselves as indigenous in national bulletins, or how whites try to access this identity through writing on those who are actually native to the land...

hmmm. it is an anomaly, this creation of identity in a land that was never yours, (the you is the white Canadian here) that you cannot lay claim to and you know it, yet you cannot seem to admit it, because what else will you do, where else will you go, you were born here, etc... I mean its not an easy thing, eviction of the colonizers after all this time.

I really want to delve into whiteness studies, (we are such a strange breed) looking forward to this semester ending so that can get started...