Indigenous people of Tumblr, Native Americans, First Nations, Inuits, Metis, Maoris, Aborigines, I seek learning!

Specifically, I’m asking about indigenous portrayal in films and TV. What are any films or shows about Indigenous culture that are actually made by, and starring, indigenous folk. Or at least, films that portray Indigenous cultures in a way that isn’t inaccurate and insulting.

I know about the film Smoke Signals, and I’ve heard good things about Dead Man (even if it’s directed by a white man, it’s got a very likeable and smart Native character played by Cayuga actor Gary Farmer, as well as good usage of Cree and Blackfoot language. Not to mention his character is a clever riff on the Tonto stereotype.). I also like to think that Deputy Hawk from Twin Peaks is a pretty good representation, even if his Blackfoot mythology may not be super accurate. Correct me if I’m wrong about him tho.

But yeah, hit me up with some other stuff! I’m eager to hear what Indigenous people consider to be good representations of their culture in media. Also musicians, I wanna find some more awesome indigenous musicians to appreciate and support!

But yeah

“Chinese Zodiac - Year of the Rabbit” © Damon Hellandbrand, accessed at his ArtStation here

[Be vewwy vewwy quiet… The achaanwaapush, or Cannibal Rabbit, appears in a Cree story. And I’m always down for more low level monstrous humanoids. I gave it an axe in reference to the Bunny Man of Fairfax County. If and when I do a block of Gamma World monsters, this stat block would be a good launching point for a hoop.]

Achaanwaapush
CR 2 CE Monstrous Humanoid
This creature is a humanoid rabbit, with clawed hands and a leering expression. It clutches an axe.

An achaanwaapush, or “cannibal rabbit”, is a ferocious humanoid with leporine features. They have keen hearing and excellent jumping ability, but use it to pounce on prey instead of flee from predators. Most achaanwaapush carry an axe, spear or other melee weapon, but they use their claws and teeth in combat as well. An achaanwaapush is motivated by a desire for creature comforts, and will often bully people into giving them food or a place to sleep, and then butchering them for their trouble. They are foolish, however, and easily deceived into letting down their guard or chasing a fantasy.

Achaanwaapush dwellings are typically below ground, dug out into a series of tunnels where multiple families reside. These families constantly bicker and fight with each other, rarely lethally, as well as interbreeding. Children are barely raised, seen more as a nuisance than anything, and those that can’t stay out of the way and learn to be vicious may be killed by their peers.

An achaanwaapush is tall for a Medium creature, usually standing around seven feet tall.

Achaanwaapush               CR 2
XP 600
CE Medium monstrous humanoid
Init+2;Sensesdarkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, Perception +4
Defense
AC14, touch 12, flat-footed 12 (+2 Dex, +2 natural)
hp19 (3d10+3)
Fort+2,Ref+5,Will+2
Offense
Speed40 ft.
Meleebattleaxe +4 (1d8+1/x3), claw +2 (1d4), bite +2 (1d4) or 2 claws +4 (1d4+1), bite +4 (1d4+1)
Statistics
Str13,Dex14,Con13,Int8,Wis9,Cha11
Base Atk +3;CMB+4;CMD16
FeatsMultiattack, Skill Focus (Intimidate)
SkillsAcrobatics +3 (+11 when jumping), Intimidate +8, Perception +4 (+12 hearing), Stealth +7, Survival +4; Racial Modifiers +4 Acrobatics when jumping, +8 Perception with hearing
LanguagesCommon
SQhop
Ecology
Environmenttemperate and cold plains and hills
Organizationsolitary, pair, gang (3-6) or warren (7-12)
Treasurestandard (battleaxe, other treasure)
Special Abilities
Hop (Ex) As a swift action, an achaanwaapush can move up to half its speed without provoking an attack of opportunity. It may use this ability three times per day.

linguist-breakaribecca:

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.”

ForIndigenous Peoples’ Day, 2021

The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve
Billy-Ray Belcourt

Everyone’s uncle thinks that they are the world’s
most handsome NDN, and no one says otherwise.

Rez dogs roam about without having to perform
emotional labour for humans. They eat where they

are welcomed, which is everywhere. Most who live
here do not know that they are in the ruins of a sick

experiment that failed. Teens blaze to feel the
euphoria of being outside of memory.

