I’m so glad so many of you are reading this project, because its something very dear to me and the fact that there are people reading this motivates me to go deeper into this and not shove this project to the side.
Bless you all.
BUT
I’m applying to universities for my MA and that takes time. Unfortunately, I foolishly let real life take a backseat to this blog and now one of the courses I really wanted is Limited Availability now.
In short.
I would really, REALLY appreciate it if you guys could pitch in and submit any pictures you might find which you think could work on this blog. I end up spending about four or five hours at a go finding blog entry appropriate pics and then another hour or so editing them so they look good. In proportion, it usually takes me about an hour to write and edit a post so that its ready to go. The more pics I get, the quicker I can upload, the more you guys get to read. So…
Themes that will be turning up sooner or later:
- Slaves: ok this is URGENT. I need pics of slaves in slave ships - they could be paintings or screencaps, but high quality, high resolution stuff.
- Mughal art & colonial Bengal era photos/pics etc.
- ooo photos from post-war britain, preferably of immigrants from South Asia and the Carribean.
- Celts: red haired ones preferably. + points if they’re painted in blue.
- Saxons: farmers, battles, bonus points if you can find something to do with the Night of the Long Knives. Or like people being butchered at a dinner table. (No, the Red Wedding is too obvious a reference sorry.)
- Hogwarts House motifs: um. Minimalist, preferably. Also if you can get actual pics of animals/people which look nice/fit the pic quality or themes used so far = great.
- 1920s era dudes in a dudeclub. A bit like the Drones club from P G Wodehouse. I have some art for this already, but I like to have a stock to choose from. Tweed+suckerseer suits also work.
- things which could pass for Azkaban. Gloomy stuff.
All submissions should have a source link and I will credit your sumissions at the end of each post. <3
I will be posting, don’t fear, but I would dearly appreciate the help since I’m a bit swamped at the moment.
<3
[[The loveliness behind Postmodern Potterverse has been a huge supporter of this project. I can totally relate to their struggle - I too prefer writing to picture-hunting and I don’t even have workable image editing software so trying to make things look good take up a LOT of time. If you have resources do share!]]
I know that it is hard for a lot of people with religious trauma to accept. But Christianity wasn’t necessarily universally forced upon ancient Europeans. I mean, yes, sometimes it was (especially if it was intertwined with competing political forces… like in Poland). But it was also very common that people just willingly converted. I think people have the right to grieve, I suppose, for their loss of what we call now call pre-christian “Paganism.” However I find it incredibly frustrating that white American neo-pagans claim that they are somehow equally victims of the Church’s role in colonization and violence as indigenous people are.
I just think it is in very bad taste to compare the Christianization of Europe to Western colonial violence.
Some right-wing imbecile jumped on my photography Instagram page to call me a bigot for being anti-hunting. I began to type out, “Sure, and murder laws are bigoted towards murderers,” but instead I just erased it and blocked him, because if I’ve learned anything from the Trump era, it’s that these assholes all go to the same troll school and the goal is simply to waste our valuable time and emotional energy. There are no teachable moments for the unteachable.
He’s right though. If you’re anti-hunting, you are anti-indigenous and a colonizer.
He’s not right, and you’re not anti-indigenous or a colonizer if you are anti-hunting. This is total and complete simplistic nonsense. The indigenous hunt for food and clothing which is understandable and something I support. We don’t have the right to impose our moral compass on them. The truly damaging hunting, the killing of endangered creatures to extinction for sport, is almost always done by colonizers and is absolutely a byproduct of the colonial system. I love how people just make moronic pronouncements about things they know nothing about.
[ID: Two tweets by Cedar. They read: “When Indigenous people say stolen land we don’t mean 500 years ago. In the late 1800s a lumber company had my g+ grandfather tell them stories & asked for an “autograph” on blank paper. They forged a land transfer. It’s a golf course today. This is typical Native family history. Another moment in typical Native family history: Colonizer wanted farmland, said my great+ Aunt’s [farm animal] gored him. Her tribe testified in court, she didn’t even own [that type of animal], no one did. She lost, had to pay fees, her home/land was valued at the exact amount.” End ID.]
In the dead of night in the late 1800s, free masons came to my family’s land and set fire to their crops, their animals, and their home. My family fled their land out of fear of being murdered and their land was stolen from them. These stories are so commonplace yet colonizers and settlers like to place us in mental museums so they don’t have to face their true colors.
I want people to know the horrific history of what really happened here in the stealing of Garry’s land by prominent founders and citizens of our city and leaders of our nation,” Beine said. “It is time to set the record straight.”
Beine’s book, “Whodunnit: The Continuing Case of Spokane Garry,” lays out those facts. The centerpiece of the 284-page book is a long-lost document Beine discovered in the National Archives detailing Garry’s yearslong attempt to get his land back and the coterie of Spokane power brokers that colluded against him.
“In 1611, Father Pierre Biard, a French missionary assigned to colonial Canada, wrote home to complain about the locals. Apparently, the Indigenous Mi’kmaq didn’t think much of what they’d seen of European civilization:
“They consider themselves better than the French … they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other … you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.’ They are saying these and like things continually.”
