long story short, there’s legislation in the process of being passed that would
ban girls under 18 from wearing any form of religious head covering in public, and although it’s obviously aimed at muslim women, it would also affect other faith groups that practice similar forms of modest dress
ban islamic swimwear in schools and public (there is already a modest swimwear ban in place at public beaches, this just extends it)
ban mothers wearing hijab from entering schools or participating in school field trips or extra curriculars
ban the slaughter of halal poultry - the cheapest and most easily accessible form of meat protein for the muslim community
extend school hijab bans to universities
prevent muslim women from choosing healthcare providers based on gender (which many muslim women prefer to do, since many exams require removal of clothing, etc)
ban muslim parents from homeschooling
force halal markets to sell pork and alcohol or face closure
ban foreign flags at weddings
What can I do to help? This sounds utterly outrageous and I want to help out in any way I can even though I am just in the US.
hey guys! lots of people are asking how to help, so i’m reblogging this again with some more info and resources. please remember that, like i stated before, this is not yet law but in the process of becoming law.
more information is coming out daily, and there are a few corrections and updates to note:
the modest swimwear ban, though it was overturned in 2016 for public beaches, will still affect public pools and schools
the halal ban is not technically a “ban”, but it is still expected to severely impact the industry in a way that could produce similar effects and make halal poultry less affordable and accessible to the communities that rely on it as an affordable staple.
the notion to extend the hijab ban to universities is not yet in effect or being introduced, but many fear it will be the next step
How can you help?
Here are some info posts on how to help. Sources will also be linked at the bottom:
A few tips; talk to muslim women instead of for them - learn about why some women choose to wear it while also learning about why some women choose not to - learn about what hijab means for women and men - don’t limit your support to a few posts, be active - educate yourself about how colonialism, racism, and orientalism plays into this
the hashtags #CantBanUs and #HandsOffMyHijab are trending, but they were created by and for muslim women. spread their stories and give them platform, but don’t occupy their space
Information is constantly changing, so if any fellow Muslims out there have some additional links, updated info, or tips, please feel free to add on
And lastly, please don’t add unnecessary commentary or confrontational dialogue to this post. Reblogs encouraged!
In Indigenous lands where nuclear weapons testing took place during the
Cold War and the legacy of uranium mining persists, Indigenous people
are suffering from a double whammy of long-term illnesses from radiation
exposure and the C0VID-19 p@ndemic. Yet, we have not witnessed in the
mainstream media and policy outlets a frank discussion of how the two
public health crises have created an intractable situation for
Indigenous communities. The Diné are drinking poisoned water, putting
them at risk for more severe coronavirus infections.
From 1944 until 1986, 30 million
tons of uranium ore was extracted on Navajo lands. At present, there
are more than 520 abandoned uranium mines, which for the Diné represents
both their nuclear past as well as their radioactive present in the
form of elevated levels of radiation in nearby homes and water sources.
Due to over four decades of uranium mining that supplied the US government and industry for nuclear weapons and energy, radiation illnesses characterize everyday Diné life. […]
The nonprofit Navajo Water Project says the Diné are 67 times more
likely to be without running water or a toilet connected to sewer lines
than others in the United States. As a result, many are forced to drive
or even walk several miles to the nearest communal water station. Some
instead get water from an unregulated source, like a livestock trough.
But research shows uranium mining may have contaminated many wells on
the reservation.
A large portion of the area’s groundwater has been contaminated with
uranium as well as other mining by-products like arsenic that were
mobilized by the mining operations, according to researchers who
presented their findings at a 2019 American Chemical Society conference.
[…]
According to a 2019 report
by the environmental groups U.S. Water Alliance and DigDeep about
access to water, the number of cases for gastric cancers doubled in the
1990s in the Diné areas where uranium mining had taken place.
[…]
In a study
published last August in the Journal of Public Health Management and
Practice, researchers found a relatively high percentage of households
on Native American reservations lacked complete indoor plumbing. While
only 0.4 percent of homes in the United States lacked indoor plumbing,
on Indigenous reservations that number was 1.09 percent. For the Navajo
Nation, it was 18 percent.
[…]
——-
The Diné have paid a heavy toll during the pandemic.
According to the Navajo Times, there had been at least 27,887 reported positive cases of COVID-19 on the Navajo Nation by late January, including 989 deaths. […]
——-
The Navajo Nation Council banned
uranium mining under the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005,
but much of the mining contamination remains. While the Environmental
Protection Agency says that $1.7 billion
has been secured through legal settlements with mining companies and
other agreements dating back to at least 2014 for cleanup at 219 of the
523 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation, the Diné say little of
the work has been completed. “The biggest thing is that out of the $1.7
billion dollars I think the total amount that has been spent as of
today is $116 million on studies. … Out of the 219 that were funded, not
one site is 100 percent ready to be cleaned up,” Navajo Council speaker
Seth Damon said last year, according to the Navajo Times. The newspaper reported that the Environmental Protection Agency hopes to begin cleaning up the sites by 2024.
Indigenous organizations are doing a tremendous amount of work to
address radiation poisoning and water scarcity in the Diné community.
