I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be

1/ I teach Japanese (language) and one thing I often hear students say is that they want to become “fluent” in Japanese. I don’t think this is a reasonable goal. Instead I ask: what do you want to talk about fluently? Who do you want to talk fluently with?

2/ This is especially relevant when it comes to heritage speakers who have grown up in countries other than Japan. Why would you expect your Japanese to be the same as someone who lived their whole life in Japan? That would not have been advantageous to you.

3/ When Japanese people migrated to other parts of the world in the early 20th century, the Japanese they spoke changed too. Language adapts to circumstance because it is a tool for doing something, and you will need to accomplish different things in different places.

4/ When we think critically about how a student will or wants to use Japanese, it often turns out they want to talk to their family, or talk about manga, or read the news. Those are attainable goals that allow us to spend our time and resources in better ways.

5/ No native speaker of any language is completely fluent in their language bc no language is singular. If I were hanging around a group of rocket scientists speaking in English I would have no idea what they were talking about.

6/ Any language is almost always fissured by class, race, region, profession, even time (!) and the illusion that it is a singular thing that can be mastered is a myth created by nationalism / nation states

7/ There’s also no reason why “native speakers” should be the only benchmark by which you measure your progress as a language learner. People who were born and raised in Tokyo speak a particular kind of Japanese bc that is what is useful for their life. Maybe it’s not for yours!

8/ Don’t have expectations for what you’ll be able to do in a language you’re learning that are higher than the expectations you have for the language you use most of the time!

9/ You’re also not going to progress if you live in a place where there’s no need for you to use the language you’re learning. You have to alter your environment by creating the need to use it.

10/ Anyway learning a heritage language or reconnecting with a heritage language is a daunting task but I love to help people with it. Always open to DMs from heritage learners of JP or if you have thoughts on heritage languages

Why should low-carbon projects be permitted to destroy legendary Native American sacred sites? Yakama elders witnessed the construction of The Dalles Dam that flooded and silenced Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. Since time immemorial, Celilo Falls was one of history’s great marketplaces. Multiple tribes had permanent villages near the falls. Thousands of people gathered annually to trade, feast, and participate in games and religious ceremonies over millennia. During spring, this natural monument surged up to 10 times the amount of water that passes over Niagara Falls today.

What must Indigenous people continue to sacrifice for energy development? The Seattle Times editorial board recently announced support for the Goldendale pumped-storage hydroelectric project to benefit the state’s clean-energy portfolio [“Goldendale energy project can help meet state’s clean-energy needs,” Sept. 2, Opinion]. The board constructed an alternate reality where tribal nations could find common ground with the developer and resolve objections to project construction. The board wrote, “A compromise that would allow the project to go forward while respecting tribal concerns would be a benefit for all.” The board ignores the realities of Native American history and the history of this project, which the Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakama Nation (Yakama Nation) have objected to from the initial development proposal at this site.

The project site is situated on Pushpum — a sacred site to the Yakama Nation, a place where there is an abundance of traditional foods and medicines. The developer’s footprint proposes excavation and trenching over identified Indigenous Traditional Cultural Properties, historic and archaeological resources and access to exercise ceremonial practices and treaty-gathering rights.

Notably, the project site covers the ancestral village site of the Willa-witz-pum Band and the Yakama fishing site called As’num, where Yakama tribal fishermen continue to practice their treaty-fishing rights.

Yakama Nation opposes the development. The developer proposes two, approximately 60-acre reservoirs and associated energy infrastructure within the Columbia Hills near the John Day Dam and an existing wind turbine complex. The majority of the nearly 700 acre site is undeveloped; the lower reservoir would be located on a portion of the former Columbia Gorge Aluminum smelter site. The tribe’s treaty-reserved right to exercise gathering, fishing, ceremony and passing of traditions in the area of the proposed project has existed since time immemorial. The tribe studied mitigation; it is impossible at this site.

Columbia Riverkeeper, and more than a dozen other nonprofits, stand in solidarity with Yakama Nation and oppose the development: The climate crisis does not absolve our moral and ethical responsibilities. Both tribal nations and environmental organizations have worked tirelessly to stop fossil fuel developments and secure monumental climate legislation in the Pacific Northwest. But we refuse to support a sacrifice zone to destroy Native American cultural and sacred sites in the name of combating climate change.

