Ancestral Anarchism

Hi All, CALLING ALL BLACK + BROWN FOLKS & OUR ALLIES!

Please read + share to help Indigenous stewardship!

This week I am helping SOTS- Song of the Spirit- with the support needed to support their work into 2022 and beyond.

-What is Song of the Spirit?

“Song of the Spirit is a learning community dedicated to the preservation of indiginous culture and wisdom traditions around the globe. We have 3 core intentions for all our programming:

Create mutual symbiotic collective care economy (don’t take more than our own share)

To build relationships across indiginous diaspora

To support reconnecting descendants of cultural traditions back to their ancestral heritage.“

Song of the Spirit helps Black and Brown folks in the diaspora who are reconnecting with their Indigenous heritage– this is really important bc for the communities they support, our Indigenous cultures and populations often go hugely overlooked in terms recognition and access regarding ‘Indigenous Traditions’.

Song of the Spirit connects us DIRECTLY to our wisdom keepers so that we don’t have to rely on watered down or misappropriated info left behind after colonial genocides and the intentional destruction of our teachings. Doing this means they can also DIRECTLY SUPPORT our Indigenous wisdom keepers and their villages.

For this work to continue to be sustained and to grow in the ways it’s being called it will take a village of supporters to help the institute reach its goal. The end of the year fundraising goal of $25,000;

For all those capable, especially those in solidarity with us as Black and Brown Indigenous people, can you please assist us in strengthening our Indigenous communities?

>>>Any reparative support is appreciated, here is the donation link (and the site with more info) https://www.songofthespirit.org/contribute <<<<

PLEASE DONATE + BOOST and if you feel called to offer non-monetary support of your time or skills or maybe you know of organizations/coalitions that might be able to help us, feel free to send a message via the site!

Also please follow SotS on insta: @songofthespirit

[Image descriptions: A solid dark blue banner with a drawing of a red feather standing erect in the center. Large golden text reads: “Song of the Spirit” and smaller text beneath it says “Holding care of indigenous traditions with integrity and reverence”.

A neutral peach background with a drawing of two feathers in the center. Above the feathers reads: “Reclamation”. To the left of the feathers reads: “Preservation”. Beneath the feathers reads: “Stewardship”. To the right of the feathers reads: “Regeneration”.

Photo of 9 smiling dark skinned children from Nigeria crowding in and looking out of a window with open wooden shutters in a pale clay wall. One of the shutters has children’s drawings carved into it, it is suggested this is a school building. The children are all wearing button up shirts, most of them the same matching blue. Beneath the photo reads: “Preserving our tongue: Song of the Spirit has together designed a series of language courses from teachers across the world. Online courses currently are offered in Twi, a dialect of the Akan people. Yoruba, the language spoken across southwest Nigeria, Benin and Togo. And soon to be added is Nahuatl, the Indigenous language of the people of Mexico.”

The cool news is 🎉 tumblr you are crushing it! 🎉

This post, by the organizers estimates, accounts for the largest amount of donations SotS has received!

That’s extremely cool and I’m deeply deeply thankful to all of you for your real attention, support and care with this project. 🙏🏾

It means a lot to me that this group can continue this work; reconnecting can be very hard what with charlatans and white saviors so a by-us-for-us type effort like this is extremely powerful especially when African and Mexica people are often overlooked so much as indigenous folks.

The hot news is hot like, uncomfortably so- they are still really really under goal. 😔

SotS is trying to raise 25,000 to cover expenses for 2022s classes- Twi, Yoruba, Nahuatl and Mbira so far- donate if you can and if you know of any relevant orgs, please contact them with a link to their contribution page.

Hopefully tumblr we can continue to help them out- so far the effect of all of us following each other on this hilarious hellsite is much stronger than their glossiest IG post or stylish outreach email (no shade to the posts or emails but fax is fax)

For more details this is from their Insta:

“The institute is raising 25k to:

Offer more subsidies and scholarships for those who can’t afford the full tuition to attend classes and retreats. Sponsor virtual fundraising concerts with and for our partners across the globe to go towards their many community initiatives. Envision the longevity of this work supporting an expansion with more stewardship, a growing programming calendar, and the launch of a two year apprenticeship geared towards tomorrows visionaries of our new earth and collective freedom”

An early state’s population tends to run away and die fast (early city dwellers have worse nutrition and higher disease rate than hunter-gatherers), so the state had to frequently go get more population by waging war and bringing back the captives.

If the purpose of war was largely the acquisition of captives, then it makes more sense to see such military expeditions more in the light of slave raids than as conventional warfare.

You also acquire material loot, horses, cattle, etc in the raid. And burn the defeated villages, so the captives have nothing to go back to.