"Readers brought up on a certain kind of history may find this account somewhat surprising. To say the least, it is uncommon to read of Native Americans as social theorists probing into European settlers’ psyches. The Dawn of Everything, the new book from which this passage comes, offers many such charged moments. In it, archeologist David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, public thinker, and activist, confront deep assumptions about how human society developed from its humble origins.
…
"Upon contact with Europeans, Native American groups like the Iroquois and Wendat had well-established democratic institutions, and individuals’ material needs were generally guaranteed among their communities. In the face of such radically different social arrangements, apologists for European systems rationalized their own structures by belittling Native Americans’ accomplishments as “savagery.” Whether based on production modes (such as hunting-gathering, farming, or complex urban specialization) or governmental arrangement (tribes, chiefdoms, and states), the resulting narrow models of social development remain more or less baked into history textbooks, right down to the present day.
"The Western Enlightenment view of social progress is not only chauvinistic but, as these two social scientists contend, is increasingly untenable in the face of mounting scholarly evidence. By ditching the “myth of progress,” Graeber and Wengrow are free to examine prehistorical and precolonial societies with fresh eyes. From the earliest bands of hunter-gatherers, to the rise of cities, up to major moments of first contact, the book brings together previously siloed academic evidence and little-publicized interpretations. Marijuana, we learn, was widely cultivated in prehistoric Japan. Centuries before Montezuma, Mesoamerican city-dwellers developed a precursor to urban social housing. Each mini-revelation is fascinating in its own right; together, they pose a serious challenge to both the Hobbesian and Rousseau-ite interpretations of the human past.
"Developing a renewed conception of fundamental social freedoms also brings the Indigenous critique full circle, with the Eastern Woodlands confederacies of North America as their exemplars. Crucially for Graeber and Wengrow, there was among these groups no obvious way to convert wealth into the kind of power over others that coerces or forces labor. Leaders were elected, but office holders “couldn’t compel anyone to do anything they didn’t wish to do.” We learn how, through generous social welfare provisions and consensus-seeking deliberations, groups like the Iroquois and Wendat self-consciously cultivated communal practices and institutions that vouchsafed human dignity without undue sacrifice of agency. Native American societies are once more cast as noble, but not as the pure, Edenic “savages” of Enlightenment imaginary.
"Mi’kmaq critics … jibed that they were richer than their French counterparts—not in material possessions or extractive technologies, but in “other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.” I don’t know that they "jibed,” but they certainly declared the fact.
This tee was designed by Navajo artist Dustin Martin for his company S.O.L.O. (Sovereign Original Land Owners).
“Ceci n'est pas un conciliateur.” TRANSLATION: “This is not a peacemaker.”
The “New Model Army Metallic Cartridge Revolving Pistol” was adopted as the standard military service revolver from 1873-1892. Nicknamed the “Peacemaker”, Samuel Colt’s revolutionary side arm was used by Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry during The Great Sioux War of 1876. Custer and 267 of his men were killed when they engaged a combined force of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors desperate to protect their families camped along the Little Bighorn River on June 25th. Led by the likes of Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, these sovereign original land owners understood that the implement on Custer’s hip meant anything but peace. RESIST THE HYPE.
“When Lenape scouts first sighted TheHalf Moon with Hudson at its helm, they noted that the captain wore red, a color that signified vitality and warfare, joy and anger. According to [John] Heckewelder, they marveled, ‘He, surely, must be the great Mannitto, but why should he have a white skin?’
Here Heckewelder, writing two centuries later, was projecting his contemporary racial sensibility onto their first impressions. It seems unlikely (as the historian Evan Haefeli has argued) that to Lenape eyes the strangers would have appeared 'white,’ the color of wampum shells and flint. The Dutch, when they controlled the New Netherlands, did not identify themselves as 'white’ but as 'Christians.’ And the Lenape’s own early accounts fixate on the peculiar hairiness of the Europeans rather than their skin color—to a society of men who did not grow beards, the new arrivals seemed more akin to otters or bears. Or else the Lenape commented on their eyes, for where they lived, only wolves had blue or green irises.
According to records from the early eighteenth century, natives and new arrivals in the English colonies rarely remarked on skin color or identified one another in such terms. Yet within a few decades, the division of peoples into a trinity of white, black, and red had become common. Barbados, England’s first plantation colony, was the first to witness the transition from 'Christian’ to 'white,’ as the colonists sought to separate themselves from their slaves, the islanders, and the small but growing caste of people with mixed ancestry. Like a wind, whiteness travelled north and into the Carolinas, as colonialists from Barbados emigrated there. It took a decade to reach the northeast.
Around the early 1720s, indigenous people in the South began to appropriate the label 'red.’ Long before it became a slur, it was a term of empowerment, evoking ardor and prowess in war. When Carl Linnaeus, in 1740, classified the peoples of the New World as 'red’ in his Systema Naturae, red skin became enshrined as a scientific category, though it is no more grounded in biology than in the air.
The Lenape, for their part, called the sunburned strangers Shuwanakuw. The modern Delaware-English dictionary defines this as 'white person.’ Yet Shuwanakuw derives not from the word for white, waapii, but from shuwanpuy, meaning 'ocean, sea, or saltwater.’ White people were those who had emerged from the sea.”
