wait tho
pINstripes
aqueous martINis
herrINg houdINi
Things that are in just have “in” in them.
Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine. Photo: Bill Roorbach
virulentblog
Except America wasn’t an endless expanse of forest with no certain borders. At least not while human beings inhabited it. The idea that native peoples did not cultivate or shape our land and that we had no borders is white propaganda meant to dehumanize and de-legitimize native peoples.
This illustration here show Apalachee people using slash and burn methods for agriculture. Fires were set regularly to intention burn down forests and plains. Why would we do this? Well because an unregulated forest isn’t that great for people, actually. We set fires to destroy new forest growth and undergrowth, and to remove trees, allowing for easier game hunting, nutrient enriched soil, and better growth rates for crops and herbs we used in food and medicine.
Pre-Colonial New England, where my tribe the Abenaki are from, looked more like an extensive meadow or savannah with trees growing in pockets and groves. Enough woodland to support birds, deer, and moose, but not too much to make hunting difficult. We carefully shaped the land around us to suit our needs as a thriving and successful people. Slash and burn agriculture was practiced virtually everywhere in the new world, from the pacific coast to chesapeake bay, from panama to quebec. It was a highly successful way of revitalizing the land and promoting crop growth, as well as preventing massive forest fires that thrive in unregulated forests. Berries were the major source of fruit for my tribe, and we needed to burn the undergrowth so they could grow.
That changed when white people invaded, and brought with them disease. In my tribe, up to 9 in 10 people died. 90% of our people perished not from violence starvation, but from disease. Entire villages would be decimated, struck down by small pox. Suddenly, we couldn’t care for the land anymore. There weren’t enough of us to maintain a vast, carefully structured ecological system like we had for thousands of years. We didn’t have the numbers, or strength. So the trees grew back and unregulated. We couldn’t set fires anymore, and we couldn’t cultivate the land. And white people would make certain we never could again. Timber, after all, was the most important export from New England.
Endless trees and untamed wilderness is a nice fantasy. But it’s a very white fantasy, one that erases the history of my people and of my land. One that paints native peoples are merely parasites leeching off the land, not masters of the earth who new the right balance of hunting and agriculture. It robs us of our agency as people, and takes our accomplishments from us. Moreover, it implies that only white people ever discovered the power to shape the world around them, and that mere brown people can’t possibly have had anything to do with changing our environment.
Don’t bring back untamed wilderness. Bring back my fire setters, my tree sappers, my farmers and my fishers. Bring back my people who were here first.
For those curious I recommend reading Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. https://books.google.com/books/about/Changes_in_the_Land.html?id=AHclmuykdBQC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false
my favorite Millennial Thing™ is when a group of us are standing around and talking and someone asks a question that no one knows the answer to and suddenly it’s a race to get out your phone and google it and be the first to know, and then someone starts reading the Wikipedia article about the thing aloud to everyone else, and what started as a casual conversation is now A Learning Opportunity and we all walk away a little more knowledgeable about a random topic
Like, Boomers hate when we do that, but I think it’s one of the best things about us.
So long as we have internet or a cell signal, all of the world’s collective knowledge is at our fingertips, and damned if we aren’t going to use it.
I love kids they’re all like.. “when i grow up i’m gonna be an astronaut and a chef and a doctor and an olympic swimmer” like that self confidence! That drive! That optimism! Where does it go
alex-riko
It gets destroyed by adults not believing in you and telling you to pick a realistic career. And by society creating all these obstacles to the point that you’re too tired to try.
seeminglycaptivating
But they’re not really unrealistic, SOMEBODY is going to be an olympic swimmer and it might as well be you.
seeminglycaptivating
Actually I want to talk about this a little more than I did, because olympic swimming is incredible and works perfectly to talk about attaining goals.
I used to be a varsity swimmer, and I was damn good, but I was forced into it by my parents and completely lost my love for it and therein my drive. But in high school I was swimming against such talented swimmers like Olympic Swimmer Missy Franklin. I’ve met her, and the main difference between her and me was that I was strong but had no passion, but she was strong BECAUSE she had passion.
And I could have been good, really good, maybe even Olympic good. I even have the predisposition for it, been swimming since I was 2 years old, have a mom who was almost an olympic swimmer. Missy didn’t have either of those things, she just wanted it, loved it, had been doing it for a long time, and decided she was going to kick ass at it.
Right, that’s great and all, but I completely missed my opportunity to be an olympic swimmer, yeah? and can never achieve those dreams I had as a kid? No, not even though. There was this whole thought that female athletes peak when they’re 17 years old and lose their skills quickly after that, and male athletes peak around 19. But then Olympic Swimmer Dara Torres shows up. She was an olympic swimmer when she was 17, 21 and 25. Pretty normal age for retirement. She had a few kids. She kicked butt at being a mom.
And then at 33 years old she decides she’s bored or something gets back in shape and kicks so much ass at the trials that she lands herself on the Olympic Team ONCE AGAIN. And then 8 years later, she decides, heck I’m 41 now, no one has ever made the olympic swim team as old as I am, I want to get in shape yet again and teach these children how sports work.
And she still has the record for oldest US Olympic Swimmer, not even any men have beat out that record.
So basically what I’m saying is you could be an olympic swimmer, you really could be. And there are obviously a lot of things stopping you and trying to get in your way: your brain, society, too much chocolate cake for example. But if you really dedicate yourself to it and love it with all of your heart you could, you really could.
