Shakespeare Couldn't Spell His Own Name

The medieval peasant I went back in time to give a bag of Doritos to, concerned: what terrible and powerful sorcerers they must have in your age, to be able to veil the vault of heaven itself from view, as you say

Me, sniffling: I didn’t realize, I can’t, it’s so much, I, I… are the chips good, at least?

Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.

I was very struck by the disparity between single and married people for medical outcomes, and your excellent point that the causes of it are so clearly tied to the society we have now.

I think another reason that it's unfair to single folks to stop before we get to the causes of their unequal outcomes -- single people don't just deserve better, they have had better.

One of the goals of the cultural genocide of a settler-colonialist project is to eliminate all knowledge of the victimized group -- both to solidify its current position through an appeal to nature (however artificial that nature might be), but also to cast doubt on the existence or possibility of hope for a different and better life. (It's also uncomfortably common for me to see the settler-colonial project minimize and flatten a diverse and vibrant and living community into a collective of anonymous attributions to "Native Americans", especially online, so I'm going to be really careful here to only speak from my incredibly limited experience.)

So I'd like to share a chahta anumpa, choctaw language, phrase with you -- iyyi kowa. Iyyi means foot, and kowa is to be snapped or broken. It is a phrase that describes the way Choctaw individuals were expected to carry and hold themselves, and treat their community.

It is not unreasonable to dream of better community engagement and support for single people, and it is a consequence of settler-colonialist cultural genocide that we see it as such now!

Service and community is deeply fundamental to the Choctaw spirit, which we say is something that made us and our community stronger. The average life for a Choctaw person was, prior to the 18th century, almost incomparable... There was a radically different definition of personal responsibility and belonging and property, which reflected out into a radically different vision of marriage and community and identity.

And while many USAmericans (myself) and others across the world are certainly now living in a world with little communal care, it's really heartening for me to speak to elders and to read modern and historical documentation of how people have built systems of love and community and care... which can seem radical from some modern perspectives but was and is the everyday life of plenty of folks from Nanih Waiya to Oklahʋmma to all across Liʼkana now!