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Posts tagged Native American
Fact: The invasion of the Americas was histories largest genocide and demographic devastation to date, killing over 90% of the original population.
Native genocide continues in certain parts of the southern hemisphere, where mining companies and government personal have been known to gun down communities.
10,546 notes (via lostintrafficlights & snowyowlwhitecotton-deactivated)
Transracial Fantasies
At the time of decolonization and when the New Left was born in the 1960s and 1970s, the desire to live with and become the Other was transformed into an antiracist discourse, then later on morphed into the loosely defined world of New Age. The American author Jack Kerouac, who sometimes claimed that he had Native American blood, wrote in his classic novel On the Road that, “I wished I was a Negro, a Mexican, or even a Jap, anything but a white man disillusioned by the best in his own ‘white’ world.”
In a similar manner, Jim Morrison, the singer of the rock music group The Doors, boasted that he was connected to the North American continent by the way of his psychic contact with a Native American shaman.
Among the numerous examples from the same period reflecting this desire to live with, grow up with, and get taught by the Other are all the books written by New Age authors like Marlo Morgan and Olga Kharitidi, telling about their encounters with Native Americans, Aboriginals and Siberians, movie titles like The Last Samurai (2003) and Avatar (2009), and television shows like BBC’s Tribal Wives (2008) and Swedish Television’s Den Stora Resan (2009). Also, the literary genre of white women who marry and procreate with non-white men, such as I Married a Korean (1953), Not Without My Daughter (1987) and The White Masai (1998)[…]
Last but not least, the whole repertoire of subcultural phenomena, white youth and white adults who dress up and act like African Americans or East Asians, and the numerous individuals and companies that offer so-called “Oriental” quasi-spirituality, as well as associations like the Sioux Indian Club Sweden whose members dress up and roleplay as Native Americans.
[…]Canadian scholar Terry Goldie writes in Fear and Temptation: The image of the Indigène in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures that representations of the native “savage” oscillated between an abject nausea and a will to exterminate, to fetishistic desires and wish to create family ties to “it.” This reflects the white European colonizer’s more or less permanent attachment problem to the world outside Europe, the fear and hostility of being in the presence of non-Europeans, and the almost eternal need to wanting to become the Other, which results in ambivalent attitudes towards the natives, who are sometimes demonized and sometimes romanticized.
In the contemporary era, transracial adoption thus exclusively signifies the adoption of children of color to white Westerners on both international and domestic levels.
- Tobias Hubinette,“Transracial Adoption, White Cosmopolitanism, and the Fantasy of the Global family”
Bolded mine.
151 notes
Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
Black children constitute only 17 percent of the youth population in the U.S, yet make up 42 percent of all children in foster care nationwide. [pdf source download]
(via brandx)
As someone who works in this field managing data, I can share a couple of things I’ve observed. Full disclosure: I haven’t read this whole article yet, but I caution people to not confuse the rate of removal with the number of children lingering in foster care.
Two things happen when a child is placed into foster care. 1) “Reunification” efforts are made to correct whatever situation is going on in the home that caused the removal of the children. Efforts include improving living conditions & getting help for parents with substance abuse issues. When these situations are corrected satisfactorily, the state reunites the children with their parents & then monitors them for a while to make sure everything stays kosher. 2) When it’s determined that reunification is not in the best interest of the child, they terminate parental rights and “permanency” (adoption, basically) is sought with suitable relatives or families matched through the adoption process.
I suspect this is where the racial divide comes into play, not so much in the rate at which non-white children are removed from their biological families, but in what happens to them once they’re removed & in the system.
Statistically speaking, non-white children, children over the age of 8 & sibling groups are not as desirable as individual white babies. They spend longer in foster care waiting for someone to adopt them, if anyone ever does. That doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily removing more POC from their families, but it does mean that once they’re removed, they’re more likely to pile up in the system & contribute to that 42% until they age out with no family support between the ages of 16 & 18.
There is a severe lack of POC adopting (at least in my state) and we’ve got huge campaigns going on right now to encourage more participation from those communities. If anyone is invested in helping reduce these foster care numbers, I strongly suggest encouraging your friends & family to consider adopting older, non-white children.
(via skeptictank)
Oh, STFU you insignificant, honky COG.
Your privileged bullshit doesn’t merit the few keystrokes it’ll take to debunk it, but for the sake of all my sudden new followers (hai boos X) not yet acquainted with this ish, I always like to serve up a white savior takedown as a shoutout of sorts ◕‿◕ SO:
States Profit Whenever Native Children Are Put Into Foster Care
Official Federal Policy: Assimilation and Extinction of Tribes
Western Adoption Industry Purposefully Destroys Non-Western Cultures & Traditions
^ just a few facts of which your interjection betrays an abysmal lack of awareness. I wouldn’t even have had to spare the cursory glance at your blog to know that you’re white.
on that note, how fucking dare you claim that “[t]here is a severe lack of POC adopting” when your governments passed legislation outright banning adoption or even the fostering of children by POC, when adoption is reinforced as a white privilege to this day via myriad channels, when white adopters are consistently given preference over adopters of color, and when POC adopt children only to have them kidnapped en masse and/or be suspected as kidnappers themselves.
^Yes, all that shit did and does indeed happen, lol dare you to challenge the veracity IF you manage to get over your predictable White Tears(tm) tone-policing reactionary BS.
