/r/Indigenous

Photograph via snooOG

Most People on this planet can call themselves Indigenous somewhere, even the progeny of early British convict migrants forcibly removed from their homeland. Displaced Peoples from their own land however, are still struggling to maintain their survival in dominant cultures that attempt to deny them the right to their culture and assimilate them to avoid the billions they are owed in compensation.

/r/Indigenous

9,280 Subscribers

0

Non-Indigenous Writer Wanting to Write an Indigenous Character...

Hello, I'm an artist/writer whose got a bunch of story ideas in my head that I'm just working on. I'm not Indigenous (not white either btw), but one of my story ideas that I'm really passionate about (Western-based) would feature an Indigenous main character. I've done a lot of research on different aspects of the history behind different tribes (particularly the Blackfoot & Cree Nation), but I'm not sure if it's ethically good to write about them when I'm not part of them.

Am I appropriating their culture for the sake of my story? Is it really my story to tell if the main character is something I'm not? I don't have any Indigenous friends (though I'd really like one to consult with), so is it alright if I keep getting my information from Google? I'm trying to be respectful, but it's a little hard to ensure authenticity sometimes. For instance, I have extremely niche questions that I can't find straightforward answers to, like the naming systems of the Blackfoot people (is it based on physical traits? Special feats done in battles/raids? Vision names? Do babies get one name and then it changes as they get older? Do they have surnames??? Did they get English names in the 1700s-1800s when they were interacting with colonizers? I found two separate names with different meanings, are they right and can I just combine them together?). I can share some of what I've learned from searching things up to check here too, but there's so many questions I have šŸ˜“

I guess I just wanted to ask to get a peace of mind for the subject matter I'm writing so much about. Hopefully I can get an answer here. Thank you!

15 Comments
2024/03/16
06:38 UTC

7

Understanding and re-creating important ceremony tradition within our family and community

Maloā€™ob Kā€™in!

Iā€™m an indigenous woman from a Yuctec Maya family based in Mexico and the States currently.

I am very lucky in that we have always been taught to be proud of our indigenous heritage, and I grew up with Yucatec Maya words sprinkled in a lot with Spanish and English. My grandparents spoke Maya as their dominant language, and we have a lot of knowledge about our family line and family name (Dzib).

There are some ceremonies that are important to us emotionally, including a ceremony related to getting our Nawal (similar to a spirit animal but not the same). My grandmother or parent is the only person who would be able to give me a Nawal, but we donā€™t actually know how this ceremony was done in our area and our nation before colonization. I know many North American natives face similar issues, and from what Iā€™ve read, some natives opt to work with their elders and community on ceremony even if we donā€™t have perfect records of how our ancestors did this.

Are there any stories, resources or insight into what a ceremony like this should entail? I can piece together some information based on academic papers, dissertations, videos, etc, but in English, many of these resources come from white people which bums me out a little bit.

What can I do? Is my attitude appropriate, or do I need to be more mindful? I am somewhat new to reaching out to other Western Hemisphere natives outside of my root community, so if there is anything about my questions that could be alienating to other non-Maya natives, please, please let me know.

Thank you in advance šŸ™

2 Comments
2024/03/15
23:25 UTC

2

Discussion of Call to Action-Canada

Hi, a Grade 11 student here. I study in hogh school. We have been assigned a project to talk about different Call to Actions in progress over Canada. I have chosen Call to Action 22, which states that: ā€œAboriginal Healing practices should be recognized by the Canadian health-care system. The use of healing practices and treatments should be available to Aboriginal patients when requested and this call to action should occur with including collaboration within Aboriginal healers and Elders.ā€ I would love to talk about this Call to Action with someone who is Indigenous, Aboriginal or knows about the traditional healing practices of Indigenous communities. I will record just a quick video/interview of about 5-10 minutes. I will show that video to my class and my peers will get to know more about the Call to Action and healing practices used by the community as a whole. I believe I can talk to you on this CTA, from this subreddit. I would be grateful if someone can help me out. I have tried multiple organizations and multiple indigenous facilities and have not been successful yet. We can do a quick 5-10 minutes virtual online video interview. Thank you

13 Comments
2024/03/15
03:02 UTC

9

The Taiwanese Woman Fighting to Save her Tribeā€™s Food šŸ‡¹šŸ‡¼

0 Comments
2024/03/15
02:44 UTC

9

Should I read Thomas King?

