I don’t think a lot of people really understand that ecosystems in North America were purposefully maintained and altered by Native people.
Like, we used to purposefully set fires in order to clear underbrush in forests, and to inhibit the growth of trees on the prairies. This land hasn’t existed in some primeval state for thousands of years. What Europeans saw when they came here was the result of -work-
the east coast was all mature and maintained food forests. decades if not centuries of nurturing and maintenance. when the british arrived they were amazed that there were paths through the forest just “naturally” lined with berries and edible plants, like a garden of eden. then they tore that shit down to grow wheat. dumbasses
My mom is an ethnobotanist and getting people to understand this is literally her life’s work. A lot of native tribes just had a whole different way of looking at agriculture. Instead of planting orchards in tidy rows near their villages, they went to where the trees were already growing and tended them there. They would girdle trees by stripping the bark in order to stop the spread of disease or thin out badly placed saplings. And they would encourage the companion plants they wanted and weed out the ones they didn’t, so that in the end the whole forest would be productive while remaining an ecosystem and not a monoculture. It is still agriculture, but it is a form of agriculture that is so much gentler on the landscape that, as OP says, the European settlers could not recognize what they were seeing. To them the natives must have seemed to magically live in abundance while they starved.
They did do controlled burns, but so-called slash and burn agriculture was never a primary farming strategy in North America. They were just way more subtle than that. They also made the amazing Mississippian mound structures so it’s not like they couldn’t do dramatic reshapings of the landscape when they wanted: but they changed their minds about that, walking away from Cahokia and the dense, farming-supported urban structure they had build there in the 13th century, well before any European contact.
My mom says it wasn’t a collapse, it wasn’t a war, it wasn’t a natural disaster; the farmers in Cahokia just voted with their feet. They just gradually left, dispersing in different directions but generally not very far, and it was probably because they’d gotten tired of men’s bullshit.
See, agriculture was a female domain in pretty much all the native American cultures. The specifics differed by tribe, but often they had gender-specific age-grade societies: for example, the Hidatsa Goose Society was composed of married women of childbearing age. Not only did they physically plant the fields, they also had responsibility for conducting the social and ritual events around ensuring the harvest. This included things like digging the storage pits, and organizing feasts in order to bring the whole community together to plant plots for families who were suffering illness or disability, and could not do it themselves.
So, as Cahokia urbanized (at its “height” it was a population center of
between 10,200 and 15,300 people), it is very likely that the traditional, informal systems of land use-right allocations–again, always the women’s domain–became stressed by top down political pressures from the rulers (who were men). And as my mom puts it in her book Feeding Cahokia: “If rights to land ever became highly restricted as a result of a top-down, centralized process of allocation, the likelihood of poorly informed and unfair decision making is extremely high.”
So basically, the farmers took their families and they moved away. Not all at once, no mass exodus, just…gradually, they decided that they’d tried doing things the urban way, and they didn’t like it. They went back to living in smaller villages sustained, not by intensive farming, but by more garden-style plots and the traditional, sophisticated management of “wild” lands that they had never stopped practicing.
It takes a shift in thinking to recognize that was a deliberate choice on their part. Not a failure: Cahokia never collapsed, not dramatically–it just gradually wound down. They were perfectly capable of feeding themselves and they did for well more than a century. They went back to the old way because they liked it better.
And again, different tribes had different specific ways of doing it, but farming was always the women’s domain–and there are also important spiritual figures who occur under different names in different tribes. One of these is Grandmother/Old Woman Who Never Dies: giver of all plant food, protector of children, bringer of summer, and rejuvenator of living and dying things. I’m just gonna end by dropping this passage from my mom’s book because it’s amazing:
“I think it likely that the female flint-clay statues from BBB Motor and Sponemann represent an Earth Mother personage in a manifestation known to all early Cahokians, and that their Woodland ancestors had sought her powers and favors for centuries preceding the Mississippian period, just as Siouan speakers continued to protect her sacred bundles and conduct rituals focused around them long after Cahokia was abandoned. She never died. Several years ago, I accompanied a traditional Hidatsa farmer named Amy Mossett from New Town, North Dakota, to the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center [in Illinois]. When we came to the display case containing a cast reproduction of the Birger figurine, Mossett froze, took a step backward, put her hand on her chest, and said, ‘That’s Grandmother. And the snake is her husband.’“
“By 1492 Indian activity throughout the Americas had modified forest extent and composition, created and expanded grasslands, and rearranged microrelief via countless artificial earthworks. Agricultural fields were common, as were houses and towns and roads and trails. All of these had local impacts on soil, microclimate, hydrology, and wildlife.”
William M. Denevan, The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492 http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.html
autistic traits that were ignored simply because I’m a girl:
- very obvious special interests in things like animals or hair were ignored as normal girl interests
- noise sensitivity was me being an uptight bitch
- meltdowns extending into teenage years were seen as typical for dramatic teenage girls
- love of colorful, sparkly, visually-stimulating things?? GIRL
- vestibular stimming only landed me in cheerleading and gymnastics
- severe social anxiety = shy girl!!!
