Rational Progress

long story short, there’s legislation in the process of being passed that would

ban girls under 18 from wearing any form of religious head covering in public, and although it’s obviously aimed at muslim women, it would also affect other faith groups that practice similar forms of modest dress

ban islamic swimwear in schools and public (there is already a modest swimwear ban in place at public beaches, this just extends it)

ban mothers wearing hijab from entering schools or participating in school field trips or extra curriculars

ban the slaughter of halal poultry - the cheapest and most easily accessible form of meat protein for the muslim community

extend school hijab bans to universities

prevent muslim women from choosing healthcare providers based on gender (which many muslim women prefer to do, since many exams require removal of clothing, etc)

ban muslim parents from homeschooling

force halal markets to sell pork and alcohol or face closure

more information is coming out daily, and there are a few corrections and updates to note:

the modest swimwear ban, though it was overturned in 2016 for public beaches, will still affect public pools and schools

the halal ban is not technically a “ban”, but it is still expected to severely impact the industry in a way that could produce similar effects and make halal poultry less affordable and accessible to the communities that rely on it as an affordable staple.

the notion to extend the hijab ban to universities is not yet in effect or being introduced, but many fear it will be the next step

How can you help?

Here are some info posts on how to help. Sources will also be linked at the bottom:

Sources and tips:

source for the insta timeline

how you can help

how to be a better ally to muslim women

how to educate yourself and be an ally + organizations to reach out to

why you should not wear hijab in solidarity

A few tips; talk to muslim women instead of for them - learn about why some women choose to wear it while also learning about why some women choose not to - learn about what hijab means for women and men - don’t limit your support to a few posts, be active - educate yourself about how colonialism, racism, and orientalism plays into this

the hashtags #CantBanUs and #HandsOffMyHijab are trending, but they were created by and for muslim women. spread their stories and give them platform, but don’t occupy their space

Information is constantly changing, so if any fellow Muslims out there have some additional links, updated info, or tips, please feel free to add on

In Indigenous lands where nuclear weapons testing took place during the Cold War and the legacy of uranium mining persists, Indigenous people are suffering from a double whammy of long-term illnesses from radiation exposure and the C0VID-19 p@ndemic. Yet, we have not witnessed in the mainstream media and policy outlets a frank discussion of how the two public health crises have created an intractable situation for Indigenous communities. The Diné are drinking poisoned water, putting them at risk for more severe coronavirus infections.

From 1944 until 1986, 30 million tons of uranium ore was extracted on Navajo lands. At present, there are more than 520 abandoned uranium mines, which for the Diné represents both their nuclear past as well as their radioactive present in the form of elevated levels of radiation in nearby homes and water sources. Due to over four decades of uranium mining that supplied the US government and industry for nuclear weapons and energy, radiation illnesses characterize everyday Diné life. […]

The nonprofit Navajo Water Project says the Diné are 67 times more likely to be without running water or a toilet connected to sewer lines than others in the United States. As a result, many are forced to drive or even walk several miles to the nearest communal water station. Some instead get water from an unregulated source, like a livestock trough. But research shows uranium mining may have contaminated many wells on the reservation. A large portion of the area’s groundwater has been contaminated with uranium as well as other mining by-products like arsenic that were mobilized by the mining operations, according to researchers who presented their findings at a 2019 American Chemical Society conference. […]

According to a 2019 report by the environmental groups U.S. Water Alliance and DigDeep about access to water, the number of cases for gastric cancers doubled in the 1990s in the Diné areas where uranium mining had taken place. […]

In a study published last August in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, researchers found a relatively high percentage of households on Native American reservations lacked complete indoor plumbing. While only 0.4 percent of homes in the United States lacked indoor plumbing, on Indigenous reservations that number was 1.09 percent. For the Navajo Nation, it was 18 percent. […]

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The Diné have paid a heavy toll during the pandemic.

According to the Navajo Times, there had been at least 27,887 reported positive cases of COVID-19 on the Navajo Nation by late January, including 989 deaths. […]

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The Navajo Nation Council banned uranium mining under the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005, but much of the mining contamination remains. While the Environmental Protection Agency says that $1.7 billion has been secured through legal settlements with mining companies and other agreements dating back to at least 2014 for cleanup at 219 of the 523 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation, the Diné say little of the work has been completed. “The biggest thing is that out of the $1.7 billion dollars I think the total amount that has been spent as of today is $116 million on studies. … Out of the 219 that were funded, not one site is 100 percent ready to be cleaned up,” Navajo Council speaker Seth Damon said last year, according to the Navajo Times. The newspaper reported that the Environmental Protection Agency hopes to begin cleaning up the sites by 2024.

