#decoloniality

URGENT MUTUAL AID REQUEST

My friend X-Savior has been severely struggling with homelessness since last year. She is a Black Trans Femme artist and needs at least $5,000 to secure permanent housing.

It is very unsustainable when her only shelter she can access is paying $75 for a hotel every night. She cannot access work and is constantly dipping into her savings, on the brink of being out on the streets. I don't want that for her and it is SICKENING that I can reach 300-500+ accounts on my Instagram posts on behalf of her, but almost all of them are NOT acting.

If all (or almost all) those potential people donated at least $1, $5, $10, or $20 (or more if they could/wanted to), we could significantly put a dent in or even exceed her goal very quickly. WE ARE SICK AND TIRED OF BYSTANDERS.

To be found on my new Substack:

1 – Folk culture is timeless: it exists then and now, here and there. It has roots but is emerging in the ever unfolding present, connecting everything and everyone.

2 – Folk culture is elusive, existing in one discipline or artform, and in another. We therefore require cross-disciplinary approaches to study and engage with it. Where it is found in language, it is found in song, and in recipes and food culture. Where it is found in food culture it is found in plant-lore and herbology. Where it is found in plant-lore it is found in ecology. Adding to and receiving from Folk Culture is highly reduced when looking through a single lens, therefore...

3 – Folk culture is collaborative.

4 – Folk thrives on inclusivity and openness. There are cases where, in it's openness, it is threatened by a dominant and colonialist culture and must go underground to survive or otherwise limit who can engage with it. But where it is not immediately threatened, if it is hidden it is starved. If folk culture is made exclusive, it stagnates, because it limits the wealth of voices and lives contributing to it. And if made exclusive for xenophobic, sexist, racist, and queerphobic reasons, it dies. Because those are based on values antithetical to collaborative creativity and cultural development. Just how creative can such an in-group really be..?

Dismantle Israel

What, then, are the cultural criteria of Indianness à la the law of the white? As has been a typical feature of the discourses of dominance throughout the Western Hemisphere, Indians are imagined as ‘‘primitive/traditional’’ in the sense of being outside of and in binary opposition to ‘‘civilization/modernity.’’ It is a representational order ‘‘predicated upon a structure of opposites’’ in which ‘‘the ‘savage’ [is] defined against what the perceiving’’ non-Indian Brazilians ‘‘[understand] themselves to be.’’ If Indians participate in professions, use technology, wear clothes, and inhabit urban geographies (which denote modernity), then they are not considered Indian [...] As Eliane Potiguara, a Potiguara Indian who resides in Rio de Janeiro, notes,

Many people in Brazil were once torn away from their communities, and they later suffered much discrimination trying to recover their loss. For example, we spend most of our lives trying to reaffirm that we are Indians, and then we encounter statements like, ‘But if you wear jeans, a watch, sneakers, and speak Portuguese…’ Society either understands Indians all made-up and naked inside the forest or consigns them to the border of big cities.

Indians, then, are not imagined as catching the subway, drinking soda, piloting airplanes, using credit cards, watching television, and so on. They are also not thought of as being doctors, college students, janitors, maids, factory workers, or lawyers. Indians are not considered to be residents of urban shantytowns, beachfront resorts, suburban homes, or plantation estates. To live in these so-called civilized spaces, to be in these allegedly modern occupations, to possess the latest consumer goods of the global economy, renders someone non-Indian. […] To be an authentic Indian, one must live like a primitive in a traditional manner. One must embody the antiself of civilization, which in Brazil means living in a hut in the middle of the forest, naked, and with no contemporary technological conveniences.

[...]

Posttraditional Indians live in the rubble of tradition. Many, if not most, of their tribal traditions, epistemologies, languages, religions, stories, and philosophies have been crushed by conquest rather than water. José, a forty-four-year-old subsistence farmer and Xacriabá leader I interviewed in 1995, quantified the degree of this fragmentation as having ‘‘lost 90 percent of what we were.’’ Thus, the traditions of posttraditional Indians are not complete languages but sometimes only sets of words, not intact religions but only the memory of a sole trickster figure or ceremonial dance, not a comprehensive knowledge of all the vegetation in an area but the understanding of the medicinal use of a few local plants, not a family heirloom but a pottery shard found in an abandoned field or the story of a battle lost.

