#skilled people to send them to the gods so
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.