We all bathe in the sociality of the hangover. It is not
that no one has time for themselves, it is that they are

always playing cards or talking about Connor McDavid
or carpooling to bingo or babysitting their brothers’ kids.

We all owe something to someone, so we congregate
under the pretence of debt, and this is always-already.

We all joke about falling in love with our cousins,
but we are all perpetually falling in love with our cousins

in a platonic way, because we grew up together and
no one was alienated by the tyranny of the couple form.

Vehicles pass through in droves, but no one looks,
so we drown together in the freedom of utter anonymity.

==

Today in:

2021: Puerto Rico Goes Dark, Juan J. Morales
2020:Winter Psalm, Richard Hoffman
2019:King Kreations, Angel Nafis
2018:Letter to Larry Levis, Matthew Olzmann
2017:Only she who has breast-fed, Vera Pavlova
2016:First Love, Jan Owen
2015:At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School, Sherman Alexie
2014:Boogaloo, Kevin Young
2013:The Fist, Derek Walcott
2012:Turning, W.S. Merwin
2011:Consolation for Tamar, A.E. Stallings
2010:Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell, Marty McConnell
2009:Bike Ride with Older Boys, Laura Kasischke
2008:Let’s Move All Things (September), Denver Butson
2007:The Day Flies Off Without Me, John Stammers
2006:A Supermarket in California, Allen Ginsberg
2005:Tortures, Wislawa Szymborska

notwiselybuttoowell:

Blue corn and melons: meet the seed keepers reviving ancient, resilient crops

According to the United Nations, 75% of crop diversity has been lost over the past century as farmers abandoned numerous local varieties of crops for high yield monocultures that are often shoehorned into environments they are poorly adapted to.

The Hopi, a sovereign nation in north-eastern Arizona, have been practicing resilient methods of farming for years. “Hopi’s one of the only places I know that corn is made to fit the environment, and not the environment manipulated to fit the corn,” said Dr Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi dryland farmer and academic from Arizona who relies on passive rain harvesting and drought-resistant seeds to sustain crops. “In agriculture across the world, you could argue that the fundamental problem is remaking the environment to fit products.”

“The industrialized food system has failed us,” added Lowden. “We need to restore our food system and that ecological knowledge that has supported us since the beginning.”

That ecological knowledge stretches back millennia in the southwest, where farming began as early as 2000 BC.

For Lowden, Acoma – the oldest continually inhabited community in North America – is a model of resilience. A community with a holistic, reciprocal and self-sustaining food system, superbly adapted to the high desert and capable of weathering extreme drought, climate change, and violent intrusions by outsiders.

In Acoma, “farming is not a hobby”, Lowden said. “It is the basis of our culture and our survival.”

Art by Leo and Diane Dillon, for the 1993 anthology From Sea to Shining Sea. Part one, In the Beginning.

Notes from the index:

The Creation (Iroquois; Central New York State; Myth) Iroquois isn’t the name of one tribe but the collective name used for six tribes– the Cayuga, the Seneca, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Mohawk, and the Tuscarora– that united in a loose federation to stop intertribal warfare. The turtle is sacred to the Iroquois. It represents the earth and the special relationship between the Iroquois and the land.

Art by Leo and Diane Dillon for the 1993 anthology From Sea to Shining Sea.

“I can’t empathize with Aboriginal people. I am comfortable with my rich lifestyle, unlike them, who are comfortable with being poor. Until they work harder and want a lifestyle like mine, I can’t care about their issues. They choose to be poor.”

Kinda funny how Canadians have the stereotype that they’re all nice when they can’t even have the decency to be nice to Indigenous people

To all of the people who claim they’re 1/16 Cherokee or that their great grandmother was a native princess:

PLEASE FOR FUCK’S SAKE STOP SEXUALIZING INDIGENOUS WOMEN LIKE THIS.

There are countless of indigenous women who were sexually assaulted, have gone missing, and have been murdered since colonizers came to North America.

Indigenous women are NOT fetishes. Indigenous women are the backbones of our communities and hold their people up.

INDIGENOUS WOMEN ARE STRONG AND TOUGH AS FUCK AND NOT TO BE MESSED WITH.

