The Wayuu language is spoken by the Wayuu; a Native American people indigenous to the region of La Guajira on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and Colombia. The Wayuu refer to their language as Wayuunaiki, and according to linguists it belongs to the Ta-Arawakan branch of the Arawakan linguistic family. Due to this fact, it is believed to be closely related to the now extinct Taíno language; the first language encountered in the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards when they reached the Bahamas.
The Wayuu are one of the fastest growing Indigenous groups in South America, because of this the language which has around 300,000 speakers is also growing, however social pressure to learn the Spanish language has become an obstacle for maintaining that growth. The main cause of this social pressure is one that is seen throughout Latin America, which is the prevalent discrimination of speakers of non-European languages, specifically Indigenous ones, by those who speak European based colonial languages such as Spanish, French, or Portuguese. Wayuu activists have launched many initiatives, such as creating the first illustrated Wayuu-Spanish dictionary, in hopes to promote interchange between speakers of the Indigenous language and those of Spanish, but also to instill pride in young Wayuu’s who feel they need to adopt Spanish as their primary language in order to mobilize socially.
The Wayuu as an Indigenous group are unique as they managed to resist Spanish colonization unlike most other native Colombian and Venezuelan groups, and for this reason there has been minimal Spanish influence on the language until very recently. This factor has also helped in making them the largest Indigenous ethnic group in Colombia and Venezuela simultaneously, and thus the Wayuu language the most commonly spoken Indigenous language in the both countries.
Please, if you have a small business or something like that (Music, Art, Videos), let me know and I can promote it on my page! I want to help out as much as I can :)
( I have close to 7000 followers, so this can help ya!)
Atencion! Si tienes algun tipo de negocio ya sea musica, una tienda, o algun tipo de video, por favor, mandame mensaje para promoverlo aqui! Quiero ayudar los mas que se pueda.
ah, i’m so bad at posting here. acknowledging this Day of Mourning from the lands of Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Potawatomi, Myaamia & Ochethi Sakowin people, aka Chicago, derived from a native word for garlic (mmm…) which is really suitable for me because I live here now ✨
whose.land are you on? talk about it over dinner this weekend with your fam & what it means to give the #landback. considering everything, listening & learning from indigenous people is the least you can do.
It’s a good thing the natives were peaceful people’s with no borders/territory, never fought each other or any wars, and were all solar powered so as not to require killing anything at all to live. We could really learn from them.
Also, does anyone else get bugged by the fact that the same people who advocate for open boarders and free immigration also advocate for “giving the land back”?
This comic - across all platforms - has gotten the most hateful & racist responses than any I’ve done thus far. (And also so much love & support, bless) I’m impressed & glad to have made so many people uncomfortable in the hopes that some gears are turning.
The most common response is the most tired of all, the same one I’ve been hearing since grade school (where the logic should’ve stayed): that “natives ALSO did x historically bad thing / fought over territory” as if that justifies their ongoing oppression. (These replies are a great example, thanks guys)
There’s a vast difference between modern borders & ancestral tribal territories, disputed or otherwise. To focus on the US, our borders on a modern scale look like:
- US authorities spraying peaceful protestors with water in freezing temperatures so they can clear way for another oil pipeline across Sioux land (whose path was originally going through a white community! but they moved it because of the dangers oil pipelines bring)
- the forced assimilation boarding schools of the 1800s - 1970s, which like ICE’s detention centers of today were also rampant with physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
And that’s just modern day. Nothing indigenous people did to one another, not even the brutal rule of the Aztecs compares to the scale of the genocide and attempted cultural erasure of Native Americans by European settlers under colonization and Manifest Destiny. (And even if they did, we still have the very not okay present…? Like… what is the logic in continuing such utterly pointless cruelty?)
If some of you quit regurgitating the typical kneejerk settler response to try to justify the horrific history and present of US policy towards indigenous ppl and actually checked out the info provided instead (which is literally all indigenous and / or black run), you might learn a little on what it means to right these wrongs.
The US has been really shitty to a LOT of people. It doesn’t mean it has to keep being so shitty. Why is this so hard to grasp.
Otherwise save yourself the mental gymnastics of pretending to give a damn about native folks and just sidle next to those just leaving slurs and/or fun white supremacist phrases like “you got conquered, get over it” so you can all admit you’re sad lil’ people whose only sense of pride bewilderingly comes from your fake ethnic group committing atrocities against others just because they could. I sincerely hope you can live a life more fulfilling than this. It seems exhausting.
peace,
from a very much alive (and daresay thriving) person with indigenous roots in the American southeast, who has (also very alive) indigenous friends, family, and colleagues. we’re still here.
p.s. I know many of the abbreviations are wrong & that Iowa is missing. I was rushed & didn’t expect this to blow up the way it has! Many people have expressed interest in purchasing a zine or children’s book on this, and of course then I’d triple check for accuracy. Thanks again for the support. <3
The Trump administration is planning to allow oil and gas drilling on ancestral territory in New Mexico despite pledges to seek additional views from tribes.
“Expanded fracking in Greater Chaco further threatens irreplaceable cultural resources, as well as the health and safety of nearby communities,“ Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter Organizer Miya King-Flaherty said in a press release on Tuesday. "It is unacceptable for Secretary Zinke to pay lip service to the need for cultural review and consultation while still charging ahead with plans to auction off this sacred landscape to the fossil-fuel industry.”
TheAll Pueblo Council of Governors, which represents the 20 Pueblo tribes in New Mexico and Texas, and the Navajo Nation are among the opponents of development near Chaco. They have called for a moratorium on development in order to protect an area where their ancestors built communities, held ceremonies and laid their loved ones to rest.
I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help
It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.
The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.
This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.
Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.
This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.
In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.
At a time when Ireland was enduring the terrible loss of a million dead and the mass exodus of a million more during the Great Hunger, the story goes that the Ottoman Sultan, Khaleefah Abdul-Majid I, declared his intention to send £10,000 to aid Ireland’s farmers. However, Queen Victoria intervened and requested that the Sultan send only £1,000 because she had sent only £2,000 herself.
