Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, is a brilliant and hopeful read about the ways that indigenous peoples learned from and related to the land, and the ways that the rest of us today can draw from that knowledge to realize kinder, more reciprocal ways of living with the world. Check your local library for it if you can't afford a copy; if mobility is limited, check to see if your library offers ebooks via Libby.

For a shorter read (but honestly do read Braiding Sweetgrass if you at all can), The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans is an article that addresses a number of the same topics.

Some additional context: one of the most subtle but insidious forms of racism that we see in the community is this attitude that Humans Are Inherently Bad For Nature (which then often generalizes to Humans Are Inherently Bad). People so often treat this as Obvious Fact, when... it's really not! The idea that humans and nature Can't coexist, that they are Fundamentally Separate, is a myth constructed by an exploitative and imperialist society, which erases all of the indigenous cultures that have very different ways of relating to the earth and its beings.

Braiding Sweetgrass PDF

audiobook version

can also buy the book (and others) from Robin Wall Kimmerer's official website!

“Wild pig sculpture” by palestrina55, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

False killer whale Pseudorca crassidens

False killer whale Pseudorca crassidens

And later that night, when I was just about to doze off, I heard the sounds of footsteps coming towards the small pool where I rest. and you appeared in front of me. a hungry look in your eyes. you began to undress in front of me. I watched eagerly, making soft curious clicks. you slipped into the chilly water completely naked. you swam towards me and rubbed my smooth skin, moving your hands swiftly to my underside.

eager fingers quickly rubbed and dipped into my gential slit. and immediately, most of my length slithered out. I saw momentary hesitation flash across your face. It was obvious you underestimated just how large a dolphin's cock was. After a few seconds, your hand returned to the base of my dick and began to stroke again. I bucked into your hand with much force, which seemed to spook you even more. You seemed to realize that maybe this fantasy wasn't thought all the way through. I was a fully grown dolphin, lithe and muscular, and you had just entered into my habitat.

My moment was so swift that I knew I had caught you off guard. All it took was a quick turn, a forceful push and I had managed to shove you onto the slideout connected to my tank. You coughed up a bit of water that you had breathed in during my "suggestion" to join me on the slideout. You looked a bit shocked but not deterred. Once I was on the slideout with you, I saw that you were on your hands and knees. you trembled as I pushed myself towards you.

I pushed myself on top of you, easily pinning you down with my weight. My flippers rested at your sides as my tapered penis began to poke at your entrance, the tip easily slipped inside. It didn't feel like much as I adjusted myself. My tip was not as thick as the base. Without any warning, I slammed my whole length inside you. I heard you let out a panicked but pleasured noise. I could tell I was much much too big for you as your inside squeezed me so so tight.

I very quickly had begun a quick rhythm. I slammed as hard as I could into you. I saw you reach up to your stomach to feel the bulge that formed each time I fully pushed myself into you. I very quickly reached my limit. I pushed myself up, making sure I had the right angle to thrust as deeply as I could into you. As I reached my climax, I felt myself begin to pump you full. You were moaning as it overflowed and begun to drip down the back of your legs.

 Hawaiian False Killer Whales (Pseudorca crassidens) gliding through their amazing blue world

(A mirror of a post that I made first on Reddit, and then to our website.)

In a discussion about system member roles, it was brought up that much of the history around roles has been buried. There is no reference for who came up with the concept of roles or where the older roles like "protector" originated. My system is in contact with LB Lee, who are an older system with a great dedication to researching and documenting plural history. We reached out to them to ask if they had any knowledge regarding the origins of system roles, and they wrote a post about their findings.

The post itself is extremely well-cited: it delves through medical texts and biographies from as far back as the 1970s. It is worth your time if you have an interest in plural history. But I think the most important takeaways come from these paragraphs:

[...]of all these other terms, all of them come from medical contexts. If they aren't outright, obviously created by therapists themselves (Ralph Allison, Cornelia Wilbur), they're cited in books that they were involved in--like Sybil or the Minds of Billy Milligan. These are terms created by medical personnel to compartmentalize and organize headmates like a stamp collection... and often deny us the right to self-determine or grow. There's an icky historical context there; there's a reason these terms were considered unfashionable tools of the oppressor when we came on the scene in 2007! These therapists are not little tin gods you should worship. There's a reason Allison, Ross, and Wilbur have controversies about them! [...]

To be clear, I am not sharing this to shame systems for using roles. Nor am I sharing this to claim that roles are for trauma-formed systems only and that it is appropriation for other systems to have roles. Please do not use this post as grounds to start yet another exclusionary slapfight.

What I do want us, as a community, to do instead:

(continued under cut)

you're still allowed to use them if you want, but please don't use them as a way to box yourselves or others in. you are more than a function.