Environmental justice is on the line with the pumped-storage development. Seventeen tribal leaders sent a letter to Gov. Jay Inslee, urging him to reject development permits. The leaders explained, “Our ancestors signed Treaties with the United States, often under threat of violence and death, in exchange for our ancestral lands and sacred places. Through these treaties, we retain the rights to practice and live in our traditional ways in these places. Yet, the promises made by the government have been broken time and time again.”

Earlier this year, the Washington State Office of Equity, located within the governor’s office, released the state’s inaugural five-year Washington State Pro-Equity Anti-Racism Plan & Playbook. Gov. Inslee stated, “We will no longer replicate and reinforce systems, processes and behaviors that lead to inequities and disparities among various communities.” Now is the time to apply the playbook to climate change and energy siting.

There is no room for compromise. The choice is stark: Continue to advance our nation’s and state’s history of sacrificing Indigenous resources through broken promises, or work with tribes committed to tackling the climate crisis while, at the same time, protecting the last remaining sacred sites.

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Of course, people can learn any language they can find resources for. So with this question, people are mostly looking for moral permission. Would it be harmful for me to learn one? Do I have the right to learn one?

The short answer: It depends. It depends on a lot of factors. Key things this post will focus on are:

Which one do you want to learn?

Why do you want to learn it?

How do you plan on learning it?

What are you going to do with it once you do get some fluency?

Some tribes feel very differently about outsiders learning it than others do. And individuals within tribes have an even wider opinion range.

There is no "one" correct answer, and I think if white people go about seeking to get a direct clear cut yes or no answer, that by itself is a sign that they are not very educated in Native American language activism and the needs of Natives.

To explore this topic, I organized a survey for Native people to share their thoughts. It involved questions about how they personally feel, how their tribe as a whole tends to feel, and how their opinion varies between white people vs other Indigenous people not from their own tribe. 53 respondents participated, and 3/53 choose to not disclose their tribe. Throughout the rest of this post, I use "Native" for short. Please see below the cut for all the results and exploration! Note: this is very long. But for all allies / people interested in learning these languages, it is well worth your time to read and learn from Natives.

climate change represents world-altering tragedy if unchecked, but not even in the worst-case scenario does it mean “literally everyone dies”

[ID : A tweet by Mohammed El-Kurd @/m7mdkurd of a picture that reads :

Tuesday, 2 - Nov - 2021 —

Statement from the families of Sheikh Jarrah

We reject the “proposal” by the “Israeli Supreme Court” which would have rendered us ‘protected tenants’ at the mercy of settler organizations. We stand firm in our refusal to compromise on our rights despite the lack of institutional guarantees that would protect our presence as Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem.

The Israeli judiciary is circumventing its duty to adjudicate the case is forcing us instead to choose between our own dispossession or submitting to an oppressive agreement. Naturally, we refuse to commit someone else’s crimes.

Such “compromises” create the illusion of the ball in out court, fabricating a framing in which we reject a “generous deal”, in a situation where our dispossession would still be imminent and our homes would still be regarded as someone else’s. Such “deals” distract from the crime at hand: ethnic cleansing perpetrated by a settler-colonial judiciary and its settlers.

The international community has long maintained that settler expansion and forced expulsion in Sheikh Jarrah are war crimes. Thus it must respond to grave international law violations with real diplomatic and political repercussions. The culture of inaction and impunity must not be maintained.

It is time for our Nakba to end. Our families deserve to live in peace without the looming ghost of imminent dispossession.

Hundreds of union employees at three U.S. Nabisco bakeries that make Oreo and Chips Ahoy cookies and Ritz Crackers have gone on strike to protest proposed changes amid contract negotiations with parent company Mondelez International, Inc.

Approximately 200 workers at a factory in Portland, Oregon, have been on strike for two weeks and were joined on Monday by about 400 employees at Nabisco's bakery in Richmond, Virginia. On Thursday, workers at Nabisco's bakery in Chicago also walked off the job to go on strike.

Employees at a sales distribution center in Aurora, Colorado, also joined the strike on Aug. 12. All of the workers on strike are members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union, which announced the Chicago strike on Thursday.