For context, I'm a white Canadian.

Over the last few years I have been intentionally trying to read more books written by Indigenous authors. I love all kinds of fiction and have been really enjoying reading fiction that takes a completely different lens than my own experiences reflect.

Thomas King novels keep coming up under my recommendations on my Kobo so I did a quick Google search and I'm getting some skeevy vibes but not really sure what to think. I was hoping to get some opinions from the fine folks on this sub.

From what I understand, he claims to be Cherokee and Greek but doesn't give much detail on who his Cherokee father was, nor is he claimed by any Nation or group. I'm aware that Cherokee seems to be the go-to claim for a lot of less-than-honest people in the US, and I think it's a bit weird that he's made a name for himself here in Canada as an Indigenous writer.

Thoughts?

Many many thanks!

ETA: if anyone is aware of any good Blackfoot fiction novelists please let me know. I live in Calgary and would love to read some stories stories rooted in Blackfoot knowledge and culture. There seems to be an abundance of Metis authors and quite a few Anishinaabe but that's probably because those are pretty large populations by comparison.

Indigenous authors I've read and enjoyed include:

  • Waubgeshig Rice
  • Eden Robinson
  • Angeline Boulley
  • Cherie Dimaline

Many thanks for the other suggestions some of you have made in your comments :)

16 Comments
2024/03/15
00:37 UTC

18

Internalized racism

I was on the phone with my mom today and she said something that made me really upset. She said "there's a drunken native in the parking lot" and I was shocked to hear this from her because she's native too.... has anyone else experienced this with family members? I don't understand why she would say such a thing about our own people?

14 Comments
2024/03/14
18:23 UTC

2

Coast Salish Star/Constellation Stories

I am of mixed settler/Indigenous ancestry, but do have Indian Status, as per the Canadian Indian Act. I also happen to be a Science teacher who would like to teach something about the traditional knowledge about the stars, especially as it comes from the Coast Salish people. I would love nothing more than to develop a stargazing activity where we use a telescope to look at the stars, and share (appropriately) traditional Coast Salish knowledge at the same time.

Does anyone know of any resources that I could use? I've found stories about the Moon and the Sun, but am really wanting some star/constellation information. I've notice that Cree and Ojibwe resources exist, but can't find anything from the West Coast.

4 Comments
2024/03/14
04:45 UTC

2

How to find someone knowledgeable in indigenous land management?

Hi- I'm chasing leads and thought crowd sourcing an answer might work and this would be the place to go.

I've married into a family that owns a small farm between Tuscaloosa and Montgomery; the last generation that lived there, government land services forced them to log the native trees and then replant non native pine. My husband and I are pretty much devastated over the move now that we have inherited the land and we're making strides to remove the non native species and introduce native ones again.

We intend to produce food for ourselves but we hate the idea of using chemicals or artificial fertilizers or row planting. The number of bags of dead leaves and chicken šŸ’© we have hauled in our van....the limit does not exist. We farm small batches of fish, encourage native fauna by planting fruits and graze crops for them- and we have a colony of bees that have re-wilded during his father's old age that we are trying desperately to save- Our native frog population seems pretty healthy, so that's a great plus- all of these things we really care about, the farm is like the third spouse šŸ¤£

Because of the non native pine issue it's smothering a lot of things that SHOULD be there and we'd very much like to restore the land to it's natural thriving state and we have been studying permaculture and food forests and how to do all of this ourselves, but the only land management content online I can find is from šŸ»ā€ā„ļø folks and I would really love if I could actually find someone online who's indigenous to the area. Maybe the people I've found know a lot, but who would know best but someone who has the deepest roots there?

I believe the tribes that are closest to our area may be the Echota Cherokee, the Piqua, the Creek- but many of the maps I've seen have overlaps and I may be incorrect.

So does anyone have any suggestions for a content creator, blogger, or site that I could learn from who might fit that description?

TLDR: Please recommend indigenous land management content, middle Alabama area?

4 Comments
2024/03/13
21:30 UTC

6

Indigenous HGTV?

Idea: what if there was an HGTV style TV show that got Land Back into Native hands? Like an organization/family/person reclaims property either to be put into trust as reservation land or to be owned privately. Viewers would learn a bit about the communities repatriating the land, and some of the basics of federal Indian policy that led to the current moment.

