#indigeneity

There are over 5,600 recorded missing Indigenous women, girls, Two-spirit, and LGBTQIA+ folks in the USA, and over 4,000 in Canada.

Indigenous women in the USA have murder rates over 10 times the national average.

Okay I know I've seen this post before but as usual the search function is failing me. There was a post I saw (albeit a while ago) quoting an indigenous professor from I think UC Berkeley?? who was speaking on a panel discussion about diaspora ethnic communities and who realised that the diaspora that no one was actually speaking about was the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant one and when she stood up and said she was going to speak on it the panel got real awkward bc they initially treated that like it wasn't a diaspora, until she pointed out that if she spoke about her own people's dances and culture that wouldn't be a diaspora because they were the native people here, and only after that particular elephant in the room had been addressed could a real open conversation about the nature of diaspora and ethnicity happen, and she felt it her duty to make sure the native students who looked up to her felt safe to stand their ground as she stood hers. I know this post exists somewhere on here and it will have the source but I have searched everything I can think of and I can't find it.

✨two spirit appreciation post ✨

first lets talk about what 2 spirit and why the term is important

a lot of people here on turtle island tend to have very black and white perspectives on sex and gender and gendered roles in american society but when people say gender is a social construct thats not just a catchy slogan it is something purposefully constructed that changes over time with societal values and it is a fairly new social construct especially within the context of turtle island

before colonization the social values held around gender sex and gender roles held by the people indigenous to this land were incredibly varied and complex and specific to each groups cultural and spiritual beliefs and values but they were overwhelmingly beliefs that not only viewed sex and gender as complex and fluid but celebrated those born with complex relationships with sex and gender and saw them as important spiritual members of their communities

after colonization indigenous people were killed en masse and separated children from their families in order to force their children into boarding schools because only through force and violence could colonizers make it seem as if their own cultural and societal values were not only normal and rational but righteous and moral

if sex and gender were truly binary and men belonged at the top of our societal hierarchy naturally and women were made to be subservient to men if these were truly normal civilized and natural ways of viewing the world it would not require genocide in order to enforce it

2 spirit describes an anti colonial movement within indigenous communities in attempt to form community around indigenous spiritual and cultural beliefs around sex and gender based on their own cultural and religious histories

2 spirit typically describes someone who holds both feminine and masculine spirits simultaneously but it has a wide range of meanings related to individual cultural beliefs

2 spirit is a term for indigenous people based on the history of indigenous peoples and only indigenous people can claim this identity

while the vast array of experiences 2 spirit can describe have existed long before colonization and have deep roots in each respective culture the term 2 spirit itself was coined by Anishinaabe elder Myra Laramee in 1990 During the Third Annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference the term 2 spirit comes from the Anishnaabemowin term niizh manidoowag which literally translates to two-spirits

not all 2 spirit people consider themselves trans or even queer and as these spiritual and cultural beliefs long outdate the modern trans or queer communities its frankly completely understandable as these identities are a natural part of their own culture

the issues 2 spirit indigenous people face and their issues are absolutely issues important to and similar to the struggles of trans people as a whole not only are 2 spirit identities counter to american beliefs about sex and gender and as a result gender expression in 2 spirit indigenous people specifically is often punished but gender expression within indigenous communities even outside of 2 spirit peoples is often punished by american patriarchy as american views around sex and gender are structurally imperialist euro centric and white supremacist and has no allowance for cultural diversity in terms of sex and gender

the laws and policies around sex and gender that disadvantage women at the expense of men that punish diversity in gender expression and identity are antithetical to many indigenous peoples core cultural and spiritual values and decolonizing our views around sex and gender is incredibly important for us to do within our own queer communities

2 spirit as a term also isnt meant to replace other terms from indigenous communities that describe cultural spiritual and historical beliefs around sex gender and gender expectations and there are many terms that are used to describe fluidity in gender and gender roles in their respective cultures such as

agokwe agokwe-nini okitcitakwe and ogokwe in Anishinaabemowin

etuijijaqimijinui'k and l'nuk in Mi'kmaq

nàdleehé in Dine or Navajo

aayahkwew Înahpîkasoht napêhkân iskwewak napêw iskwêwisêhot and iskwêw ka napêwayat in Cree and Plains Cree

winyanktehca winkte winkta and wintike in Dakota

sipiniq arnaasiaq angutaasiaq and choupan in Inuktitut

tuučuk and čakusšƛ in Nuuh-chah-nulth

titqattek in Ktunaxa

aakíí’skassi in Siksikáí’powahsin

miáti in Hidatsa

and many many more

2 spirit people across tribes and cultures and religions you belong in our community

trans people should absolutely be fighting for the rights and issues of indigenous folks but especially for those of our 2 spirit siblings

the trans community could absolutely learn quite a few things from 2 spirit elders about sex and gender and how to deconstruct our views around them

anti colonialism and anti imperialism are trans issues

and a world where first nations and inuit peoples have sovereignty over their own lands is one that benefits us all especially as queer people

