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How to Draw Native People: a Tutorial/Reference Guide

As requested, here is a basic guide for how to draw Indigenous peoples (mostly focused on North America)! Also please note that this is not an exhaustive list of Native American phenotypes/features, and more like an intro on very common features that can be found in us, and even then, not altogether at once on a single person’s face. I highly encourage the use of references and care taken into research when drawing. I may do a part 2 that goes slightly more into depth, but for now, enjoy part one.

Resouces:

How to draw Native Skin tutorial (don’t draw us red!)

List of Native American Celebrities, which include their tribe(s) and home country, with 1,250 names, to use for your referencing pleasure

How to draw black people by Peachdeluxe, & Black hair in depth by misslaney for mixed black Natives

How to draw East Asian People, a guide by Chuwenjie, for mixed Asian Natives AND because it includes a lovely tutorial on monolid eyes, a shared feature of Native people

Like 85% of tumblr users hate and loathe embarrassment based comedy with every fiber of their beings, but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure their audience that the embarrassing scenes are skippable.

Lots of people dislike tragedy but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure the audience that the death and grieving scenes are skippable.

Stop trying to pass off self-censorship as “accommodation.” Stop trying to pass off pandering as “inclusivity.”

Rez Dogs s3e3

"Re"-domestication of cheetahs?

With reference to This Post In ancient Egypt, Cheetahs were sometimes used as hunting animals like greyhounds, and kept as housepets by the royal family and later, many wealthy households.

Now, there's an argument about how "domesticated" these cheetahs were- the majority of them were captured from the wild as adults and tamed/trained to tolerate humans and obey hunting commands, mostly because back then and still today, cheetahs are extremely hard to breed in captivity. Some were bred and raised from cubs, and there was not a shortage of cheetahs living in and around human habitation for them to replace stock with.

Even today, cheetahs are... weirdly comfortable around humans, if those humans know how to mind their manners. Game wardens in Kruger National Park sometimes sleep next to young cheetahs they are re-introducing into the wild, or have had female cheetahs who are familiar with them drop their cubs off on their feet to 'babysit' while she goes hunting.

Here's a pair of San hunters from the Naankuse Wildlife Reserve in Namibia bow-hunting while a wild local male cheetah hangs out with them (the angle makes him look much bigger and closer to the men than he is, but he's still VERY close). The male's name is Aiko, and is well-known to these men- they're not worried about his presence because they know how to respect his space and he knows not to go after game they've downed. Game they miss is free for him to run down, and game he flushes from the bushes are much easier to shoot- a mutually beneficial partnership. It's extremely similar to how the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea hunt with their dogs, some of the most recently domesticated and most similar to ancient 'proto-dogs' alive today.

So, cheetahs aren't domesticated the way dogs and housecats are- they haven't been selectively bred for generations, they're not dependent on humans, and they can and will attack people that bother them.

But like Coyotes, the remaining cheetahs we have are VERY habituated to humans, arguably even moreso than coyotes are, and we've made a lot of progress in getting them to breed in captivity- Ironically by pairing them up with highly domesticated dogs, who teach them domesticated animal behaviors like "not worrying about everything".

With Coyotes, the obstacle to domestication are mostly practical matters like "getting a coyote farm funded, zoned, built and insured.", whereas with cheetahs the problem is "there are almost no cheetahs left to practice domestication on and the ones we do have are already inbred". There IS a lot of commercial interest in domesticated cheetahs, so I think a good way to get the funding for species conservation and genetic re-diversification of cheetahs would be to frame it as a prerequisite to "Re-Domestication" and pet cheetahs.

So, this thing is absolutely not trying to be a brainless fun teehee girliepop movie. It is indeed a deeply stupid film, but not on purpose. You can tell there's a genuine effort there to be artsy and meaningful! They're trying to use color symbolism and to make commentary about arousal and sex and abuse and offer some perspectives on gender and classism! This thing wants to be deep so badly that it's actively got a shovel in one arm and a fire hose in the other.

And that's what I've sort of found with most of this white woman made media with underlying racism and/or major insensitivity, which is that it's not that it's all supposed to be I guess "brain smoothing" good times.

It's that for a lot of it the lowkey racism isn't incidental, but rather a vital component of the fantasy they're trying to sell. They don't want you to point it out because that is a load bearing bit of bigotry that actually appeals to them.

White supremacy often gets sold to white women on the idea that they are desirable. Yes, ladies, you might be a second class citizen, but you're a beloved second class citizen who will be cherished and protected by your strong husband, who will keep you from being stolen away by savages who want to rape you. And isn't the idea of being so desired that there are savages who would risk dying to steal you away kind of exciting too? It's akin to the poor white men getting sold on the idea that they at least get to be part of the same group as the rich white men, that they are allowed to be above other men, even if they're still getting fucked over by classism.

White women on the whole are usually well aware that the second class citizen thing is at least kind of bullshit-y, but, it's harder to pry some of them away from the appeal of being the object of irrational desire. Heck, in some ways embracing the appealing aspects help with embracing the idea that it's also a bogus deal, since a component of it is that white women are beautiful victims and martyrs whose suffering is an aspect of their appeal. Which on the one hand is like, yeah sure y'know that makes sense, a lot of people want to be desired and to be told that their suffering is real. The trouble is that this comes as a package deal with the white supremacy baggage, it's not just being desired, it's being the desirable white, it's the dangerous exotic savages, the victim of the covetous gaze of said savages and also of masculine aggression in general, it's the only truly finding your match with a white guy, it's being innately and universally more desirable, and etc etc. It's a whole specific romantic fantasy that you can't really leave intact and pry away from the racism.