#colonialism
you can tell i love these idiots because i, a whole desi, am drawing a fictional member of the british royal army completely by choice
People on this website will reblog positivity posts about Indigenous peoples and our religions and supporting our spirituality
until they find out that some of us practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice and then suddenly no one can read and everyone has places to be
I’m speaking from the perspective of an indigenous Nahua who was born and raised in southern México. I’m very familiar with the cannibalism and sacrifice practiced by my people, and know that countless other Indigenous peoples have practiced both
Colonizers boil down the incredible achievements and scientific discoveries of Mesoamerica into ~human sacrifice~ and then have the gall to lecture me about the morality of human sacrifice???
Dismissing an entire civilizations achievements because their religion included sacrifice is absolutely peak colonial mindset. You are projecting your modern western colonial morality on something you cannot, possibly comprehend and think you are being helpful and respectful and you are not
I could write a book on my ancestor’s culture of sacrifice. Please understand that the way you likely learned it in school was racist and colonialist and taught from the perspective of white people. Please understand that trying to argue about it with indigenous people or using it as a gotcha to “prove that we’re bad actually” is incredibly disrespectful and ignorant.
And while we don’t practice human sacrifice or cannibalism anymore, the history of it is incredibly sacred and important to us. I will absolutely defend my ancestor’s practice of cannibalism to the death from non native people
instead of being racist about it, maybe you can try picking up a history book written by an Indigenous person for once in your life
If you can’t respect the ~scary~ indigenous cultures, then you have 0 respect for Indigenous peoples at all
also, big take here — but ancient European cultures also practiced sacrifice (to varying extents and historical sources are scarce but yeah. somewhere these colonisers’ ancestors are laughing)
I mean, even forgetthat kind of stuff- like yes, myforbears for example had a habit of hanging people from trees as tribute to Tyr and The Gallows God, and the fabled Blood Eagle was done in tribute to the Allfather, but even if you forgetall of thatstuff, europe’s history of Human Sacrifice gets superrecent.
Like, by what definition of Human Sacrifice does drowning a woman in a lake for being a witch because Jesus said to, notqualify as an act of Human Sacrifice for The White Christ? What about torturing people to death when they won’t convert, and/or torturing them until they doconvert and thenkilling them to stop them from going back? How’s thatnot Human Sacrifice? What about when crusaders would roll up into a Jewish village and murder every man, woman, and child they could lay hands on, all to appease their deity? Why wouldn’t thatcount?
Those are rhetorical questions obviously: the answer to “which definition allows for this” is “the one where it doesn’t count when white christians do it,” of course.
Don’t forget European cannibalism! The eating of actual Egyptian mummies as medicine continued into the 17th century. Europeans were eating powdered POC remains at the exact same time they were demonizing Indigenous people for “cannibalism.”
The very word “cannibal” comes from the Caribal people, who were falsely accused of just randomly eating folks for funsies (which is literally never true of ANY culture that has practiced ritual cannibalism).
The Aztecs were demonized for making sacrifices that they genuinely believed would keep the sun god from destroying the earth (again)—and IIRC quite a few of those sacrificed had volunteered to do it, in stark contrast to the people who died as the result of the Inquisition, pogroms, witch hunts, and the like, all of whom were innocent civilians killed in the name of Christianity—and a lot of those murders were happening at the same time that conquistadores were destroying Mesoamerican cultures under the pretense that they were “uncivilized” and “barbaric” for—killing people in the name of their gods.
The hypocrisy of colonizers is staggering.
Demonic possession movies and movies that use rituals, traditions, believes or “lore” of a different culture without their perspective about it, they’re still perpetuating the colonialism ideals of that everything that’s different is “evil” or “demoniac”.
thinking about how the burning of the library of alexandria is remembered as the most prominent historical symbol of the destruction of knowledge…but that’s nothing compared to the thousands of entire languages killed in America and Australia by the colonialists…
To put an extremely fine point on this excellent paragraph: language is knowledge in non-literate cultures. This is why language reclamation is always at the top of the list for where to spend our limited resources in Native America.
“Much like the US and the western European nations, the standards of living in the Nordic countries are based not on having invented a wonderful system that can provide for everyone’s needs, but based on the exploitation of resources and labor of the global south. Lenin described one of the key tendencies of imperialism as ‘the exploitation of oppressed nations—which is inseparably connected with annexations—and especially the exploitation of colonies by a handful of 'Great’ Powers, increasingly transforms the 'civilised’ world into a parasite on the body of hundreds of millions in the uncivilised nations.’ While the large colonial empires of Lenin’s time have largely dispersed, the relationships have not so much disappeared as they have changed form. The global south is exploited, and the western powers profit.”