Imaging how much better off Indigenous people would be if Columbus wasn’t such an idiot and thought the Americas were India

There needs to be more Indigenous representation in the media

Since the 1800s in Canada, the churches tricked indigenous peoples following their cultural and spiritual traditions, shamed them and punished them for their cultural and spiritual traditions, almost wiped out almost their entire language and culture, sexually and verbally and emotionally abused Indigenous children in residential schools, and all the Anglican Church of Canada can do is say “sorry”.

Like it says in the article, the damage has been done. In my culture, we don’t even know much about our spirituality. All shamans were called “witches”, our fucking totem poles were burned or taken away from our land because the church thought they were idols and indigenous peoples should follow and respect the rules of god.

Take your fucking apology and go to hell.

Both U.S. and Canadian governments were both established on stolen land from the indigenous groups, and how the hell do Indigenous people have LESS say in what happens on their land? How can the governments give less of a shit of Indigenous lives?

No. That shouldn’t happen anymore. Change. Happens. Now.

Do y’all have any idea how smart Indigenous peoples were before contact?

All indigenous groups had their own languages, doctors, hierarchy, art work, music, architecture, medicine, teachers, and more. Indigenous groups weren’t dumb at all when colonizers came, they had their own societies before contact. Then adapting their societies to fit a colonizer’s world, and now trying to revive their cultures and languages in today’s society, if Indigenous groups aren’t smart then I don’t know who is.

A haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada won the prestigious World Press Photo award on April 7. The image was one of a series of the Kamloops Indian Residential School shot by Canadian photographer Amber Bracken for The New York Times.

It was not the first recognition for Bracken’s work in the Amsterdam-based competition. She won first prize in the contest’s Contemporary Issues category in 2017 for images of protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.

Her latest win came less than a week after Pope Francis made a historic apology to Indigenous peoples for the “deplorable” abuses they suffered in Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools and begged for forgiveness.

Last May, the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced the discovery of 215 unmarked graves near Kamloops, British Columbia. Established in 1890, it was Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school and the discovery of the graves was the first of numerous, similar grim sites across the country.

“So we started to have, I suppose, a personification of some of the children that went to these schools that didn’t come home,” Bracken said in comments released by contest organizers. “There’s also these little crosses by the highway. And I knew right away that I wanted to photograph the line of these crosses with these little children’s clothes hanging on them to commemorate and to honor those kids and to make them visible in a way that they hadn’t been for a long time.”

I seriously hate Christians, they’re all so out of touch and racist. Imagine knowing that your ancestors were responsible for killing off 90% of a population and destroying their religion and culture, but then you try to make their ancestors OK with said genocide by making churches and religious iconography just to pander to what’s left of their community.

So, seriously, I don’t want Christian angels that look like racist depictions of natives wearing peacock feathers and crosses, which were never part of any native culture. I want Christians to help rebuild the schools, restore the communities, and revive the native religions that they took from us. Until that happens, all Christians are just racist, thieving, dirty, genocidal douchebags to me.

Christians or other groups that are pro-genocide and racist, don’t interact. And if you disagree with this, you should educate yourself and see the reality of things before you say anything defending your cult/hate group to someone who actually lives with the consequences. Only racists argue they’re not racist when presented with these kinds of scenarios.

Also a reminder that religion (unlike sexual orientation, race, gender, skin color, disability, pretty much everything else that Christians hate being unlike their own) can be changed. If you’re in a racist, bigoted religion that has committed genocide, you can either convert out or admit you’re just as bad as the people who believe that.

There are NO GOOD CHRISTIANS. If you are a good person, you’re not Christian. Convert or act like every other bigot. Stop lying to yourselves that good Christians exist. It’s like saying you’re a good nazi. You’re not.

Natives-only, non-Native don’t interact:

Where do you draw the line where a Native character in a story becomes a Noble Savage Trope? What are some key characteristics that you think prevents them from becoming that trope?

Dunno if I’ll do more with this but here’s a pic of a bunch of ndn Kindred dancers getting dressed for a moonlit powwow!!

Asen showed up late to dress and came half undressed to compensate

fun game: guess their clans