Arrested For Autism Crimes

i was incredibly dysphoric about my round face and softer features until i started looking at the faces of hispanic men and realized that those features weren’t feminine at all, they were ethnic features white supremacy had conditioned me to see as less masculine

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

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In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off. 

For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished - usually with a beating. 

Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.

And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.

People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents. 

Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can. 

I also remember a guy whose tiktok was dedicated to showing indian recipes that were slowly being lost because of english and other dominant languages drowning out the language of the culture that made them.

And I remember in my breton class learning about AAVE through US rap, and about how shaming the use of a language or dialect as wrong and/or stupider is also about shaming a culture out of existence; and then I learned about how killing breton was as much about closing schools and forcing administration to be done in french as it was about shaming people who spoke it. There is a well known 1900s school poster with a rule on it that goes “no spitting on the floor and no speaking breton”, and the punishment for either was a whack on the tips of the fingers with a wooden ruler. Breton was called the language of pigs and geese. There’s still insulting words existing in french language that were about bretons, like plouc (a rural and stupid person) or baragouiner (to speak unintelligibly). And then I remember learning about the colonisation of Africa by France and the methods that were used to smother the languages there too.

A language dying is a normal part of life: it usually evolves into something else, like latin giving us a bunch of languages, and historians can reverse engineer it through those languages. A language being killed means nothing of the sort gets left behind. It means meeting an 80yo grandma with alzheimer who cries to a 14yo me because she’s ashamed of remembering a word in her “dirty” mother tongue but not in french. It means learning about the almost century where a language that still has alive native speakers has stagnated so badly that in the early 2010s it still didn’t have a word for computer. It’s learning about how historians were touring retirements homes in hopes that someone there could help them translate documents dating WWI, because the main form of language conservation for breton in the 20th century was oral transmission.

i did see some users in the notes who were concerned about her looking 'scrawny', or wondering if she's maybe a juvenile -- far from it! at 15, joanne is very much considered a geriatric tiger; she's a grandma. she is, however, a sumatran tiger (panthera tigris sumatrae) -- sumatrans are the smallest extant subspecies of tiger, built more for the sweltering jungles of sumatra than the blistering cold of the amur river or the dense forests and mangrove swamps of south asia.

start being comfortable posting Black people's words in your blogs, the same way you'll reblog posts about transness, gayness, disability, because these specific topics can affect you

I have some gigs lined up this month, but if folks are able to pitch in a little bit it’d really take a lot of stress off. A lot of things have changed for us financially in a short period of time and I fear this may continue to happen for a bit. I know times are tough for literally everyone right now, but basically if like 85 or so people chip in $5 each we’d be golden. Which is to say I have a goal of $425, but honestly anything at all towards that would help a lot! thank you!

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