(lol, and of course you haven’t even read these immediate sources. you wouldn’t be honoring your white privilege if you didn’t shoot off your mouth before educating yourself on oppression you can’t begin to imagine in the first place.)
And “as someone” who’s actually SURVIVED foster care, IS a transracial adoptee, and whose work and vocation are far greater and more relevant than yours, you’re welcome to cede to my actual expertise, sit your ass down, go back to your bean counting.
1,508 notes (via skeptictank & brandx)
(TW rape) Eric Cantor moves to protect white men from being prosecuted for raping American Indian women
December 16, 2012House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been working lately with Vice President Joe Biden on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), after it expired last year. That sounds like a good thing. But here’s the sticking point:
The rate of sexual assault on Native-American women is more than twice the national average. And according to Amnesty International, 86% of Native American women who are raped are attacked by non-Indians—who are beyond the reach of tribal authorities. As a result, “we have serial rapists on the reservation—that are non-Indian—because they know they can get away with it,” one native American activist told Salon.
So some House Republicans proposed a measure to fix the problem, by allowing tribal courts to try non-Indians in such cases, while still letting the defendants move the case to a federal court if they felt their rights weren’t being protected.
But Cantor—who’s seen as influential with the conservative wing of the House GOP caucus—is blocking the proposal, the Huffington Post reported last week, because he doesn’t want to give added jurisdictions to Indian tribes. And he is moving to kill the VAWA re-authorization over the dispute.
This is so shameful & absolutely without justification.
2/3 of American Indian women raped on reservations are raped by outsider non-American-Indian, mostly-white predators who go specifically into the reservations because they know that they won’t be prosecuted. I heard Deborah Parker speak earlier today about how women are even being dragged onto the reservations by their rapists, to avoid legal liability. This is so sick it makes me want to vomit. You know who else is sick? Eric Cantor & his rape-friendly supporters. Yuck.
2,229 notes (via dickensian-werewolf & thepeoplesrecord)
NPR BREAKING NEWS ON NPR! In a strong showing of solidarity, the Coalition of Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) Directors in South Dakota voted 6-0 to submit a report to Congress confirming S.D.’s systematic violations of ICWA. The directors demanded that the Bureau of Indian Affairs live up to its months-old promise of hosting a summit on Native American foster care in S.D. LISTEN TO THE NPR REPORT HERE: http://n.pr/TyfUfb
351 notes (via lakotapeopleslawproject)
lakotapeopleslawproject asked:
Hi, I love your blog! Last Thursday, South Dakota’s nine ICWA Directors voted on whether to make D.S.S. follow the law by placing Lakota foster children with Native families. I have a post on December 1st that has a link to the NPR story that was released to cover what happened at the meeting and how we, Lakota People's Law Project, are involved. I was wondering if you could listen to it yourself and reblog it so we could get the word out there! Thank you so much!
I LOVE YOU TOO
My internet’s shite at the moment as I’ve buggered off to some of the coldest & remote regions of pasty ass cracker land for the holidays (my skills at navigating enemy territory come way too easily after a lifetime of displacement) but I’LL LISTEN ASAP & MOST DEFINITELY SIGNAL BOOST AVEC PLAISIR
HAYYYY. \o/ Those of you in more advanced places of the world with solid connections who know what’s up enough to give a fuck about this decimation of Native American children, get to clickin’ and streamin’!
NPR BREAKING NEWS ON NPR! In a strong showing of solidarity, the Coalition of Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) Directors in South Dakota voted 6-0 to submit a report to Congress confirming S.D.’s systematic violations of ICWA. The directors demanded that the Bureau of Indian Affairs live up to its months-old promise of hosting a summit on Native American foster care in S.D. LISTEN TO THE NPR REPORT HERE: http://n.pr/TyfUfb
1 note
ACTION ALERT! This coming Thursday South Dakota’s nine Indian Child Welfare Act Directors will vote on whether to make D.S.S. follow the law by placing Lakota foster children with Native families. Right now 90% of children are placed in non-Native homes. HAVE YOU SIGNED OUR PETITION TO ENCOURAGE A YES VOTE? Join us at Lakota People’s Law Project and the Last Real Indians in defending ICWA. Please LIKE and SHARE this post! http://on.fb.me/S1CL4c
If you are a white privileged U.S. citizen following this tumblr and you’ve sought my advice on how you can ‘ethically’ adopt (and jfc how are there so fucking many of yous my ask queue is horrendous) — and you don’t signal boost this at the very least, you are a hypocritical piece of shit and I’ll be making a special post just to call yall out your lazy ass white savior supremacy later. Ta.
608 notes (via dustoffvarnya & lakotapeopleslawproject)
There are far more First Nations & Native American children in foster care today than there were at the height of the residential school system.
Oh and for those who don’t understand what the ‘residential school system’ truly was
(TRIGGER WARNING for child abuse, racism, suicide)
[TEXT: As recently as 1975, the U.S. and Canadian governments made it mandatory for Native American children to attend boarding schools where native languages and cultural traditions were forbidden. Virtually imprisoned, children experienced humiliation, grueling labor, widespread sexual and physical abuse, and medical experimentation - often resulting in murder and suicide.
- Source: ‘Older Than America’]
221 notes (via dustoffvarnya & brandx)
There are far more First Nations & Native American children in foster care today than there were at the height of the residential school system.
221 notes
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