Indigenous organizations are doing a tremendous amount of work to address radiation poisoning and water scarcity in the Diné community. These include the Red Water Pond Road Community Association where activists like Terry Keyanna are fighting for environmental justice every day. The Navajo Water Project, a section of the larger non-profit DigDeep, is doing valuable work to address the lack of access to clean water in the Diné community. Since last March, Gavin Noyes and Woody Lee at Utah Diné Bikeyah have provided food and supplies to more than 800 homes, and delivered “175,000 gallons of new water storage capacity to over 600 families without water.” The Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund is another grassroots organization, started with a GoFundMe page created by former Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch that raises money for two weeks’ worth of food for Diné and Hopi families in self-quarantine. Their work is a pivotal lifeline in pandemic times.

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The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.

Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.

Tw genocide, tw violence

When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.

They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.

Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.

The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.

The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.

And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.

Ew imagine being as ignorant as @displacedandqueer and just believing whatever racist US history you've heard that implies Natives were some dumb savages who didn't explore all their lands and had no concept of territories.

the indigenous people who built those things, wrote those books, started their organizations, made those newspapers, fought for their rights and for those systems to be put in place, and did everything they could to build themselves up after what was done for them: we did that.

This has included:

“In response to Mi’kmaq fishers setting up 150 out of their 350 allowed traps, non-Indigenous fishers gathered at the wharf in Digby to protest.”

“One of the ways Nova Scotian fishers have found it appropriate to protest Mi’kmaq harvesting practices has been to chase down boats and fire flares directly at them. There have also been attempts to ram small boats with much larger vessels.”

Two people being arrested and charged with assault.

“Lobster traps in St. Mary’s Bay were vandalized, their lines were cut, and the traps were left on the shore.”

“Some fishers have posted calls on social media to reimplement the Canadian residential school system, and for other harsh treatment of Indigenous peoples and their children.” 

A lobster boat belonging to a Mi’kmaq fisher has been destroyed by a suspicious fire at a wharf in southwestern Nova Scotia.

These people have the right to sustainably fish on their own land and support their livelihoods. Megan Bailey, professor at Dalhousie University’s Marine Affairs program, an expert, has said that there is no conservation concern as has otherwise been claimed. “The scale of the livelihood fishery as it exists right now with 350 traps is not a conservation concern.”

Ways you can support the Mi’kmaq people (both on this front + other issues):

Treaty Truckhouse Legal Fund - Grassroots Grandmothers, Mi'kmaw Rights Holders and others continue to stand united as water protectors of the Shubenacadie River in the Sipekne'katik District of Mi'kma'ki, where Alton Gas intends to dump salt brine equivalent to 3000 tonnes of hard salt every day.

Another donation link is here, or e-transfers can be sent to [email protected] 

Support for our Eskasoni Mi’kmaq Fishers - Supplying resources for the fishers to continue the battle to have access to moderate livelihood fishery.

Mi’kmaq Fishers: To show support you can donate funds via e-transfer to the following emails with the message “donation”:

[email protected]

[email protected]

Here’s the Standing Rock Syllabus: 

https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/

Allyship and Solidarity Guidelines of Unsettling America:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/allyship/

Towards Decolonization and Settler Responsibility:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/towards-decolonization-and-settler-responsibility-reflections-on-a-decade-of-indigenous-solidarity-organizing/

Sample Syllabi of the DEcolonization Resource Collection:

https://nationalhistorycenter.org/decolonization-resource-collection-sample-syllabi/

Further Readings:

https://decolonization.wordpress.com/decolonization-readings/

indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex

Autonomously And With Conviction:

follow indigenous news organization on social media.

follow news on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. 

help us claim sovereignty over our land again.

donate to our organizations.

support our businesses.

reblog our art, writing, and creative works.

stand up for our peoples.

come to our rallies and be there for us.

help boost our voices.

it’s a database and info hub for missing and murdered indigenous women. it’s trans inclusive and doing vital work.

i kicked them 10bux. i’m not telling you this because i want to humblebrag about how performatively woke i am, but because there’s research to suggest that the more visibly common/popular an act is, the more likely other people will do it.

this is fucking awful. i have no words. i can’t even think right now. i’m so tired.

if you can, now would be a good time to donate to the Louisville bail fund. hundreds of protesters are currently marching with a long day ahead.

gofundme for jacob blake and his family

petition to charge the cops who shot jacob blake

milwaukee freedom fund: bail funds for protesters in kenosha

call or email kenosha state officials, compiled by twitter user @ankita_71

split a donation to bail funds across the country