Obviously Land Back canā€™t be solved with TV, but maybe some small good and learning could happen?

1 Comment
2024/03/13
02:09 UTC

52

Hollywood enabling Pretendians once again: Kali Reis is not even Native

It seems Hollywood never learns and is still enabling Pretendianism and helping people to profit from claiming our identities. Iā€™m Inuit as well as have ancestry from a couple of other Arctic indigenous groups so I was quite excited for the new season of True Detective and had high hopes for it. While I liked the setting and itā€™s cool that the show has made people interested in us and brought more awareness to issues like MMIW, I was overall disappointed with its portrayal of us. It leans pretty heavily on noble savage and magical native tropes whilst glorifying suicide and using the culture as an aesthetic which surprised me since the show has hyped up how it has an actual Native lead and how much creative influence she has had on it. I would have thought that anyone from any indigenous peoples would have done better than this and so I became curious about her background as I have only ever seen her identified as "indigenous" or "Native" and never with any specific tribal links.

Looking into her though, I was dismayed (but not too surprised) to find that Kali Reis is just another pretendian and not even actually indigenous and seems to just be adopting a Native American identity for career advancement.

She claims her mother is Native American and her father from Cape Verde. The tribe she claims to be a member of through her mother, the Seaconke Wampanoag, is one Iā€™m familiar with and not for good reasons. They are a completely unrecognised tribe (neither federally nor state recognised) who self-identify as being the descendants of Wampanoag people (who are an actual legitimate nation and exist today in the forms of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head). The Seaconke Wampanoag have been investigated and found to have absolutely zero links to the Wampanoag or any other Native American peoples. Theyā€™re just another in a long list of organisations and corporations that self-identify as and fraudulently pose as indigenous nations.

Genetic studies on the Seaconke Wampanoag led by people such as Kim TallBear (a respected Dakota genealogist who does a lot of work on DNA and Native American identity) have shown them to be entirely of European and African descent. To put it this way, they are less indigenous than Elizabeth Warren (who at least was 1/1024 rather than completely zero). They have been shown to have absolutely zero maternal Native American DNA as well as absolutely zero paternal Native American DNA (except for some remote paternal ancestry in one singular male individual who was already known and confirmed to have some Cherokee ancestry). So long story short, they are essentially a group of cosplayers. And Kali Reis claims that her mother is the ā€œmedicine womanā€ of this ā€œtribeā€...

And before any of her fanboys accuse me of perpetuating colonialist ideas of blood quantum, Iā€™m against blood quantum and donā€™t think we should be gatekeeping people based on not having a high enough blood percentage or whatever. But thereā€™s a pretty massive difference between not considering someone indigenous based on them not having ā€œenoughā€ blood and not considering someone indigenous based on them having absolutely ZERO ties to any indigenous communities.

The whole tribe all claim to be descended from one single Wampanoag guy who died all the way back in 1676. Even if that was true (which it appears not to be given the genetic studies into them), that's just so far back that at this point you still have absolutely zero connection to it culturally or genetically (we're talking less than 0.1% of your ancestry at this point). I could understand claiming it if it is a great grandparent or even great-great grandparent. I could even accept someone with only a great-great-great grandparent if they still had genuine ties to the culture and to their community. But if we're talking 1600s far back then at that point it's just ridiculous and making a mockery of Native American identities.

She also has claimed before to have distant Cherokee ancestry through her maternal side although considering she is not an enrolled member of any Cherokee tribe and that every single American claims to have distant Cherokee ancestry and almost none actually do, I would take this with as much of a grain of salt as I do whenever any American girl tells me she is also indigenous because she is 1/16 Cherokee and her great-great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess. And considering the only ā€œā€tribeā€ā€ Kali is actually connected to or a member of has zero Native American ancestry, I think we can safely take this claim as equally as bullshit unless proven otherwise.

In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense why Kali Reis seems to primarily identify as just ā€œNativeā€ and ā€œindigenousā€ rather than with her specific tribe. I find this is often a bit of a red flag with Pretendians where their entire personality is some weird pan-Indigenous amalgam caricature avoiding any specific links to nations. I'm just surprised the grift is still working for her considering that everything I've said here is public knowledge. You'd think anyone hiring her would do more than a five second google search on her although, that said, the whole season of the show gave five second google search energy so I guess it fits.

