Phina's Waking Hours

And I clutch the little warm tubes of blood and feel this sick person warming my hands and I think about how kind you might be and how I wish I could hold your hand and how badly, how really really badly, I want you to get better and stay warm and hold someone’s hand again.

And anyway sometimes it’s better to not think so vividly about the people I’m doing tests for. I’m a good little cog in a vast machine of people all trying to heal and cure, and my cog feels so fucking small sometimes. But I hope the blood I prepare for you helps you breathe better and laugh and wake up feeling well rested.

Disabled people often die from a lack of support. A lot of disability aids are not a luxury, but a basic need in order to live.

“Well what happens if—” people die. People hurt themselves. People hurt others. Disabled people don’t magically become abled if our needs aren’t met.

If a bedbound quadriplegic is caught in a housefire, and there’s nobody there to save them, they’ll probably die. They won’t magically become able-bodied out of sheer will.

If a nonspeaking/nonverbal autistic is denied access to alternative methods of communication, they’ll suffer in silence. They won’t spontaneously become capable of speech.

I’m a disabled person who went from struggling to even just sit upright for a few hours a day (orthostatic intolerance) to being able to go for 1mi long walks spontaneously, and I never forget how lucky I am. it is by the whims of luck that I’m responsive to the meds I’m on and the lifestyle adjustments I’ve made

these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"

Many people today would like to say, “they should have taken guidance from indigenous practices!” But those practices succeeded in supporting perhaps four million people in the entire vast land area we now refer to as the USA and Canada, one per cent of the current figure. Worse still, the native peoples were constantly engaged in brutal and often genocidal warfare, which served to keep their populations down to the level that could be supported by their food supplies. Even people with no pre–conceived notions of their own superiority would have questioned the value of such examples.

Do not be like the idiot above. They say that there were only 4 million people in the Americas before European colonization? Nope!

“there is a general consensus that the Indigenous population in the Americas was nearly 100 million people at the time of Spanish contact.”

- Williams, Charlotte. 2023. 'Estimating Populations of the Americas pre-1492'. Dispossessions in the Americas. https://dia.upenn.edu/en/content/WilliamsC003/

And genocidal warfare? I’m sorry?

The indigenous people’s of Turtle Island are people. Historically, our cultures have engaged in both warfare and peaceful diplomacy. In the tens of thousands of years that we have lived on that land has something that we may call genocide ever occurred?

Yeah, I mean, probably.

But there is no evidence of a pattern of constant warfare or genocidal behavior which is what the fuckwit above me claims. Perhaps they mixed up my culture and their own.

I saw that someone had left this reblog that had some very incorrect claims and I wanted to correct them but I would have to look everything up and write up refutation to the claim

If anything, the 100 million number is an UNDER estimate.?? I know at least that in my state (Kentucky) pre-European populations are estimated based upon the amount of artifacts like projectile points... But the problem with that is...rivercane! (the native North American bamboo, which is discussed in another reblog thread, used to form its own ecosystems known as Canebrakes, which were the ecosystem that was destroyed to create these cotton plantations worked by slave labor.) River cane is so sharp and strong, arrows and knives for butchering could be made out of river cane no problem. (I've seen this handling the plant myself, you can easily cut yourself on splinters of rivercane)

i hope they all know that i

want them to know that