Re-reading The Two Towers, I came upon this passage from the battle of Helm’s Deep:
“‘Yet there are many that cry in the Dunland tongue,’ said Gamling. ‘I know that tongue. It is an ancient speech of men, and once was spoken in many western valleys of the Mark. Hark! They hate us, and are glad; for our doom seems certain to them. “The king, the king,” they cry. “We will take their king. Death to the Forgoil! Death to the Strawheads! Death to the robbers of the North!” Such names they have for us. Not in half a thousand years have they forgotten their grievance that the Lords of Gondor gave the Mark to Eorl the Young and made alliance with him. That old hatred Saruman has inflamed.”
So basically, we have an indigenous people, whose land was claimed by conquerors from across the sea. When said conquerors couldn’t maintain control of the land anymore, rather than granting independence to the native people, the conquerors handed it off to a different set of foreign colonizers, who have refused to recognize the indigenous people’s rights for hundreds of years. No wonder the Dunlendings are upset! This is a war of liberation for them! Tragically, at the end of the battle, the Dunlending POWs are forced to labor at repairing Helm’s Deep as penance for their rebellion.
This all supports my headcanon that Saruman was the good guy in this portion of the war.
Turns out Tolkien more or less agreed with me. From the essay “Of Dwarves and Men,” in HoME XII:
Also it must be said that ‘unfriendliness’ to Numenoreans and their allies was not always due to the Shadow, but in later days to the actions of the Numenoreans themselves. Thus many of the forest-dwellers of the shorelands south of the Ered Luin, especially in Minhiriath, were as later historians recognized the kin of the Folk of Haleth; but they became bitter enemies of the Numenoreans, because of their ruthless treatment and their devastation of the forests, and this hatred remained unappeased in their descendants, causing them to join with any enemies of Numenor. In the Third Age their survivors were the people known in Rohan as the Dunlendings.
I really don’t understand how some people hate Hamilton. Here’s some reasons why I love it:
• it was written by a man of color, Lin Manuel Miranda, to modernize and retell the story of the founding of the US and the overall impact an immigrant faced in an up and coming nation
• the roles were specifically written for people of color to play the characters because of the white washing in the media, but specifically Broadway (there was an entire scandal surrounding this casting choice in 2016)
• it emphasized the roles that immigrants played in the founding of the country but also in the modern day America
• not to mention that Lin Manuel Miranda speaks out about a variety of issues in America and he even went as far as to open Hamilton in Puerto Rico to raise money to rebuild their country after the hurricanes
• The musical gives a voice to people of color and gives them a place in a retelling of history that they were largely not included in, especially in our text books and classrooms
• it empowers women throughout the musical, showing different dynamics and types of powerful women (Angelica compared to Eliza)
• it expresses the duality of each character and while Aaron Burr is the anti-hero, he isn’t a villain. It shows motivation and angle behind each character’s action
• it shows us people of color in powerful positions! It gives THREE presidents of color and the only white person in the musical was King George III
• Hamilton is a relateable character. Specifically his line from Hurricane, “When my prayers to God we’re met with indifference, I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance!” That’s so powerful!!!
• Lin chose the hip hop/R&B style music because he thought it was the sound of America and it represented the country.
These are just a handful from the top of my head. I like Hamilton because I find Alexander Hamilton to be an inspiring, relatable, flawed, and outspoken character. His ability to take a stand and constantly voice his opinions are what I aspire to do as well. He was outspoken and bold in the middle of a revolution, and he went after what he wanted. Despite his flaws and mistakes, he is still one of my favorite fictional (the musical portrayal is fictional imho) characters that still inspires me to this day. I could write an entire essay about the musical, but I’ll spare you.
During these difficult times, I hope you can be like Hamilton: strong in the face of adversity and unafraid to punch the assholes that get in your way. Support those around you and stand with our Black friends. Black Lives Matter!
Blah blah blah and here’s why we hate it:
* It glorifies the founding fathers, European colonizers, and slave owners.
* It’s written by a non-Black man with no connection to slavery and who has no right to make commentary on it in any way.
* It’s true that it might cast non-white people in the main cast…as slave owners and colonizers.