And lets say olympic swimming isn’t your jam? That’s cool too. There isn’t a single skill in this world that you can’t learn if you absolutely love it and want to. Any skill you want is going to take time. There are countless famous people who started learning a skill after 20, 30, 40, or even 50. Not a single person has even been president under age 35 (most likely because you’re not allowed to be, but there’s a reason for that). Whatever you want to do you’re probably going to be bad at first, and I’m talking really shitty.
Van Gogh got started in his 20′s and was thought to have no artistic talent at first and was forced to sit in the back of classrooms where the worst artists in the class sat. So yeah you’ll probably be bad, like really bad and everyone including you will think you’re bad. If you stick with it though, if you’re willing to work for years and years, if you keep loving it after all the pain it’s given you,
then you might just paint Starry Night.
I get really confused when americans, when talking about universal health care are like ‘yeh but it’s not free sweaty :) :) you have to pay it through taxes :) so gotcha!!’
and I’m like ….???? That’s the whole point??? Everyone pays their fair share so that no one has to be turned away because they don’t have insurance??? And no one has to set up a Fundraiser page just so that they DONT DIE???? So people don’t put off going to the doctor because they’re scared of going bankrupt?? Because healthcare is a RIGHT and should be free at the point of access?!?
peccatopotpourri
“So no one has to be turned away” she says hahaha go to a universal health care country and get a necessary operation in less than a few years and come back and talk shit.
Look at the cure rates compared to mortality rates in universal health care countries and compare them to ours, then talk shit.
Tear your ACL in a universal health care country and see what the people say if you should go to their hospitals or go to an American hospital, then talk shit.
2010. I’d been feeling a bit ill. Work was going nuts, so I figured it was stress. Pretty good call considering a week later work fired their entire IT department (of which I was part).
But then I got sicker. And it turned out I had cancer.
Burkitt’s lymphoma, stage 4a. It had spread into my brain and spinal column. 90% cure rate, but I needed nine months of chemo - and not the outpatient chemo, nope, talking multiple week stays per round of the magrath protocol. Drugs were about 10k an IV bag. I was unemployed. And there were complications.
Thankfully I live in a country with universal healthcare. And it didn’t cost me a goddamn cent to save my life. I’m now officially past the five year mark to move me from “remission” to “Cured”.
I’ve lived in a universal healthcare country my entire life. And I’ve seen the US system in action. Your system is fucked. Straight up fucked. You’ve got fucking Dickensian shit going on there, people dying on streets from preventable causes or ending up broke for breaking a hip. Your health insurance companies have you by the balls and people like you are begging them to squeeze harder. What the actual fuck is wrong with you?
“But but but TAXESSSSSSSSS”
yeah no shit. That story above? Happened when I was 32. I’d spent 14 years of my life paying those fucking taxes that funded the system that saved my life. And guess what? Now I’m cured, I’m…Back..at work..And have been for several years…earning waaaay more money and paying back into the system. This shit doesn’t exist in a vacuum, dickhead. You’re not feeding some imaginary pack of leeches, you’re paying forward on your own damned healthcare so you don’t have to argue with an insurance company while trying to heal.
bpd-disaster
i also don’t get why americans can’t wrap their heads around the fact that universal healthcare is actually cheaper
like yeah your taxes might go up (hell, take a chunk out of the military budget, they might not even change) but you won’t have to pay ridiculous health insurance premiums. it’s a net saving, dumbasses.
Also I care about people that aren’t me
swordlesbianvraska
Also I care about people that aren’t me
vampireapologist-archive-deacti
today I had a dream that there was a species of deer called “ice deer” and every winter they’d travel up North and have their babies in a frozen cavern and the babies would be sort of comatose in the cold, and then the deer would leave the babies there and migrate South until spring, and just before the first thaw, they’d go back up North and find their babies and wait for them to thaw out and wake up and they’d nurse them.
But with the Earth getting warmer and spring coming sooner and winters being less harsh up North, the babies were starting to thaw out too early, so when the Ice Deer got to them, they’d been awake already and starved to death.
So there were only like, 300 Ice Deer left. They were bigger than elks, all white with blue antlers that even the females grew, and I realized the only solution would be to somehow lead them North every year when it started thawing. As a human I could check the weather and the ice in the North Pole and when it was time to go to the babies, even if the deer thought it was still winter.
So I had to devise a plan to get the Ice Deer to follow me North to their babies on time every spring, and it just became part of my life. I did other stuff and lived life as usual while keeping track of the weather near the end of winter and I’d be like, welp it’s time to lead the deer North, and I’d set out to find their winter home.
And a lot of people were like “this isn’t a permanent solution. We need to focus on climate change so it’s fixed for good.”
and I was like dang I know but the Ice Deer need us right now so, someone’s gotta do it? And it just became a thing I did.
vampireapologist
ppl messaging me like “I thought this was real for a minute”:
salukis look like the dog equivalent of those popular white girls in high school who turn out to be actually really nice when you get around to talking to them on their own and end up doing international studies at uni
kerrchevron
shes a paid employee of amnesty international now
The best murder weapon would be a Tupperware lid because nobody would ever find it.
Veganized Wendy’s Frosty (recipe from pinterest)
¾ cup of almond milk (or other plant based milk)
about 15 ice cubes
½ tsp of vanilla
1-2 tbsp cocoa powder
1/3 banana blended
(comments on pinterest suggest that a sweetener is added by the milk or cocoa, using less ice or frozen banana, and maybe not to expect authenticity–but it is still good)
a-cat-with-antlers
Dunno about anybody else but I’m really iffy with a lot of anti-PETA posts because most of them come from people with an anti-vegan bias and are just thinly veiled shots to discredit the animal rights movement
Not that I support PETA
I’d just prefer to reblog anti-PETA that don’t have some kind of ulterior motive
