the general population’s education of indigenous american cultures is literally painful like people walk around not knowing that native americans domesticated dogs and turkeys, that many communities had farms that stretched for hundreds of miles, that many communities had completely terraformed their territories, that there were native trade systems stretching across the continent, that there were native metalsmiths before european arrival, that most native people were multilingual etc
also fed up with peoples assumption that sedentary cultures were “more advanced”. like sure, they had technology that hunter gatherer cultures didn’t, but that’s because the hunter gatherer cultures didn’t need those technologies. hunter gatherer cultures have their own ways of doing things, and they do it that way because it works for them. like what if i called you less advanced because you don’t know how to make a serrated arrowhead, and you don’t know how to work a bow drill or an atlatl or a long bow.
Hey, if you’re non-Native/not indigenous like me, I found this book to be helpful. It comes both as the original text for adult audiences and a version for young people that felt kinda like the history textbook I should have had in fourth-sixth grade.
I believe we currently have no evidence for a separate dog domestication event in the Americas, they likely traveled with humans onto the continent BUT what’s arguably even cooler is that Indigenous peoples of Tierra Del Fuego likely domesticated a completely DIFFERENT canid species, the culpeo! They’re called Fuegian dogs and were sadly eradicated by the europeans..
The llama, alpaca, turkey, fuegian dog, guinea pig, and muscovy duck were all domesticated by indigenous americans. In coastal British Columbia shellfish were farmed and harvested in sea gardens made from rocks and are thousands of years old.
There were also pre-columbian chickens in south america that arrived via trade with polynesians, if you like the blue eggs of the araucana breed you should thank the Mapuche people of Chile!
And that’s not even including the domesticated plants that have become staple ingredients in cuisines across the globe. Potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and chili peppers are all the work of indigenous american agriculture.
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Eliot’s Books (Toronto, Canada) Gustavo Thomas
Throughout her translation of the “Odyssey,” Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented — “radical” in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind.
The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by…
Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above [which I cut because there were a lot] couldn’t be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word they’re translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseus’s nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate (“of many a turn”) and Cook (“of many turns”) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them — poly(“many”), tropos (“turn”) — answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does “a man of many turns” suggest the doubleness of the original word — a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the “Odyssey,” one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?
“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”
Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:
Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.
When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (“wandered … wrecked … where … worked”) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (“Tell me about …” and “Find the beginning”) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer’s polytropos and Odysseus’s complicated nature.
Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson’s choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of “complicated” is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means “to fold together.” No, we don’t think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it’s what we mean: that they’re compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.
“It feels,” I told Wilson, “with your choice of ‘complicated,’ that you planted a flag.”
“It is a flag,” she said.
“It says, ‘Guess what?’ — ”
“ ‘ — this is different.’ ”
This (and other things I’ve read about it) makes me want to read her translation
Oh.
Yes.
Yesssss
If I was really going to be radical,” Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, “I would’ve said, polytropos means ‘straying,’ and andra” — “man,” the poem’s first word — “means ‘husband,’ because in fact andra does also mean ‘husband,’ and I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem.
Oooooh my god yes.
This gave me chills and also it is so ridiculously vindicating to see my “Guy with something wrong with him” theory of ancient literature stated in words by a real academic
I feel like people who enjoy this would also enjoy Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf, which begins with “Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings!”
Source: The New York Times
Caillebotte's Floor Scrapers, one of my favorite paintings on the planet. When I look at it I think, I see the same beauty he saw. I didn't even know it was here. In person it's even better -- luminous and grey at the same time.
[ID: a painting of three men refinishing a wooden floor; they are kneeling, shirtless, and the gleam of their skin matches the floor's alternating matte and shine. Behind them is a window that lights them; to the right is a bottle of wine for breaks.]
the sun mourns in vain for the white-throated rail: a comic about disability and the unwanted able-bodied grief for past selves.
[IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Page 1: The sun holds a white-throated rail, a bird with a red head, a gray body, and a white throat, in its hands. The sun speaks in a tone represented as sorrowful pity through a drippy speech bubble.
Sun: Looking at you makes me sad!
Rail: What?
Page 2:
Sun: Looking at you makes me sad!
The sun stands with a hand clutching its face.
Sun: How miserable it must be to be flightless! Don’t you yearn for the skies? Don’t you wake up grieving you’re still on land?
Page 3: The white-throated rail looks down in frustration in the hand of the sun.
Sun: (speaking off screen) I’d simply perish if I were you!
The rail speaks, looking down. Pink flowers bloom towards the bottom of the page, petals and pollen blowing in the wind.
Rail: Why do you put your words in my beak and your grief in my feathers? Am I not beautiful?
Page 4: The bone of a white-throated rail is positioned against a colorful galaxy dotted with flecks of stars.
Rail: Am I not adaptability in action? Am I not evolution in motion? Do you mourn the days you weren’t a star? Do you mourn when the sky was cold, how unbearably hot you must burn to keep embracing it every day?
Page 5: The sun looks at the viewer.