- always saying “what”? can’t be her ears bc she has great hearing, must just be another ditzy blonde girl
- only eats specific foods/plain food? girls are sooo picky
- self-harming? red flag but still typical of girls who are “looking for attention”
- awkward laughing at everything because I don’t know what to FUCKING SAY?? giggly girl, very normal and cute (not)
- doesn’t go out a lot? the perfect daughter!
not to mention all of the symptoms that WEREN’T obvious because I worked so hard to hide them.
pls educate girls on autism so they don’t spend their formative years wondering why they feel so different.
i slept in until 5pm and while i did i had this dream that the new meme was that "i see no difference. love is love." panel comic except the other 3 panels were replaced with pictures of things that were all related in some way but not exactly the same and i made one with pictures of a marsh, a bog and a fen with the caption "i see no difference. mud is mud." and i got so much hate for it that i had to delete my blog
like this
Hi everyone, I mentioned earlier my baby had to go to the hospital.
During her seizure, we rushed her in our car to the hospital but halfway there, we decided to stop and call the ambulance for her safety.
We spent most of the day at the hospital for her ultrasounds and xrays, blood tests.. 😩
We’ve been setback in finances and we received the bill today. If you can help a nishnabwe First Nations family worry less, Thank you/meegwetch.
hi tumblr look at my outfit yesterday (and my bicep)
Insiders claim that Google’s internet-fixing Jigsaw is a toxic vanity project for its founder, where women keep a secret post-crying touchup kit in the bathroom
In 2016, Google announced that it was renaming its small Google Ideas unit to “Jigsaw,” giving the new unit a much broader, “wildly ambitious” mandate: to tackle “surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship.”
In the years since, the company – now a separate entity under Google’s Alphabet parent-company – has made a lot of headlines for products that, on closer inspection, were deeply flawed: the troll-detecting AI that could be terminally confused by typos (which was then used to produce a deeply flawed map of America’s most trolly places). Other projects (generally more modest than the “wildly ambitious” mission statement implied) were more credible, but so far have not borne much fruit: turning Change My View into a standalone, separate from Reddit; publishing a giant, amazing open data-set of news links; producing a censorship-busting DNS proxy; providing a pop-up dictionary of security terms.
Some of the other “wildly ambitious” projects were never released: the company crushed its own report on the use of trolling by state actors to achieve authoritarian ends.
One project stands out as living up to Jigsaw’s promise: Project Shield, which helps journalistic organizations defend themselves against Denial of Service attacks, a frequent tactic employed by state actors to silence unflattering reportage.
People who work at (or partner with) Jigsaw are bound by tight, far-reaching nondisclosure agreements, but Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (previously) got many current and former Jigsaw employees to speak anonymously about the conditions inside the mysterious “think/do” tank.
They describe a toxic work environment where complaints are met with vicious retaliation; where women are demeaned, sidelined and degraded (the women of Jigsaw have a secret bathroom kit “with mascara, moisturizing spray, and other items to help employees in distress hide their tears”); and where women on Google’s anonymous gwe-anon message board warn any woman thinking of applying for a job at Jigsaw that it is a misogynist cesspool.
As to the actual mission of Jigsaw, the insiders say that the first priority is not to fix the internet or defend its most vulnerable users, but to generate headlines and accolades for Jared Cohen – a US State Department veteran who served under Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton before becoming senior advisor to Eric Schmidt, longtime CEO of Google and now Chair of its Board. Cohen and Schmidt have a very close relationship, and co-authored a book: “The New Digital Age.”
The insiders say that Jigsaw’s internal leadership are alternately patronizing and hostile when it comes to the internet users they say they want to defend, and cite an incident in which Cohen threatened to scuttle a joint project with the world-leading Citizen Lab if they did not feature Jigsaw’s logo on the project’s site.
Franceschi-Bicchierai claims that Jigsaw has hemorrhaged two dozen employees (out of 60) since mid-2018, including Lucas Dixon, the first engineer at Jigsaw, who was chief scientist when he resigned and published an open letter to colleagues decrying Jigsaw’s culture of retaliation, fear, and ego.
Google and Jigsaw are apparently aware of their cultural problem, but their major effort to address it has been nothing short of bizarre: “Jigsaw’s leaders tasked six employees to form an internal committee, interview all other employees—including each other—and write a report that would detail the team’s problems and potential solutions, according to current and former employees.” The committee’s report was “dismal,” revealing widespread dislike of Cohen, but it was also “purposefully vague, because employees would not have felt comfortable sharing personal complaints with the whole team and feared retribution for speaking up.”
Franceschi-Bicchierai appeared on this week’s Cyber podcast – another Motherboard project – to discuss his article. In the interview, he describes Jigsaw as serving the role of a diplomatic corps for Google – a company that is larger than many of the world’s governments – helping shape public opinion of Google and its role in an ethical, sustainable internet.
Cohen would not comment on Franceschi-Bicchierai’s article. After its publication, he sent an internal memo to Jigsaw employees, lamenting that he was “deeply disappointed for all of you to see our culture characterized in this way,” and “as CEO, I take this responsibility seriously and I’m committed to ensuring we continue to improve.” (The odd phrasing of the former does not inspire confidence in the latter).
