#colonisation
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.
Colonial ethnography was at the heart of the 40th edition of Festival Jean Rouch, a pioneering academic who spent his life rewriting some parts of the African history through his lenses.
Viewing ancient Africans from the early 20th century “playing” the indigenous roles assigned to them by the various European videographers of those days, informed the power relationships colonialism had installed through military actions.
Staging indigeneity was common practice among European explorers and researchers in humanities.
To this day the African colonial storytelling has been misguided also because of this propaganda surrounding the creation of the numerous myths shaping the “European perception of Africa and its inhabitants”
Cette semaine du 40ème Festival International Jean Rouch, un des africanistes universitaires precuseurs de la video ethnographique en Afrique coloniale, le plus en vue; fut remarquable en terme de diffusion de contenus datant de 120 ans et plus.
L'expedition Griaule de Dakar vers Djibouti dans les annees 30 ainsi que son bateau-laboratoire 20 ans plus tard ont contribue avec le recul actuel au remaniement de la narration coloniale; en sciences humaines mais aussi en compréhension du paradigme de propagande pre-independances.
End imperial exploitation. End neocolonialism. End settler colonialism and capitalism.
Canada has a nice public image because it hides behind it’s big brother US. But Canada is the home of some of the largest extractive industries in the world which violate indigenous people, lands and global south.
A good book to read would be “Blood of extraction: Canadian imperialism in Latin America” by Todd Gordon and Jeffrey Webber.
‘Unacceptably high’ risk of tailings dam failure in Canadian miner’s Amazon project
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“La sirena y el pescador,” Elisa Chavez.
Hey all! This poem is part of my chapbook Miss Translated, which I produced in a limited run as Town Hall Seattle’s Spring 2017 artist-in-residence. The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.
The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.
oh shit. my spanish is pretty shaky, but i’m pretty sure “te perdono” is “i forgive you.” wow understanding just that much is pretty chilling.
and something about…blood? and transformation? oooh yikes. she didn’t want legs in the spanish version did she. and it was a painful process.
so this poem is about…misunderstandings leading to pain for the person misunderstood? whish is really effective with the way it’s written, wow. this is the most meta poem form i’ve ever seen. wow.
#reblog#photoset#poetry#i later ran it thru google translate to confirm my theories#won’t post said translation or say how right i was#cuz i feel like that’s missing the point
<— This right here is AMAZING. Look at the journey this person went on reading my poem! Secret fact, I have been stalking tags and reblogs of this because what I wanted more than anything was to provide an experience for people and LOOK AT YOU ALL GO. Your engagement and enthusiasm is amazing and so humbling for me.
Holy crap, this is incredible. As a natively bilingual Latina woman, allow me to dive into a full analysis.
First, I should tell you my experience of reading this. I didn’t even look at the English at first, because I didn’t know that the mistranslation was the point, and of course I didn’t need it. So I read the whole poem in Spanish and thought it was really sad and moving. Then I looked at the English and my eyebrows went right up to my hairline. Why the hell would you translate it this way, I thought.
Then I read the caption and realized that this is a genius way of demonstrating how translation into English can be an act of colonization and violence.
I would translate the first two lines as “The mermaid rose from the sea / To see the dry world.” They’re very neutral lines. She was curious about the dry world, so she went to check it out. That’s a very different connotation from the mistranslation, which tells you that the mermaid preferred the land to the sea.
The second two lines I would say mean “She found a fisherman on the beach / this beautiful fish without a net.” She’s the one with agency here, not the fisherman, and she thinks of herself as a free fish, unconstrained by a net, not as a fish without a home.
The next three lines by my lights read “She had a gleaming tail; scales / that covered her breasts, arms, and face / and a wake of lacy waves.” Again, it’s from her perspective, not the fisherman’s, and she thinks of herself as having a gleaming rather than oily tail, a lacy wake rather than a frothing one.
Next stanza: “The fisherman caught her by the tail / and cut it in half.” From her point of view, the fisherman has committed a sudden and senseless mutilation. Then he goes, “’Now,’ he said to her, ‘you have legs. / Why don’t you walk?’” It’s almost like an accusation. You have legs now, why don’t you just get up and walk?
My read on the next stanza is: “The mermaid began to sing to the sea / for aid, her blood transforming / the sand of the beach into rainbows.” The sea is her home, not the land, and she’s crying out to her home in pain as she bleeds.
Then the poem ends with “She sang to the fisherman, ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.’”
The reason this mistranslation is so brilliant is that it takes a story about a mermaid trying to forgive a man who’s committed senseless violence against her, and turns it into a story about a man who uplifts a woman to a better life out of the kindness of his heart. And the thing is, that’s exactly what happens to so many stories from colonized cultures when they’re adapted by the oppressor. Translation into English, and further the cultural language of the oppressor, can be an act of violence and erasure rather than one of respect.
This is why I have worked so hard to translate poetry from Spanish to English that has previously only been translated by white Americans who learned Spanish in college. I can bring something to the translation that they can’t. It’s usually not this extreme, but this exists to some degree in all translations by people who don’t truly understand the culture that produced the work they’re translating.
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Cicatrix- SJ Norman
“Norman, a non-binary transmasculine cross-disciplinary artist, said definitions of religion and spirituality were inherently colonial and problematic. The practice of bodily scarification could be variously described as a religious practice, cultural practice, spiritual practice, a knowledge practice, a political practice, or all of the above, he said.
“’For the many Aboriginal people on this continent who still practise scarification, the distinction [between ceremony and art] is completely clear. For myself, as a south-eastern Koori, this work represents a very personal, referential gesture to a practice which has been suppressed, and which colonisation has divested me of,’ Norman told Guardian Australia.
“’This is a work of body art, which is generated from a point of tension between the western canon of performance, which I inhabit and am influenced by, and my Indigeneity,’ he said.”
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Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) was such a peaceful colony that the British instituted universal suffrage in the country in 1931, only three years after its adoption in Britain. Its path to independence was also so moderate and peaceful that when the country gained independence in 1948, parts of the countryside supposedly didn’t even realise.
What is my legitimity as a white person to write a master thesis about the impact of colonisation on gender norms (in a defined geographical area/country) (would be more of a historical work)
