REBLOG IF YOU ARE HELLA BORED AND WOULDN’T MIND SOME CURIOUS ANONS.

I promise you any change you think you could be making by bitching that Ian Ousley "looks white" would be more easily accomplished by watching Reservation Dogs, talking about it, telling your friends amd neighbors about it, thereby helping to create a demand for media where Native folks are actually in charge of the story and not just a neat facet to add flavor.

Reservation Dogs is about Native teenagers trying to leave their community for the greater wide world and California specifically. They do what they can to save money, getting into trouble along the way as teenagers tend to, all while facing a "rival" gang. If Jet and his Freedom Fighters or Team Avatar's not-entirely-legal shenanegins were your favorite parts of the original series, you'll love Reservation Dogs. Check it out and help boost the ratings.

While we're at it, let's hype up the video game Never Alone, even though it's been out for a while now, because it was entirely informed by Inupiaq people sharing cultural knowledge and stories. It was narrated in Inupiatun!!! The narration is in a dialect of our dying language!! You collect little video lessons about the way of life, contemporary and traditional. They talk about King Island! A video game studio found my grandma's village interesting enough to depict and offer an explanation for! We never get that kind of attention in anything not strictly about us or Nome!

Native people who aren't that weird crypto-terf that tried following me a while back: reblog this with a piece of Native media you think should get more love

heyo i havent slept in two (2) days, and im so awake it fucking hurts. my heart rate hasnt been below 80 bpm for about 16 hours, i keep almost puking, and i have a migraine. fuckin.... what is my life and how do i stop

If you are able to, please donate to Indian Residential School Survivor Society!

Halsey coming out on their Insta story with their diagnoses of EDS (Ehlers Danlos Syndrome), MCAS (mast cell activation syndrome) and POTS (post orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) is a huge banner moment for zebra & spoonie visibility and awareness and I stan a zebra queen. Thank you for your honest, raw presence here with us.

CBR

10 Films By Indigenous Filmmakers To Watch Instead Of Avatar: The Way Of Water

With James Cameron's recent insensitive remarks towards Indigenous people maybe it's time to look at they movies they've made instead of his

#NotYourDeadEndSociety

Hey, if you have no choice but to infodump, always use characters, never the narrator to tell things to the reader.

This way, if you got something wrong and someone points it out later, you can argue that this character in particular was lying/misremembering/was ignorant of the exact details. You, the author, obviously knew what the real facts were all along.

Help bring Indigenous horses home!

Hi all!

My friend is Ojibwe and a dedicated Indigenous researcher and activist. She recently has discovered a number of Ojibwe ponies (also known as the Lac La Croix pony) for sale by a white-owned farm. 

This is really important because these ponies are very important to the Ojibwe – these ponies are also the only known Indigenous-developed breed of horse in Canada, and there are only 200 left in the world. 

[Image: A girl sitting on an Ojibwe pony and hugging its neck. Image credit to Broadview.]

The fact that there are 200 left at all is incredible at all, because in 1977, Canada took the last known four ponies away to be destroyed, and they were rescued by an Ojibwe man living in Minnesota. 

Read more about the history here.

My friend is arranging to have five of these horses brought back home to the Ojibwe, and her elders are already planning a welcome ceremony for these horses. If anyone has anything to spare, it would be a huge help to bring them home. 

Donate here!

Alternately, you can get the horses a gift from their wishlist! 

now since tumblr apparently loves to support non-american authors, but is surprisingly mum about this, imma tell you.

you see, everybody's favorite evil corp, Amazon, bought Indian publishing house Westland some six years ago. Now Westland is a very famous and reputed publishing house in India, and has put forth some of the best titles the country has seen. It didn't shy away from controversial and uncomfortable topics, and some of its books quite vocally criticise the current government, which has been responsible for the current state of india as a pseudo-democratic, pseudo-secular, economically ruined country, the most notable one being The Price of the Modi years by Aakar Patel. It also produced Amish Tripathi's pathbreaking Shiva Trilogy.

Now here's the thing that got me nuts.

AMAZON. SHUT. IT. DOWN. A WEEK AGO.

JUST OUT OF THE BLUE, IT IS CLOSING DOWN WESTLAND FOREVER. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IS TO COME OF THE HUNDREDS OF TITLES PUBLISHED BY IT, OR OF THE AUTHORS ITS CONTRACTED, OR THE PEOPLE EMPLOYED BY IT.

It has triggered a buying surge in India, as people go on shopping spress to get their hands on the titles they want from this house. Short on supply and high on demand, bookstores across India are showing solidarity and moving surplus books around.

here you go with a few links that i think sum up the problem quite nicely, and please guys. just. please support westland.

here they talk about how this is becoming a trend with global corps.

here they talk about the future of indian publishing houses.

this one talks about a bleak future for literature and how it feels like we're living in a dystopian novel

spread this around. jeff bezos continues to be evil, and will be. he is quite literally, irredeemable.

Sometimes I think about my life through the lens of the past.

How many things do I suffer though because of the greed of European “explorers” and American imperialism.

I leave the ‘āina. I leave my ‘ohana. I leave my heart. And I suffer at a job I hate. And I spent years wearing a fakey costume and smiling for tourists and pretending I felt anything other than empty.

I colonized myself. Made myself palatable for tourists. Made myself palatable for tips and a paycheck. And I ate popcorn for dinner bc that’s what we could afford and I spent my extra money making sure my siblings didn’t feel the crushing weight of poverty. And every extra cent was spent trying to save them from how I felt.

Humiliated. Colonized. A joke.

And now I live on the mainland because we cannot afford to live on sacred land. Because haoles move there for paradise, and they kill us as they buy up beautiful houses and pave the road for resorts. Our land. Our ‘āina. And I’m now a walking attraction. And I can do the hula style smile and I can make my eyes shine like diamonds. And people ask me if I picked coconuts from trees and I think about my elders who live in concrete apartments and I miss my grandfather and his warm smile. And I never know if I will see them again.

I used to stare at the statue of Kamehameha. His arm stretched out in a loving greeting. His other hand holding a spear to defend his people. But he leads with the hand. He leads with aloha.

Because that’s what we do. It is what we are born to do. We are born to aloha. To love. To compassion. Even now, even after everything, all I want to do is be kind.

And it’s terrible. But sometimes I just wish he had lead with the spear.