The most obvious advantage is that the conquerors take for the most part captives of working age, raised at the expense of another society, and get to exploit their most productive years. In a good many cases the conquerors went out of their way to seize captives with particular skills that might be useful—boat builders, weavers, metal workers, armorers, gold- and silversmiths, not to mention artists, dancers, and musicians.

James C Scott lists three reasons shy slavery was crucial in early Mesopotamian states:

To be the property/reward of the elites

To get labor for textiles, which were Mesopotamian states’ main export to non-state peoples who paid with resources which early states couldn’t do without, and also couldn’t produce on their own, like metals.

Uruk basically had a textile gulag at one point that engaged as many as 9000 women (at a time when Uruk’s population was ~45,000)

To get labor for onerous work like canal digging and wall building, which normal non-slave subjects won’t do without high rebellion risk

There isn’t much information about how male war captives were used in Mesopotamia, but Greco-Roman states would use them for the most brutal work: stone quarrying, timber felling, pulling oars in galleys. This was work that needed doing for state projects, but was hard to force its normal population to do. “The numbers involved were enormous, but because [the male war captives] worked at the sites of the resources, they were a far less visible presence—and far less a threat to public order—than if they had been near the court center. It would be no exaggeration at all to think of such work as an early gulag, featuring gang labor and high rates of mortality.”

Also, one really interesting point the book brings up that I’d never considered:

Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus. So long as there are other subsistence options, as Ester Boserup noted in her classic work, “it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding other means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree. When population becomes so dense that land can be controlled it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower classes in bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working class of the right to be independent cultivators”—foragers, hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, pastoralists.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the Spanish treasure galleon San José sank off Cartagena. Since she sank off the coast of Colombia, it belongs to Colombia under current law. Even though the Spaniards had tried to lay claim to her. Now a Swiss salvage company, Maritime Archaeology Consultants Switzerland AG, was to recover her on behalf of Colombia. In return, the company had demanded 45% of the recovered treasure as a fee. Now Colombia has declared the wreck and its treasure to be Colombian cultural property, and according to the law, cultural property cannot be used to pay for a wreck, and now the country wants to salvage it itself.

The wreck of the San José (x)

Unfortunately, the whole thing has a very unpleasant aftertaste, because the treasure is estimated at 17 billion US dollars, the salvage at about 70 million, because it is assumed by the UNESCO, Archaeologists and Historians that the country will put the finds on the art market after the salvage and sell them to fill the state coffers. It is also questionable what will happen to the wreck itself, because whether it will then be processed and exhibited.

The Kurdish revolution does not only face attacks from the fascist state of Turkey. Now Iraq is also attacking the mountainous region of Shingal. The population has promised to resist, and for this all international help and solidarity is essential! Action is needed now!

Antimidia and subMedia relay this message from comrades in Rojava.

I have a family friend who worked at our local Salvation Army headquarters as a a secretary. This particular office took all the Christmas donations for children in need, put them in a warehouse, and on a designated day the staff and their friends picked through them all, taking whatever they wanted. She saw people hauling away bikes donated for specific families. Some local children had hundreds of dollars of gifts donated in their name, and on Christmas they received three cheap things, items likely not even from the person who sponsored them.

My friend quit, and I’ve not given them a dime of my money since then.

I’m a wildfire and disaster logistics specialist.

I deal with a lot of agencies who provide disaster relief.

I used to say the Salvation Army’s disaster services were the one (literally the ONE) good thing they did.

They would come in, set up a canteen trailer, make and pass out hot coffee and donated food in a disaster, usually being one of the first agencies to get there and the last to leave.

Then I found out.

Every time they did this, regardless of if they were actually invited or deployed by the agency in charge (usually FEMA, sometimes others) they would SELF-DEPLOY. Meanjng they would just show up. Ok. That’s not TOO bad, sometimes agencies have to take initiative and get there before the red tape is sorted out. BUT. They, after they left at the end of the incident, they would send FEMA or the host agency a BILL. They used one or two paid employees (usually the driver of the truck and a supervisor); and many VOLUNTEERS, but they would bill for EVERYONE’s Labor at standard federal rates. They would bill for the food they distributed even though it was all donated by another agency or private parties. They would bill for the coffee they made and the supplies. Except they would use electricity from the shelter location, water from donations or from the shelter, and in many cases, they would get the coffee and industrial filters DONATED, but bill for them at retail prices.

Salvation Army reached out to Milknmuffins and asked what shelter she’s at with the promise to address the abuse in it. She…ended up saying where she was. She was thrown out onto the street. It’s also all on Twitter.

They invited her to a personal talk so she could explain the situation in person.

And then they threatened her with a screenshot of a rape-threat made supposedly by her:

And then threw her out into the street while claiming she broke house rules that

but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)

or this pic of me

or this pic of me