The transfer was celebrated by members of the Ponca Tribe as well as environmental advocates who oppose the construction of the pipeline and continue to demand a total transition to renewable energy.

“We want to protect this land,” Larry Wright Jr., the chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, told the World-Herald. “We don’t want to see a pipeline go through.”

“While TransCanada is trampling on Indigenous rights to fatten their bottom line, Native leaders are resisting by building renewable energy solutions like solar panels in the path of the pipeline,” said 350.org executive director May Boeve.

“Repatriating this land to the Ponca Tribe raises new challenges for the Keystone XL pipeline and respects the leadership of Native nations in the fight against the fossil fuel industry,” she added. “Tribal sovereignty is central to the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground and build a more just society for all.”

[the above image is a screen capture of tweets from @JoshuaPotash, which read,

“Protesters will reportedly be forced out in 10 minutes if they don’t clear out voluntarily. And many have expressed that they won’t leave.

(Also I’ve only seen one link to a bail fund so far and it hasn’t worked. Please send me info on a verified bail fund if you see anything)

[a screen capture of a tweet from Unicorn Riot @UR_Ninja, reading

20+ people total have been arrested (~30 minutes ago, as well as a few hours earlier). We just took the stream down.

- children and teens who cant get home until a later time have a safe, warm, well lit, populated area to socialize, charge devices, rest, etc

- children and teens have a safe place to go to stay away from danger

if you want this, you need to be at your local community government meetings. you need to be talking to your representatives.  you need to be out there Lobbying.

Just a few weeks ago, my library, me, my coworkers, we had to write letters, send emails, make phone calls, speak at council meetings, just to beg our aldermen to give us our usual funding. Which they didn’t even give to us last year.  Losing last year’s funding forced us to cut staff, hours, and all of our databases.  If we’d lost this year’s funding? two positions would have been gone and we would have likely had to close on Saturdays.  On Saturdays.  The day of the week most of y’all working M-F jobs actually have time to go to the fucking library.

And do you want to know how much money we were asking? We were asking for an increase of approximately 13 cents a person.

13.

Fucking.

Cents.

ACROSS AN ENTIRE YEAR.

No one seems to understand how libraries are funded.  It’s not just Free Stuff.  It’s your tax dollars being paid back into your community.  It’s crowdfunding.  The highest cost anyone in my community pays for the library a year is approximately $250.  Divide that up.  That’s just $4 a week.  That’s less than a coffee.  It’s the equivalent of purchasing about 10 hardcover books a year.  For that price, you could have access to every book that has ever been written, a place to go that’s not a bar, programs for kids, teens, and adults, educated staff that can help you find the answers to your questions, and so much more.

You want these late-night libraries?  You want all this stuff?  Start fighting for it.  Start showing up.  Start making phone calls.  It’s not going to come out of thin air.  Start fighting to erase the idea that taxes = evil.  Start fighting to spread the understanding that taxes are what help us build a better society.

Make sure the people who represent you know that you want this.  That this is where you want your tax dollars to go.  That this is what you want them to support.  That you are willing to see your tax bill go up a few more dollars for this.

Because otherwise?  None of this is going to happen.  Libraries are going to keep cutting their opening hours.  Keep cutting staff.  Keep cutting programs and databases and collections.

-“we’re all one race…the human race”

-“culture is made up and everyone can do anything they want”

-“I was Native in a past life”

-“if I feel called to it, I can do it”

Until Dawn Game and Use of the Wendigo

From what I’ve gathered about the game, they didn’t have Algonquian people giving input to the story. While Wendigo legends have spread much farther West in modern times because of how much ecological destruction is happening, it’s spreading amongst Natives and is still staying mostly within Algonquin territory (the Cree are an Algonquin speaking people, and their nation is absolutely gigantic). 

While the game pays lip service to the original locations of the Cree, and it is remotely possible the Cree owned mountains, the thing about the bordering Cree nation is they are called Plains Cree for a reason. If you look at a map highlighting the Rockies, and you look at a map highlighting the territory of the Cree, the two barely overlap if they overlap at all.

Disclaimer: I am not Plains Cree— I am Mohawk, Mi'kmaq, and Wyandot— so I could be wrong. Plains Cree are more than welcome to correct me about ancestral lands.

However, the concepts taken from the game make me uneasy.

The Wendigo is not a random horror creature, as I have said before. It has been stolen and repurposed (before anyone comes at me saying that it’s part of their local mythology so it’s free for white people to use, allow me to explain that Native people were not free to practice their religions in Canada from 1884 and the ban lasted about a century; there was no room for there to be equal sharing of religions, because Natives had no ownership over their own). As soon as I see any Native ‘scary creature’ used, I am extremely wary. It is possible to use them respectfully, but more often than not, it’s just appropriation.

Even though the game pays lip service to keeping the Wendigo within the Cree, I cannot find a single piece of information that says the Cree were actually consulted for the game. And that’s a huge problem. The thing about the proper use of Native American mythology is it stays within our control, like the aforementioned Skinwalkers usage. It seems to me that they simply used the Wendigo for the old school horror tropes, which are inherently racist.I can’t seem to find any Native-written pieces about the game, either, which I would love to link to (followers, if you provide opinions, make sure they are either linking to Native-written works or you yourself are Native). 

But from my own glance at it, I don’t like their use of the Wendigo and I don’t like how I can’t seem to find any Native voices anywhere around the project.

On the topic of the w*d!go, that representation of it is also strange. I’ve never played the game “until dawn”, but from watching gameplays of it, it seems that the monster only kills the characters for sport instead of eating them. The whole reason Crees feared the w*nd!go is because it ATE people; it was a person who turned into an evil spirit for practising cannibalism, & it never grows full. We’re not even supposed to say its name for fear of calling it forth (And so I have blocked the word thusly). So it kind of takes away from the whole cannibal part in ties with the spiritual part.

Aside from just that, they sort of went for a pan-indianism type of thing because there’s collectable “totems” and butterflies with different symbolic meanings based by color, but none of that is Cree from what I know. The totems are more reminiscent of western coast totems, which Crees didn’t have.