Salvinho Pataxó, a subsistence farmer and community leader, described the posttraditional condition in the following manner:

The Indian from the east and northeast is an Indian who has always endured massacres. […] But still the people say that we’re not real Indians because we wear shorts, sneakers, put a watch on our arms. But in reality, all of this is meaningless. What matters is the root that comes from there [he points to the ground], underneath our community, the root that comes from our ancestors.

[…] Posttraditionality is not simply a question of living in the ruins of tradition, for such an individual might be nontraditional or antitraditional. There is instead another component to posttraditionalism: the meanings that one ascribes to these ruins. To be a posttraditional Indian is to regard these fragments and shadows of tradition as relevant or important, to embrace, privilege, and value them. It is to define one’s indigenous ancestral roots as essential to one’s identity, to make them the anchor of one’s dreams and future, and to work toward their recovery. In Salvinho Pataxó’s words:

Our dream is always to fight to defend our parente [kin], to unite our community. To try and recover my language, my culture, and my history, this is the future that I’m working toward. This is the future of my dreams.

My use of tradition, then, is not meant to invoke this notion of static, timeless, primordial Indians positioned in opposition to the most current constructions of modernity. Nor do I wish to imply that posttraditional Indians are inauthentic or less authentic Indians. In other words, I am not suggesting a view of traditional that implies an underlying schema in which real Indians are only those who have putatively remained ‘‘securely located outside modern societal boundaries’’ and as such, are able to be considered biologically and culturally ‘‘pure.’’

Empires and their hunger for conquering, subduing and imprinting their bias and ideals on others may have eradicated acceptance within most cultures, but there are still those that persevered against all odds... Pit a bigoted empire with iron tools, numbers & gunpowder against a bunch of small tribes–who will win? Most of the time, the answer is obvious, but the odd victory does come to the tribe and we mustn't forget that! Nevermind the disease they brought to people whose immune systems weren't privy to... What those big bullies did to pick on the smaller folk who just wanted to be left alone is nothing more than cowardly and contemptible acts... It is babyish to impose your own bias by way of bloody, razing warfare and all the disgusting horrors that always follow suit like a rotten shadowy tail. What Rome—& later additionally ignorant, narrow-minded empires—did starting 2000+ years ago with their conqueror's mindset was spread around their ideals, imposing them on people that they weren't natural to—who could say classism and division by sex is natural, anyway—and up-ended the natural way of life for many, such as the celtic & Germanic tribes, who had same sex relations in abundance and much equality between women and men, the former even allowing women as leaders & having strong personalities in public life... A German tribe, the Nahanarvali, seemingly had acceptance of gender/sex diversity, and the celts may have, aswell, though their detailed history, aswell as that of the Germanic tribes, is quite obscured and most of it sadly lost... By the first century AD, same sex relations were seemingly viewed quite negatively within most Germanic tribes, so a shift occurred at some point—older sources show that it was prevalent... It is detailed by 1st century & later writers that it was now death penalty within these tribes to have same sex relations... Would this apparent shift be the reason the ancient Norse or Northern European viking folks were so ungodly homophobic & despising of femininity in men so much that it was seen as a grave & serious accusation to call another man feminine?

What then happened after that whole fiasco was a bunch of empires even worse than Rome forming, such as the Spanish, English, Portuguese, Belg-- idk Belgianese (???). Europe's entire history after this for centuries is just war, war, five years of peace, war war war.... You'd think they'd learn, but no! Kept going the same way over and over again, expecting shit to change... But there was constant off with the king's head and off with the queen's head and the common man always suffered the brunt of it—the way these so previously praised empires functioned simply was and never could be sustainable...