29 Comments
2024/03/12
20:56 UTC

0

Indigenous Peoples and Environment Articles

Hi everyone,
I am trying to learn about the inter-relation between Indigenous Peoples and Forest, especially with Indigenous Women. Do you have any recommendation on short and easy readings that I can start with?
thank you

4 Comments
2024/03/12
20:20 UTC

4

El Zapoteco en la Sierra JuƔrez Oaxaca

0 Comments
2024/03/12
19:14 UTC

17

Cultural Appropriation Jewelry?

I grew up in a small village in Alaska, and my best friend was a native Alaskan of the Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) tribe. I am of Irish descent, with pale skin and red hair. For my birthday one year, she gifted me a gorgeous beaded necklace made from ice blue stones and ivory beads with matching earrings, which she made herself. I loved it so much and wore it on any dressy occasion. Then I left the village for college in a different state in a big city. The first time I wore it, I was met with such vehement reactions that I was completely confused. One person asked me if that was ivory. I said yes, and he said, holy crap, donā€™t you know thatā€™s illegal and that youā€™re contributing to the extinction of a species? He didnā€™t give me a chance to tell him that it was legal for my Alutiiq friendā€™s family to gather ivory. Another person approached me and asked why I was wearing Native American jewelry (she was technically wrong; it was specifically Native Alaskan jewelry) when I was clearly not a Native and that buying it (I didnā€™t; it was a birthday gift from my best friend) was an ignorant act of cultural appropriation. I went to my dorm in tears, not understanding why I was being judged for wearing a heartfelt gift by a person of a different cultural origin.

Should I not wear my best friendā€™s gift because Iā€™m not from her culture? I know her well enough that it would hurt her feelings if I never wore her elaborately handmade gift ever again. But why do people not allow me to feel comfortable and safe just because I appreciate her beautiful gift inspired by her culture?

Is this wrong that Iā€™m resentful of people giving me crap for wearing this? Iā€™m trying to understand. Iā€™m not trying to pretend to be of my best friendā€™s tribe, Iā€™m just wearing a beautiful gift she made for me out of love.

Iā€™d like to hear your thoughts about this. Thanks!

23 Comments
2024/03/12
00:55 UTC

9

The Murder of 2 Year old Wynonna Noganosh by a North York Monster Rodrigo Flores-Romero - Toronto, Ontario

Hello my fellow indigenous community,

I'm not sure how many people are aware/have been following this case. It is heartbreaking, and I haven't seen much floating around reddit about her case, but this young girls name needs to be remembered...

I feel compelled to share her name & story.

The Canadian justice system has once again completely failed our Indigenous community by only sentencing this monster to 11 years for manslaughter... a reduced charge that he did not deserve. He should be behind bars for life.

I have included a link to an article, but I urge you to do some more research. HER NAME SHOULD NOT BE FORGOTTEN.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/toronto-man-guilty-in-beating-death-of-two-year-old-wynonna-noganosh/article_d1471ea4-e8fd-5e84-b7d4-7850eaf45676.html

I do not know the family, but the mother is raising funds for a memorial tree and plaque in her daughters name:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/build-a-future-for-winnies-mom-and-brother

ā€‹

ā€‹

1 Comment
2024/03/11
20:22 UTC

13

Friendly reminder that you have until March 7, 2024, 11:59 PM PST to submit your FN Drinking Water Settlement

https://firstnationsdrinkingwater.ca/

https://firstnationsdrinkingwater.ca/index.php/who-can-submit/#eligibilitylists

ā€‹

Compensation for individuals and Impacted First Nations subject to a drinking water advisory that lasted at least one year between November 20, 1995, and June 20, 2021.

ā€‹

Important note if you were born before November 20, 1995

Legislative limitations in Canadian law place limits on how long adults have to bring a lawsuit forward after an event happens.

In the case of this settlement, individuals born before November 20, 1995 are eligible for compensation only for events that happened after November 20, 2013 up to June 20, 2021.

If your First Nationā€™s water advisory ended before November 20, 2013, you would not be eligible.

There are exceptions to this if you were unable to begin a proceeding for a claim before November 20, 2013 because of a physical, mental or psychological condition.

ā€‹

1 Comment
2024/03/06
08:13 UTC

3

Pan-ethnicity

What do you guys think about gathering all indigenous people from the Americas. We all have a lot of similarities and that would make our voice stronger

15 Comments
2024/03/06
07:12 UTC

Back To Top