Sun: Why would I? That was then, this is now. I am content to be in this state.
Page 6: The rail looks up at the sun off-screen.
Rail: Well…So am I.
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The most ridiculous thing about this shit is that the idea that skeletal remains can be easily and unambiguously 'sexed' is absolutely bunkus
In 1972, Kenneth Weiss, now a professor emeritus of anthropology and genetics at Pennsylvania State University, noticed that there were about 12 percent more male skeletons than females reported at archaeological sites. This seemed odd, since the proportion of men to women should have been about half and half. The reason for the bias, Weiss concluded, was an “irresistible temptation in many cases to call doubtful specimens male.” For example, a particularly tall, narrow-hipped woman might be mistakenly cataloged as a man. After Weiss published about this male bias, research practices began to change. In 1993, 21 years later, the aptly named Karen Bone, then a master’s student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, examined a more recent dataset and found that the bias had declined: The ratio of male to female skeletons had balanced out. In part that might be because of better, more accurate ways of sexing skeletons. But also, when I went back through the papers Bone cited, I noticed there were more individuals categorized as “indeterminate” after 1972 and basically none prior.
Allowing skeletons to remain unsexed, or “indeterminate,” reflects an acceptance of the variability and overlap between the sexes. It does not necessarily mean that the skeletons classified this way are, in fact, neither male nor female, but it does mean that there is no clear or easy way to tell the difference. As science and social change in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that sex is complicated, the category of “indeterminate sex” individuals in skeletal research became more common and improved scientific accuracy.
Source: https://www.sapiens.org/biology/intersex-biological-sex/
Cis transphobes, you too could have your skeleton miscategorised hundreds of years after your death, because neither gender nor sex are the clear binaries you want them to be. Which you would know if your view of science in these fields wasn't perpetually stuck in the first half of the 20th century.
(another good article from Sapiens on transgender perspectives on archaeology/anthropology - https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/transgender-people-exist-in-history/ )
Anyway I just wanted to put this here to say that the assholes who go "when they find your bones" aren't even correct, in recent decades that narrow approach has been challenged in the fields of archaeology and anthropology, and don't let anyone invalidate the joy we feel in life.
Trans joy now and forever.
Yes!!!!
A) not all archaeologists are osteoarchaeologists
B) the ones that are, are aware of ambiguity in human bones!! Which exists! This is like osteo-archaeology 101 (literally my intro bones & stones class covered this. It was "likely," this or that, not guaranteed).
C) all of them can conceive of human remains in context of how they were found meaning that a good archaeologist doesn't just look at a pelvis and declare the sex of the skeleton and that's all they ever study or do. ....that would be silly and also pointless. Archaeologists are gonna look at lots of things. They're going to look at epitaphs/tombstones, burial objects, clothing, location of burial, etc etc.
Like if an archaeologist digs up a person whose tombstone says "loving daughter, friend, sister, she will be missed," and that person's pelvis isn't as wide as expected they're going to get laughed at if they declare that the skeleton is actually a man on the basis of ignoring literally all other data points and the fact that outliers exist all the time.
An archaeologist might be able to gather enough data to argue: "this person could have been/was likely a trans woman, and here's what we know about their life, and they existed back then, and here's how they were honored in death." But it won't be done by bone size alone, and also... just shows trans people exist and are real and have history.
terfs just hate admitting science might validate trans existence as legitimate and real. But science doesn't work by running around making claims and then forcing evidence to fit those claims.
I know I've been over this but man HRT is good stuff. I wanna shake the hand of whoever invented it. It's a crime that I don't know who that is actually. They're more important than Einstein
id also been really curious about the history of hrt so i had some tabs open:
The first hrt treatments were mostly estrogen extracted during pregnancies to be used for menopause symptoms, but the first usage of those medicines for trans women is credited to the world's first Trans Clinic, opened in pre-WW2 Germany by Magnus Hirschfield, a gay jewish man.
Oh he looks delightful
Thank you grandpa
The comparasion to Einstein was actually made at the time too! He was commonly refered to as “the Einstein of sex”, to which he supposedly once replied that he would rather Einstein be called “the Hirschfeld of physics” lmao
Oh my god
The story of the Institute of Sexology should be mandatory learning in all schools. It is arguably where the science of gender and sex were codified and became a field, featuring such hits as development of HRT, gender affirming surgeries like top surgery and bottom surgery, and understanding of gender and sex which were inclusive of gay, bisexual, asexual, trans identities, etc. Hirschfeld advocated free sex education and contraceptives, and destigmatization of LGBT identities. He coined transsexual, as a departure from transvestite, and wrote medical passes for trans people to show police who would hassle them for crissdressing.
The Institute of Sexology, was burned by the Nazi regime. It was one of the earliest targets and one of the biggest, of the book burning efforts, and the majority of photos depicting Nazi book burnings were from that one specific event. It had medical research, records, case studies. The burning of the Institute set back the entire scientific field entire decades.
A Girl Standing in the Wind, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1893