* “Sally, be a lamb darling, won’t you open it?” *vomiting intensifies*
* Miss me with the idea that Hamilton is fucking feminist lmao. There are four women, I repeat, FOUR WOMEN, in the play, only 14 of the 46 songs are sung by women. All of them play a peripheral love interest role to Hamilton, even Angelica, who in real life was already happily married by the time she met Hamilton, and in the musical is supposed to be his intellectual equal, and yet all she gets to do is sing and rap about…her feelings for him and the love triangle between them and her sister. The only exception to this role is Peggy, who…umm, disappears. It doesn’t pass the bare minimum of the Bechdel test. The women of the play are not powerful feminists, they are pawns designed to further Alexander’s journey and exist in relation to him. Them snapping their fingers and saying they’ll include women in the sequel is just a “you go girl!” moment, it’s all for show. We as a society are just so used to the “bare minimum of women is enough or even majority women, just make them give sassy quips and act ‘BADASS’ and boom, you’ve got a feminist narrative!” that we accept stories like these even outside of the colonist propaganda aspect of it all as feminist. Despite there being actual feminist musicals that put women at their center out there that are much, MUCH better and less problematic than Hamilton. Mean Girls? Heathers? SIX? The Color Purple? Hello? But no just focus on the musical with like four women whose only feminist moment is asking to be a part of the narrative.
* Say No to This
* It doesn’t give POC a voice so much as it has them play the role of historically white founding fathers and colonizers who were involved with the slave trade.
* Alexander is not a relatable hero. He’s a racist colonist who married into a family of slaveowners.
Is that enough for you?
Although:
During these difficult times, I hope you can be like Hamilton: strong in the face of adversity and unafraid to punch the assholes that get in your way. Support those around you and stand with our Black friends. Black Lives Matter!
Good God. Some people are unable to be reasoned with.
Hey! So I made this post years ago, and I totally forgot about it and this blog for a while, but I definitely agree with what this person is saying and I think it’s important to read!
I am sorry. I was wrong. My original post is tone deaf, flawed, and wrong on several accounts. Thank you to @thisismisogynoir for their contribution and corrections.
I thought about deleting this post when it came back up, but this person shares a lot of important information that we should know as we consume or engage with this media.
I hope you take the time out of your day to read this, listen to Black voices on this matter, and do your research.
I will do better in the future. Thank you for correcting me and holding me accountable.
I saw Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019) at a local cheap theater with one of my friends last night and, to quote my friend, it was “wild”. Overall Dora is a fun movie that offers very important and positive Latine representation, and most of the minor things that bothered me (lack of narrative cohesion, the unrealistic absence of the sheeramount of paper involved in actualarchaeology) certainly wouldn’t bother the core demographic (children). However, Peter Debruge, writing for Variety, commented:
““Dora and the Lost City of Gold” goes out of its way to establish that the character isn’t a tomb raider or a treasure hunter, but rather an explorer, risking her life for the love of knowledge. That ranks her as perhaps the most “woke” big-screen adventurer since the invention of cinema, making Indy’s indignant “That belongs in a museum!” seem so 20th century by comparison” (“Film Review: ‘Dora and the Lost City of Gold’”).
This is where, I think, we get into some trouble. Spoilers below.
There are, on the surface, some obvious differences between a “treasure hunter” and an “explorer.” Treasure hunting is destructive and extractive, taking artifacts based on how high their potential resale value might be, with a complete disregard for the surrounding artifacts/environment, let alone the cultural meaning of the either artifact being extracted or the things being destroyed to retrieve it. An explorer, we are told, doesn’t take the gold.
“Exploration” and “explorer,” however, are highly loaded terms. Exploration is intrinsically linked to colonialism and imperialism, and explorers have historically been central to the production of knowledge and the generation of public and private interest which paved the way for colonization. They have also, historically, taken the gold. This is highly evident in the way that Cambridge Dictionary defines “explorer” as “a person who travels to places where no one has ever been to learn about them” because if explorers go where no one has ever been and explorers go to places where people of color have lived and are actively living, we now know who counts as a person and who doesn’t. To be fair, this specific phrasing is not a universal definition, but other definitions still contain the same problematics. Google Dictionary, for example, defines “explorer” as “a person who explores an unfamiliar area; an adventurer”. Here we can maybe concede that the “unfamiliar area” is unfamiliar to the person exploring it not an area that “no one” is familiar with, but again when we consider how the term is applied, explorers implies an emptiness to the region being explored: someone on vacation might “explore” the city of New York, but they wouldn’t be considered an explorer for doing so.