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/03/missing-piece-of-the-puzzle.html
provides legal services and representation to detained parents. It’s seeking volunteers to represent low-income individuals and families.
On Saturday, a Democratic state representative tweeted
that border patrol officials told him that they were not accepting
donations for immigrant children. Still, we’ve compiled a list of
organizations that are mobilizing to try to help children separated from
their parents and asylum seekers at the Texas-Mexico border:
- http://www.americangateways.org/ - provides legal services and representation to detained parents. It’s seeking volunteers to represent low-income individuals and families.
- https://www.facebook.com/angrytiasandabuelas/ - delivers financial support to local shelters; transportation to and from bus stations, airports and shelters; and emergency food, water, clothing and toiletries to individuals and families seeking asylum. They are accepting donations.
- https://annunciationhouse.org/ - shelters families detained and separated by ICE on the El Paso/Juarez border.
- https://www.houstonimmigration.org/members/bakerripley/ - is providing free or low-cost legal services throughout the Houston immigrant community.
- https://www.catholiccharitiesrgv.org/Home.aspx - provides a place for men, women and children to rest, have a warm meal, shower, change into clean clothes, as well as receive medicine and other supplies.
- http://www.dmrs-ep.org/ - says it’s the only full-service immigration legal aid clinic serving low-income immigrants and refugees in the southwestern U.S.
- https://immigrantfamiliestogether.com/ - works to bond out asylum seekers and reunite them with their children. It also provides food to families and government and foster-agency-approved housing to expedite reunifications. The group is accepting donations.
- https://www.immigrantjusticenow.org/current-initiatives - is working to provide supplies, like bus tickets, Pedialyte, shoes, prepaid cellphones and underwear, to immigrant families and children.
- https://interfaithwelcomecoalition.org/ - assists refugees, asylum seekers and at-risk immigrants. They have an overnight shelter at Travis Park Methodist Church and help migrants get transportation — buses or planes — as they travel to other places through San Antonio.
- http://njfon.org/ - provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant individuals and families in Texas.
- https://supportkind.org/ - partners with major law firms, corporations and bar associations to create a nationwide pro bono network to represent unaccompanied children through their immigration proceedings. Volunteers don’t need to have immigration law experience.
- https://lppshelter.org/ - in San Benito runs a shelter for people in the legal process of seeking asylum, residency or some other legal alternatives.
- https://las-americas.org/ - provides legal representation to asylum seekers. It’s accepting donations.
- https://www.raicestexas.org/ - is a nonprofit that provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children, families and refugees in Texas. It’s accepting donations and volunteers at its website.
- https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/immigration/projects_initiatives/south_texas_pro_bono_asylum_representation_project_probar/ - s looking for volunteers and attorneys (even ones not experienced in immigration law) to provide legal services to asylum seekers detained in South Texas.
- https://texascivilrightsproject.org - is looking for bilingual attorneys who can help represent detained and separated parents during their immigration proceedings.
- http://www.trla.org/ - provides legal advice and prepares detainees for credible fear interviews at the Dilley detention center. They recently expanded to another detention center in the Houston-area.
- http://www.cilacademy.org/ - has pro bono attorneys representing children in immigration-related proceedings. It’s also providing specialized training to legal service providers and volunteers who are serving unaccompanied immigrant children.
- https://hrionline.org - provides free legal services to immigrants who are seeking asylum in the U.S. and immigrants who are victims of violence.
- https://migrantcenter.org/ - is providing free and low-cost legal services for detained asylum seekers in Texas.
- https://vvbhcoalition.com/ - supports refugees by providing them with access to phones, restrooms, showers, laundry and warm meals.
- https://www.theyoungcenter.org/ - is accepting donations that will go toward providing more child advocates for immigrant kids inside the detention centers weekly and accompany them to immigration proceedings.
- https://togetherrising.org/ - is collecting money that’ll go toward defenders, prosecutors and advocates who are working to reunify immigrant children with their families.
PLEASE SHARE THIS USEFUL INFORMATION IT COULD SAVE LIVES!!!
woefully pessimistic of y’all to assume the United States will exist in 30 years
well. I’m well and truly fucked right now, as doctors refuse to take me seriously and nobody seems concerned about my persistent fever; I’m even more limited in mobility than usual and in desperate need of new pajamas, as I keep waking up soaked in sweat from autoimmune fever.
I don’t have family or local support beyond a close friend who’s struggling herself, and I’m stuck in homeless accommodation for the next g-d knows how long. My benefits are £504 a month, which is increasingly not enough.
If you’re in the position to help a gay Soviet Jew survive Brexit and austerity, you can donate via PayPal:
If you’re able to help a gay Soviet Jew survive Brexit and austerity, you can donate here:
We need to reform pride
We can’t have our children be exposed to degenerate freaks like these who come to corrupt their young, impressionable minds:
What leftists fear isn’t an ~imperfect candidate~
What leftists fear is a democrat will take the reigns from Trump, continue on the same path only with better PR, and suddenly half the angry voices we thought were backing us up have suddenly disappeared.