Winter Solstice 2024

It is cold and it is dark, but the Winter Solstice brings the promise of light's return and the warming of our world. To celebrate this most important day, we feature a naturally-dyed wool weaving entitled Náhookǫsji Hai (Winter in the North) / Biboon Giiwedinong (It is Winter in the North) held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) and produced by Navajo artist D. Y. Begay in 2018. This image, which is only a portion of the slightly larger work, is from our copy of the exhibition catalog Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists edited by Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Kiowa) and published by the MIA in association with the University of Washington Press in 2019.

D.Y. Begay (b. 1953), a Navajo born to the Totsohni’ (Big Water) Clan and born for the Tachinii’ (Red Running into Earth) Clan, is a fourth-generation weaver. Begay’s tapestries encompass her interpretation of the natural beauty and descriptive colors of the Navajo reservation, reflecting on her Navajo identity and her family’s weaving tradition. This spiritual connection to the plants yields the natural colors that are transformed into evocative land formations on her loom. Of the weaving shown here, Jennifer McLerran, curator at the Museum of Northern Arizona and a retired assistant professor of art history at Northern Arizona University, writes:

Most of D. Y. Begay's textiles respond to the Southwest landscape in which she was raised and resides today. For this work, a textile produced with all-natural dyes and handspun wool, Begay traveled to Minnesota in the depths of winter to observe the land surrounding the Grand Portage Indian Reservation of the Ojibwe people. Over an extended period she observed changing light conditions as the sun and clouds moved across the sky, altering the hues of snow and water.

D. Y. Begay with her weaving Confluence of Lavender by Arizona videographer Kelso Meyer, 2016. From the University of Virginia Mellon Indigenous Arts Program.

We wish you a most serene Winter Solstice.

View posts from Winter Solstices past.

We're going to set aside the UN notion of indigenous because that's crafted to exclude Jews and often enough this is a statement by people who reject that and consider Jews to be indigenous, they're often saying both groups are. So...I guess that means something like "A group is indigenous to the region where they underwent ethnogenesis" so we'll take that as our definition of indigeneity. Jews are indigenous to the Levant, check. We're good. Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. All makes sense.

So, anyway, what's an ethnic group? From Wikipedia:

An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a people of a common language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment.[

Ok, so common language, culture, traditions, history, etc.

So European American Protestants are indigenous to North America? Common history (going back to the 1600s!), identify as a group, believe they have a common culture (even if we need to break things up more finely, you can find common cultures, say, New England, or Midwest, wee American Nations), common language (English, which I will posit is part of why there's basically a moral panic about Spanish and has been almost my entire life, in much of the country). Note that an ethnicity "can include" and doesn't need ALL of these things.

So it seems pretty solid that European American Protestants are, at the least, a collection of ethnic groups unique to North America. Which means they did ethnogenesis here. Which means they're indigenous now.

So...let's be clear, to me this is a reductio ad absurdam. OF COURSE white US protestants are not indigenous to North America! But I've yet to see definitions that mark Palestinian Arabs as indigenous to the Levant without also implying that white Americans are indigenous to fucking Ohio (along with the rest of the country).

Especially when you consider that white american protestant as an identity in this sense is older than a distinct Palestinian identity. It just brings us to the eternal questions that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict brings up and that people REALLY don't want to discuss:

When, if ever, does indigeneity expire? Personally, I think it doesn't, and Jews are and will always be indigenous to the Levant, just like the Cherokee Nation is indigenous to the US Southeast, even though they've been displaced. Though I know many "Pro-Palestine" activists implicitly believe indigeneity does expire, at least for Jews, but even if I weren't Jewish, I wouldn't want that precedent set because it would fuck over EVERYONE

When does a colonizer become indigenous to the place they colonized? This is rarely discussed, but lies implicitly behind a lot of things. Again, I want to avoid setting bad precedents, but I don't see how Palestinian Arabs can have hit this threshold and white people in the US haven't, which leads me to reject the idea that colonizers can ever become indigenous, at least while holding onto the identity that did the colonization (White and Arab, respectively, hell, White Christian and Arab Muslim if we want to get more specific).