This leads us into the problematic of “jungle puzzles.” The phrase is first used in the movie by Randy, the cliche socially awkward nerd, after they have fallen into an aquifer. Dora and Randy both notice that the star map on the roof is wrong, prompting Randy to say it must be a jungle puzzle and pull a lever at random in order to correct the star alignment and reveal something hidden. Dora says there is no such thing as jungle puzzles, the room begins to fill with water, and they realize the star map was in fact accurate the whole time and they had just been looking at it wrong. This scene offers an excellent subversion of the “jungle puzzle” trope which is so often utilized in jungle-action/explorer flicks. In the images and rhetoric of colonialism, we frequently see the “challenge as invitation” theme appear, and often in ways which are very violently sexualized. This model is not only applied to colonial imaginings of colonized women/women of color, but to the feminized land itself, and it is very much as rape-y as this implies. The entire jungle puzzle trope is centered around the idea that ancient and/or indigenous peoples built their cities and their civilizations in order to serve as “escape the room” tests of courage, morality, and knowledge for outsiders, rather than for actual use by the inhabitants of those cities/members of those civilizations. It carries over the idea that the challenge of solving the puzzle invites in explorers/colonizers, and often it further imagines a universal morality and understanding of value which the explorer/colonizer can access and succeed at. Because of this, having a scene where explorers believe that an element of indigenous civilization was designed for outsiders to “solve” in order to be “rewarded” only to realize that they not only misunderstood the accuracy of an Incan star map, but that the entire structure was just a regular part of Incan life that had nothing to do with outsiders is an important intervention.
Unfortunately, upon arrival at the city of Parapata this initial intervention is lost, as the children quickly realize there are in fact “jungle puzzles” both to enter the city and to view the giant golden monkey statue. I do want to emphasize here that between Indiana JonesandDora and the Lost City of Gold, it is obviously important and even radical to see the rugged individual (cishet white man) model of Indiana Jones replaced by four kids–two of whom are Latinx and one of whom is played by an Australian Aboriginal woman–working together, and this shift is apparent in the way they characters interact with the city and its guardians. However, because it uses the same tropes it has many of the same issues. Again, it imagines that the city was built as a test, but the problematics of this representation are heightened by the arrival of los guardidos perdidos/the lost guardians and the old woman who initially tried to keep both the treasure hunters and the explorers away from Parapata but in the scene leading up to Dora solving the final puzzle, transforms into a beautiful young Incan princess and allows Dora to attempt the puzzle.
First, as a separate but connected issue, the figure of the Incan princess also plays into the idea of indigenous peoples as mystical/mysterious, ancient, and displaced from/frozen in time. First of all, I again want us to think about definition and application; according to Google Dictionary “ancient” means “belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence.” The Incan Empire fell in the 1530s under Spanish conquest and the Incan people still exist today; when we look at Europe, Stonehenge is ancient; you don’t ever hear about the “ancient” art of Leonardo di Vinci, and he was dead and buried for more than a decade before the Incan Empire was destroyed. While we are not told where the guardians or the princess comes from, what we are implicitly told by an de-aging of the Incan princess is that they seem to be connected to the “ancient” empty city rather than contemporary Incan society, and subsequently that there are no modern Incan peoples, or that the modern Inca are irrelevant to this story. Against this lack of contemporary Incan indigeneity, Dora refers to the student body of a Los Angeles high school as its “indigenous population” several times throughout the film; it is imperative to consider how this undermines modern indigenious communities and their experiences.
Furthermore, the figure of the old-young princess fully leans into the sexually exploitative imagingings of colonized peoples/cities/lands as desiring of the entrance of outsiders; as an old woman, the princess’s role is to warn away, but as the young woman her role is to invite in the worthy, with the worthy being those who are able to solve the puzzle. Dora says she wants to learn, and the princess allows her to attempt the puzzle, but what exactly is Dora supposed to be learning (it seems the reward for the puzzle is the ability to view a giant gold statue of a monkey) and, more importantly, why is the entire city centered around this test?
Thirty Everyday Phrases that Perpetuate the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples
“Language isn’t neutral or objective. It is a vessel of cultural stories, values, and norms. And in the United States, everyday language plays into the violent, foundational myth of this country’s origin story—Europeans ‘discovering’ a virtually uninhabited wilderness and befriending the few primitive peoples who lived there—as well as other cultural myths and lies about Indigenous Peoples that are baked into U.S. culture and everyday life.
Cleve Davis (Shoshone-Bannock) points out that everyday language continues discrimination that is an extension of the centuries-long federal policy of genocide, assimilation, and oppression toward the original peoples of North America.
…
It might seem harmless when your boss mentions the need for a powwow among the company’s executives or an online quiz promises to reveal your spirit animal, but everyday language like this is a result of centuries of violence and continues to perpetuate stereotypes that have real-life impacts on Native communities.”