As if.

“I feel strongly about the fact that it takes a certain amount of privilege for many of us to put life on hold and get outdoors, so I also share photos of my experiences in the outdoors to include those who couldn’t come along.” 

White women, do me a favor and read this.

This line, in particular, gutted me:

We eat eggs and I tell Y about how when I was 8 years old, I taught my white friend, B (actually called Becky), how to count to 10 in Urdu. How at school the next day she looked at her feet as she shuffled past me, and the white teacher pulled me aside and asked me why I was bullying Becky, because Becky’s mum said I was bullying Becky, and that maybe it would be best if I didn’t sit next to her anymore. She suggested this with the kind of half-arsed, sad-eyed, apologetic shrug that white women perform when it is less of a scene to administer psychological warfare against a brown child than it is to challenge your fellow white woman.

This is the year 2017 and I’m still having to yell about how ridiculous Maya extinction myths are and tell people we are ‘Maya’ not ‘Mayan’. I’m not saying shame shame if anyone reads this and didn’t know. I’m so angry concerning how slowly these issues are being picked up by educational institutions, at how often I have to bring these things up to higher education professors.

We are a massive massive group of peoples. One of the largest Indigenous groups in the Americas. Wikipedia cites 7 million or so of us total but honestly that’s way off because that’s about how many Maya folks there are in Guatemala alone.

We’re not dead. The Maya did not ‘mysteriously disappear’. We did not ‘fall’. We did not fade into obscurity. We’ve led revolts and rebellions against colonial powers for hundreds of years. We’ve had a big hand in shaping legislative definitions and protections for Indigenous Peoples in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

We haven’t lost our cultures. We’re constantly threatened and experience a lot of violence and have our resources stolen but we are still very much alive and our cultures have persisted.

And don’t even try me with the whole “Oh well we mean your CIVILIZATION disappeared, not you.” The structure of our societies and layout of our network changed and decentralized in many areas. That didn’t make us turn invisible. That didn’t make us not still be large in numbers with a relationship with our lands and lose influence in the areas we live. We still held power in large cities way after what people like to cite as “the fall of the Maya Civilization” (around 600-900 A.D. when we still had cities that we held power of until nearly 1700 when the last was “conquered” by Spain.)

Which brings me to the next issue. Being “conquered” or having a colonial government installed does not erase Indigenous societies or civilizations. That’s an extremely eurocentric way of thinking. We didn’t suddenly turn into Spaniards. We still had massive amounts of towns and villages with leaders. We still had our cultures, our trade, our networks, our influence, while Spain focused on putting up flags in our cities.

So yeah. All your history books have you all convinced that an extremely large group of people, with a greater population than more than half of the countries in Europe, all died out 1100 years ago.

Caste War of Yucatán

Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Maya Farmers & Beekeepers vs. Monsanto

You will be blocked if:

- You think it’s your place to educate me on my own people and culture.

- You infer in any way that I am not educated enough to criticize the way my people are framed and discussed in mainstream social studies or to criticize academia in general.

- You think you need to explain to me what civilizations or empires are or the popular social structure categories. If I didn’t know them I wouldn’t be criticizing their definitions/use/focus.

- You come at me with “not all history books”, “not all historians”, “not all professors” to dismiss my point about a broad institutionalized issue. If you can’t get past that someone saying “you all/y’all” doesn’t mean every single person everywhere then I don’t know how to help you.

We are a group of Peoples. Plural. Maya Peoples/Pueblos. We have different names. I am Maya (Maaya, Yucatec). My great grandmother is K’iche’. I have Tzeltal cousins. I have Mopan, Tzotzil, and Mam friends. We’re all Maya.