protectthesacred

[protectthesacred]

[protectthesacred]

[protectthesacred]

My dashboard has turned into whatever the opposite of a prayer circle is.

[protectthesacred]

[protectthesacred]

What’s up just a reminder that the Hula Girl stereotype can go to hell and is in part responsible for Hawai’i being the tourist destination and getting invaded by rich white people, and for Hawaiian culture being disrespected and appropriated

Here’s a few sources on the topic:

How America’s Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai’i (the site is weird but the research is legitimate, gives a good overview of the issue and references a lot of sources that are harder to get your hands on read: books)

“Pop” Goes Hawai’i: The Twentieth Century Origins of Tourism in Hawai’i and the Impact of U.S. Pop Culture on Women in the Islands of Aloha (this one is very long but a really good read)

Misperceptions of the “Hula Girl” (this one is a personal essay but it’s an entry in the University of Hawai’i’s academic newspaper)

[protectthesacred]

Pro respecting elders in the 'listen to people with more experience than you' and 'don't discount people as automatically regressive or out of touch because of their age' sense. Very much anti respecting elders in the 'authority figures are automatically right' and 'children aren't allowed to disagree with their parents' way.

[protectthesacred]

Please do not interfere with nature!

For the last few years we have received quite a few calls from people that scared a hawk or snake away from what it was eating.

These calls always go something like, “I save a ___ from a hawk that was trying to eat it”, which means these people know what they stopped. These people then want us to save what the hawk was trying to eat. We’ve gotten in anything from a turtle with three legs already removed by the hawk, to small song birds to bunnies and the outcome is almost always the same….death, though more slowly and painfully than it would have been had people not interfered.

I want to remind you all, when a hawk captures its prey, it typically crushes it at least to a point. A snake will do the same. This means that the internal injuries are typically such that nobody could possibly save the animal. The most humane thing would have been to leave hawk or snake to its meal and NOT interfere.

Also, hawks are only successful in about 1 in 10 hunts. Meaning you don’t know how long that hawk or that hawk’s babies have been without food and now will go without food even longer.

Hawks have to eat and feed their young as well. It isn’t really fair for a human to decide what a proper meal may be.

We realize this may not be the most pleasant thing for you to watch, so we suggest you turn away. Chasing them away from a meal only does two things; 1. whatever they were trying to eat will now suffer until it dies, when dying would have been much faster had it been left, and 2. it leaves the hawk without a meal, meaning it is going to now go kill something that it wouldn’t have if the person hadn’t interfered.

Please, respect nature and let her do what she is supposed to do!

~CLAWS, Inc.

[protectthesacred]

The Indigenous led street medic collective know as the South Sound Street Medics have been asked to go to the frontlines of the Winnemucca Indian Colony where elders homes are being bulldozed! Elders in Winnemucca have asked for the SSSM to come and teach first aid skills to them and their allies. The SSSM have already covered a majority of their costs to get there but still need help getting a rental car to travel to camp and to transport elders in the colony. Any help is hugely appreciated and every bit counts! Thank you ❤️✊🏼

#indigenous #ndn tumblr #winnemucca #land defense #land defenders #protect the sacred #indigenous pride #water protector #south sound street medics #street medic #native american #street medics

[protectthesacred]

Hey, its Australia day! Aka the day a bunch of English arrived in Australia and began two centuries worth of genocide and cultural erasure.

In honour of Australia day, do you wanna help some indigenous people reclaim rightful ownership of their unceded lands?

[protectthesacred]

caption: Irma Galindo is still missing. An Indigenous Oaxacan woman (Ñuu Savii/Mixtec) and there hasn’t been much of a push from the Mexican settler government to find her. She has been a defender of Oaxaca’s Indigenous forests.

[protectthesacred]

Sometimes I think about my life through the lens of the past.

How many things do I suffer though because of the greed of European “explorers” and American imperialism.

I leave the ‘āina. I leave my ‘ohana. I leave my heart. And I suffer at a job I hate. And I spent years wearing a fakey costume and smiling for tourists and pretending I felt anything other than empty.

I colonized myself. Made myself palatable for tourists. Made myself palatable for tips and a paycheck. And I ate popcorn for dinner bc that’s what we could afford and I spent my extra money making sure my siblings didn’t feel the crushing weight of poverty. And every extra cent was spent trying to save them from how I felt.

Humiliated. Colonized. A joke.

And now I live on the mainland because we cannot afford to live on sacred land. Because haoles move there for paradise, and they kill us as they buy up beautiful houses and pave the road for resorts. Our land. Our ‘āina. And I’m now a walking attraction. And I can do the hula style smile and I can make my eyes shine like diamonds. And people ask me if I picked coconuts from trees and I think about my elders who live in concrete apartments and I miss my grandfather and his warm smile. And I never know if I will see them again.

I used to stare at the statue of Kamehameha. His arm stretched out in a loving greeting. His other hand holding a spear to defend his people. But he leads with the hand. He leads with aloha.

Because that’s what we do. It is what we are born to do. We are born to aloha. To love. To compassion. Even now, even after everything, all I want to do is be kind.

And it’s terrible. But sometimes I just wish he had lead with the spear.

[protectthesacred]

[protectthesacred]

[protectthesacred]

People love natives in such a superficial way. People wanna stand with natives when we’re talking about the trees, and the land. People wanna stand with natives when we talk about philosophies of love and togetherness. But as soon as it’s time to talk about political side of being native. About dismantling a system built on the genocide of our people. About how we need a new system that isn’t built upon capital gain and benefitting white bodies. About putting up a fight. About how the colonial state we reside in is a disgusting imperial plague on this land. Suddenly y’all don’t wanna talk native.

[protectthesacred]

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious.”

~ There There by Tommy Orange

[protectthesacred]

[protectthesacred]

Protecting Indigenous food sovereignty doesn’t just mean calling out the shitty colonial behaviour of groups like PETA etc. It also means taking up the environmental fight, stopping threats like tankers and pipelines to salmon populations, fighting commercial fish companies threatening the fishing practices of Indigenous fishermen, fighting government propaganda that blames wolves for caribou declines instead of poison from oil companies, and fighting against land encroachment which threatens the whole food chain in the name of extraction or recreation industries.