Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff

The Sameer Project

Dahnoun Mutual Aid

Mona's Initiative

Hussein Team

Last Thursday, there was heavy rain in Gaza. Israelis bombed a residential block very near to where Mahrah and her parents are sheltered. Panic gripped her family.

Her brother Mahmoud posted about this on tumblr from the account they share, and then staff immediately banned their blog as part of a broader racist campaign against Palestinians.

Here's one.

Aanin.

In Ojibwe my native language it's a greeting that usually is just meant to say hi or welcome. But it's older translation means something that's more like "I see your light" or "I see you."

It was a way of recognizing a person while also showing respect for their personhood.

I'm two spirit.

Do you see me? Do you see my light? If I said aanin to you, could you say it back?

Do you want to?

•••

If studies on gender, work/job inequalities, sexuality, hate crimes, assault, population, education levels, or other demographic based statistics include you then you have the privilege of being seen within systemic oppression.

Perhaps you entirely lack systemic power, but at the very least you don't lack visibility. You have the ability to reference objective sources that you can use to prove that not only your oppression exists, but that you exist and deserve to be cared about.

I'm two spirit which makes me part of a demographic that not only is never included in studies or statistics, but that is also left out of even feminist analysis. The exception to that being when the person writing the analysis is intentionally making the point that white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and/or racism are all tools of colonialism that must be deconstructed.

Anti-colonial understandings should be the standard of feminist and gender analysis, especially if feminism is to serve all women.

There are so, so many indigenous genders and expressions that are never ever talked about, known, or accepted outside of their own tribes or people.

This is a failing.

The vague expression that "queer ppl have always been here" is a popular slogan and so often indigenous people are used like tools to prove that point, but nobody can name what makes us queer or asks if we even want to be considered queer. Nobody seems to notice the way we are only ever acknowledged to prove the important of someone else.

To know nothing about us, our values, the ways we serve our communities, or our personhood while using us as tools in debates is just another racist way objectifying us without having to actually care about us.

So few people stop to think about the word queer itself, who it describes, or what queer people are being compared to, where those things come from, or perhaps most importantly: why. So few people stop to think about those of us who consider ourselves outside of all that. By that I mean queerness, being straight, the definitions of man and woman, being cis, etc. Those are all labels and ideas that stem from a colonial and oppressive framework of understanding gender, sexuality, societal expectations, and identity.

So it makes sense that this framework never ever includes people like me, someone from a people that colonialism actively targeted from the very beginning.

I say knowing exactly how indigenous kids were forced to conform to these standards in boarding & residential schools.

So it isn't a mistake nor is it a coincidence that people with indigenous genders, sexualities, or identities are never included.

They still don't want us to exist.

I know it seems like I'm asking for acceptance into that framework. So let me be clear that I am absolutely not. I don't want my indigeneity to be absorbed into the same exact framework that has always sought to oppress, suppress, subjugate, and erase my people.

I don't want my oppression to be inclusive of me. What I want is liberation and not just for me but for all indigenous peoples regardless of their gender, sexuality, or identity.

And to have that first we must be recognized, cared about, heard.

We need to be seen.

Prices in Gaza have started to rise unusually, and goods have almost disappeared from the markets. Types of vegetables are scarce and expensive, and meats have vanished from the markets too. I mean, what's happening is the beginning of a new famine; food is expensive and scarce in the markets!

Every help is appreciated guys you can DONATE HERE

Children dying from the cold, mothers screaming in pain and anguish, men praying to their Lord against injustice, the elderly groaning, the sick praying to their Lord to ease their pain and cold—all this in the tents.

Your donation and participation are very important; my family survived death due to the rain, floods, and cold.

(the sefaradi pronunciation is cuz maskilim were stupid orientalist self-hating morons who dovetailed with the dominant goyishe european orientalist idea that sefaradi hebrew was "pure/real" while ashkenazi hebrew was "corrupted/butchered" but that's a whole nother post - but suffice it to say that the majority of the "first speakers" of israeli hebrew were simply ashkenazi settlers who dutifully stopped speaking yiddish as a vernacular and shifted the same hebrew that they had used for prayer and liturgical purposes as well as for religious discourse and as a lingua franca to that purpose instead - in many cases even with the ashkenazi pronuciation before getting browbeaten into speaking it "properly" (sefaradically))

the idea of it being a "conlang" is a telephoned version of a zionist mystification of its de-diglossification in service of the zionist nation-building project and its goal of imposing zionist hegemony via linguistic homogenization upon global jewry; for this purpose, in line with the negation of jewish diasporic history/culture, a myth of a "miraculously revived dead language" was spread, seeking to replace and erase not only the diasporic vernacular components of jewish diglossias (eg. yiddish, judeo-arabic, spanyol, etc) but also to characterize the language that millions of jews have spoken in a wide variety of contexts for the last two millennia as but a pale shade of the "real thing" (monoglossic hebrew used as a vernacular) and homogenize the unique hebrew dialects in each di/triglossia into a single israeli ideal. the ostensibly antizionist version of this myth buys this farcical narrative hook line and sinker and then goes uh but that's like, bad, actually,

this also has major implications for legitimate native language revival and revitalization projects cuz this myth is so widespread that it is super common for ppl seeking to run these kinds of projects to get suckered into taking advice from ulpans for a bit before realizing that it is not even close to a revival. or a conlang for that matter! i hope this will become less common now at least that antizionism is more widespread

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