"This fight is about maintaining what we already have," Mike Burlingham, vice president of BCTGM Local 364 in Portland, told TODAY Food. "During the pandemic, we all were putting in a lot of hours, demand was higher, people were at home, and the snack food industry did phenomenally well.

"Mondelez made record profits and they want to thank us by closing two of the U.S. bakeries (last month) and telling the rest of us we have to take concessions, what kind of thanks is that? We make them a lot of money. It's very disheartening. How is that supposed to make us feel?"

The union is in the midst of negotiating a new four-year contract with Mondelez after the previous one expired in May.

If you also didn’t hear, Danny DeVito got unverified briefly by Twitter for voicing solidarity with the union. Dan Rather got involved. It’s messy. Don’t cross the line if you can. 

"On paper and to people who only know her by her government IDs, she is Michelle Nahanee.

To everyone else, she is Ta7talíya Nahanee.

And yes, there’s a number 7 in the ancestral name she’s given by her Indigenous family in the Squamish Nation in North Vancouver. The number 7 is actually a “glottal stop, similar to the stop in the middle of the word oh-oh!” and the name is pronounced Ta-ta-li-ya.

After carrying her English colonial name Michelle in her IDs all her life, Nahanee was excited when she heard in June about the federal government’s new process to allow Indigenous Peoples, residential school survivors and their families to reclaim their Indigenous names on passports, travel documents, citizenship certificates and permanent resident cards.

For context: Dr. Asmamaw is an Ethiopian doctor and PhD. He is raising awareness at this year’s 2021 G7 summit of the need for people in the global north to acknowledge & help spread awareness of the dire pandemic conditions in the global south. He also calls out the lack of global south voices speaking up at the summit itself.

Viola Fletcher is the oldest survivor of the racist attack on the city’s ‘Black Wall Street’ in 1921 that left up to 300 dead

For nearly a century she was denied a voice by a culture of silence. Finally, at the age of 107, Viola Fletcher got a national stage on Wednesday to bear witness to America’s deep history of racial violence.

Fletcher is the oldest living survivor of a massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 31 May and 1 June 1921 when a white mob attacked the city’s “Black Wall Street”, killing an estimated 300 African Americans while robbing and burning more than 1,200 businesses, homes and churches.

She was just seven years old at the time.

For decades the atrocity was actively covered up and wished away. But Fletcher and her 100-year-old brother are seeking reparations and, ahead of the massacre’s centenary, appeared before a House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee considering legal remedies.

Yesterday, Israel bombed one of the biggest bookshops in Gaza. The Samir Mansour bookshop was one of the few publishing houses in Gaza as well. I saw a video of the owner of the bookshop fighting tears and talking about how much this bookshop meant to him and how he used to skip meals to be able to save money to get this bookshop going. This bookshop was part of the Kahil building which had various stores and offices.

In another video that was circulating, a guy from Gaza was explaining why Israel targets these buildings and towers. Every day you hear about a building targeted and leveled. He explains that these towers have been the main destination for the youth of Gaza as they usually contain coffee shops, bookshops, restaurants, educational and learning centres. So by destroying them, Israel is destroying memories and any potential for communal relationships. 

This is what we mean when we say Israel is not only committing a full blown genocide as we have been witnessing publicly for days now, with over 200 deaths in the span of a week (as of May 19, 2021), but also this other form of incremental genocide that has been ongoing for decades; even when Israel isn’t bombing Gaza on a daily basis, there has always been an effort to erase Palestinian history and culture, from appropriating tatreez and the Palestinian cuisine to destroying literary works.

Highly recommend watching The Great Book Robbery documentary for more on that as it goes into the details about Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian books during the Nakba.

There were executions of Black people who had already surrendered. I don’t want to describe all of the horrible graphic details, but I accidentally saw some of the pictures and footage, and I honestly can’t even eat.

Please signal boost this. These are some of our most vulnerable Black people in the entire world. What happened to them today was nothing short of genocide.

According to Black Brazilians, the fastest and most reliable way to get help to Brazil right now is through Voz Das Comunidades

Here is their Twitter with updates: https://twitter.com/eurenesilva

Here is their PayPal: [email protected]