Here is why I really, really love the indigenous people of North America:
Having endured the trail of tears and their own nation in tatters, the Choctaw nation sent the Irish people the modern equivalent of about $6000 during the great hunger (the potato famine). I genuinely consider it a true act of love among the poor and oppressed.
Picture above is a sculpture in County Cork to commemorate their incredible gesture.
We will never forget
Both of them were invaded, robbed, murdered at scale and still are occupied in their own lands centuries later. I can't think of more similar groups than the Irish and native Americans, maybe add in Koreans.
Went to a pow-wow this summer, was easily one of the coolest things I've participated in in a few years. I could've watched the dancing competition for days.
Decolonize Turtle Island.
Sorry we suck. Hope yall find peace.
hell yes
Really love the pictures!
I wonder...what if all the people of earth stayed where they evolved from and didn't build the means to go conquering other countries? What would the world look like?
migration and colonization are not at all equal
...but if they were equal...what would that look like? Neanderthals would probably still exist right?
Yeah!
Silvio didn't liked that
I'm divided because I'm half and half. One half is the innocent person who lived in Africa and was brought as a slave and the other is the one who lived peacefully in America and had to endure abuse and slavery and death. And yet another half is from Ireland running from famine and Jew running from the inquisition and Filipino brought back thru the global slave trade. Yet another half is Italian and German I'm sure. I'm a mutt. Even my last name is a mutt. My last name is as useful at tracing my roots like Mesa or Arboles (table and trees).
I made a conscious decision to make my kids brown. Not my own kind of brown but a different new-ish kind of brown. One that has no other nation I thought, just America. But now they're taking brown people to random countries. But it was a sort of good idea.
It's good to live near the reservation and be able to visit to see how at least some of those who fought for independence got independence. It's a never ending battle, but it's a good battle. It's good to celebrate the wins.
I made a conscious decision to make my kids brown.
That's weird. Don't be racist.
Well browner than me. See you don't understand. Usually, in Latin America and I assume other places too, people who are white are seen as somehow better. So the tendency is to "marry up". Well but then that means that those who are darker skinned don't get to marry. It's an overly simplified explanation for the context of several history classes I took during my university life a few decades ago. So I had this thought...I could marry up by finding a woman who is whiter than me. I should instead find a woman who is browner than I am. There's no reason to marry up, to whiten up my kids skin color. And I sure as hell don't want to marry within "my kind" because I don't believe anything about being born at a particular place makes you some how of that place specifically. So I don't believe in nationalisms or ethnicity pride... I'll be proud of something I earned and not randomly chosen things like being born at a particular place or being of a particular height or having a particular shade of pink for skin color. But I do believe in how painful racism was to me and how I would want less pain brought to the world. So my kids will be like me hopefully and see racism as a bad thing. Hey if A white woman had given me the opportunity to marry her I wouldn't have said no. But destiny had plans and I had plans to screw destiny and marry the way I wanted. Life is experimenting and I experimented. I think 🤔 Hmm it was a good experiment and experience. I proved that you can pick anyone you choose to marry and it will work just fine. You can be of any race or creed and it work just fine. You can "marry down" and it works just fine. Love overcomes.
I don't think you said anything racist, and I'm white. I get where you're coming from and I think making the world browner probably would lead to more empathy for racial issues and that's a good thing. Pretending to be color blind doesn't help anything when the world isn't a color blind place.
You're very right on that. It is striking how local racism can be. In Sandiego it is very common to hear the n word or for somebody to call someone else a wetback or a gringo. But holy smokes moving to the pnw, here things are way different, like night and day. Yeah, everything is like twice as expensive but everyone loves minorities and those who don't are pretty much not welcome. It's great here that way. In other countries or localities racism is played differently.
I recall looking for a job once and the place I applied at had a long line of applicants. I got the "unfortunately we are not looking for engineers of your kind here". Damn! That makes me boil. But this morning someone at my kids school called another kid "chocolate". And I just got a notification from the teacher expression her concern for our community and how she teaches everyone in the classroom about the origins of skin color and how everyone might look different but we are the same. That gives me hope that it will one day be more true than today. Hopefully everywhere.
You can read more about the complexity of socioeconomic constructs that women in Latin America had to overcome:
And the similar history of women in the Philippines: https://www.scribd.com/document/245991318/Hi185-Abot-a-Historical-and-Cultural-Survey-of-Marriage-in-the-Philippines-Law-Custom-and-Religion-libre
It's a history marked by men moving up in socioeconomic status by choosing to marry up and controlling who their kids married to be able to control their family wealth.
It's a problem of the past. There's nobody in my societal level planning on marrying a series of generations of descendants to end up as an heir to Elon Musk. People don't do that anymore. But what I did was to just find someone browner than me to love. It's no different than finding someone specifically taller or smarter than you are. I'm just swinging against the flow.
People of the future are going to be saying shit like this about their genetically-engineered test tube babies. Maybe they'll have rainbow colors by then too.
But Christopher Columbus never set foot in North America.
The Caribbean is North America. He landed in Cuba and on the island of Hispaniola.
Looks like a picture of a native American Indian to me.
Yes, but he still instigated the events that lead to the colonization of the americas, north america included:
Columbus's expeditions inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization that lasted for centuries, thus bringing the Americas into the European sphere of influence. The transfer of plants, animals, precious metals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the Old World and New World that followed his first voyage are known as the Columbian exchange, named after him. These events and the effects which persist to the present are often cited as the beginning of the modern era. ^(^^source^^)^
That's nice but fuck that guy.
... What part of that makes you think it was said in support of Columbus?
The fact that you presented it as a counter-point. Perhaps I was mistaken and you meant it sarcastically?
You may be confused - you presented as questioning why Columbus Day was a concern on a landmass he never set foot on; I explained the impact he had on the people here, even though it was more indirect than south or central america (and as has been pointed out he did land in north america, albeit in the Caribbean/Cuba).
Well confusion is a natural state for me.
