#Rambling kind of and I am not native myself to any relevant degree but i've just been thinking about this a lot lately

[dankovskaya]

Once u notice that 99% of white americans (maybe just americans in general) operate at all times as if native americans don't even exist anymore it's impossible to stop seeing it. Like. Even if they intellectually Know that is not true at all they would never assume that a native person is in the room with them, that a particular audience they are addressing could include native people, that anyone they pass on the street could possibly be native. And because so many of the dominant cultural images of native americans revolve around like, "humorously" offensive outdated Americana (sports team mascots, old westerns, pocahontas, novelty indian statues at rest stop gas stations and shit) and actual native communities don't have enough cultural influence on their own fucking land to provide widespread, self-determined representations to counteract that (or even to convince people to get rid of the bad shit!), people just internalize the idea that anti-native racism is more gauche or ridiculously antiquated than it is genuinely harmful to any real living people.

#Rambling kind of and I am not native myself to any relevant degree but i've just been thinking about this a lot lately #Even growing up in a very self-styled ''progressive'' area. We did a class play in kindergarten that had 2 of these 5 year olds #dressed up as indians. Idek why or what it was about but for some reason i just vividly remember #the little costumes. #There are literally ANCIENT burial sites all around here that have largely been bulldozed over and now sit beneath shopping centers #and fucking parking lots that i've been to more times than I could count and i had never even heard of that until i was a grown ass adult! #It's jsut CRAZY how no one cares and everyone acts like this is normal. Maybe cringeworthy but normal #the goal of the settler is to disappear the native and even if that has not happened materially #it has definitely happened psychologically