These include the Red Water Pond Road Community Association where activists like Terry Keyanna are fighting for environmental justice every day. The Navajo Water Project,
a section of the larger non-profit DigDeep, is doing valuable work to
address the lack of access to clean water in the Diné community. Since
last March, Gavin Noyes and Woody Lee at Utah Diné Bikeyah
have provided food and supplies to more than 800 homes, and delivered
“175,000 gallons of new water storage capacity to over 600 families
without water.” The Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund is another grassroots organization, started with a GoFundMe page
created by former Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch that
raises money for two weeks’ worth of food for Diné and Hopi families in
self-quarantine. Their work is a pivotal lifeline in pandemic times.
——-
Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Jayita Sarkar and Caitlin Meyer.
“Radiation illnesses and COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 3 February 2021.
Also that figure is way too low, modern population estimates might be as much as twice that. There were between 25 and 40 million in central Mexico alone, almost as many people in the North Amazon, almost as many in the Andes, and almost as many in the American South. All saw 80 to 99 percent population loss in the period of 2 to 3 generations.
The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.
Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.
That’s not even genocide, it’s apocalypse.
Why are you all omitting the well known fact that it was not purposeful genocide but simply new microbes introduced that no one knew about at that time.
Cuz that’s not true.
Tw genocide, tw violence
When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.
They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.
Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.
The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.
The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.
And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.
Colonizers are not innocent just cuz the germs did a lot of the work of the apocalypse.
Btw America BARELY acknowledges this, there’s no memorials or educational trips like Germany does the Holocaust, most schools don’t even mention that Native Americans existed
as someone raised in the U.S., I’m not aware that America acknowledges it at all. Like beyond the very basic “settlers and natives sometimes engaged in warfare” (that is literally how our textbooks phrase it), U.S. history as it’s taught in schools erases all of this.
They erased a fucking global apocalypse. And got away with it.
A few weeks ago I had an argument with a bunch of spanish people. Aparently a lot of them believe and it’s a very common spanish belief (even in newsletters and everything) that all of this is a lie and they didn’t do anything wrong… They are fucking trying to rewrite history to be seen as “heroes” and “saviors”
@shianu I think David Stannard’s American Holocaust is a pretty good place to start. My biggest gripe is that it uses textual references for body counts in some places, which tend to be semi accurate early on. Then he reverts back to the weird genocidal-make-believe numbers offered by bad faith anthropologists in other places.
I dismiss the low-ball population counts for Natives made by demographers and anthropologists because, and this is not bullshit, they use a formula based on how much a staple crop a region can produce and the average population that amount of staple can sustain. Those assumptions ignore the fact that every staple in the western hemisphere has a higher yield than every staple in the eastern hemisphere, they ignore indigenous agricultural practices, indigenous biodiversity, the fact that population can wax and wane regardless of crop yield for completely unrelated reasons. The fact that most of the population models rebuff any significant population north of mexico while acknowledging the fact that mexico has an enormous population but the plains or the US southeast or the river valley all have equivalently fertile environments or even superior and a better source of red meat but can’t possibly have more than a few hundred thousand… ? Funny how basically anywhere you go you can find arrow heads and pottery shards too.
Y'all ever notice how people still don’t understand that all lands are indigenous lands? Like some woman in my class said “25% of superfund sites are on indigenous lands” but what she meant was that they’re on reservations. 100% of these sites are on indigenous lands. We didn’t abandon our homes, we were stripped of access.
Ew imagine being as ignorant as @displacedandqueer and just believing whatever racist US history you’ve heard that implies Natives were some dumb savages who didn’t explore all their lands and had no concept of territories.
Ugh, could not be me. Anyways, learn about whose land you’re on at native-land.ca
Omg to be white and ignorant must be nice……
We did indeed live on both North America and South America. There were hundreds of millions of residents of thousands of nations.
people living on indigenous land: stop complaining we’re not that bad look at all these things we gave you
the indigenous people who built those things, wrote those books, started their organizations, made those newspapers, fought for their rights and for those systems to be put in place, and did everything they could to build themselves up after what was done for them: we did that.
people living on indigenous land: yeah but like we let you do that.
Ways you can support the Mi’kmaq people (both on this front + other issues):
Treaty Truckhouse Legal Fund
-
Grassroots Grandmothers, Mi'kmaw Rights Holders and others continue to stand united as water protectors of the
Shubenacadie River in the Sipekne'katik District of Mi'kma'ki,
where Alton Gas intends to dump salt brine equivalent to 3000 tonnes of hard salt every day.
Another donation link is here, or e-transfers can be sent to
treatytruckhousefund@gmail.com
If you have any useful additions, please let me know, and I will add anything that I find. Also please spread this around, awareness is also important so that these issues do not fly under the radar and get a pass.
update on this since its been a few weeks, it hasnt stopped and it got even worse last night
If you’re genuinely interested in learning more about settler colonialism and answering questions like “wait what does land back look like?” “What can I do?” and “What are the contexts informing this and why do Indigenous people reject being part of the US/Canada?” there are free syllabi online which can answer these questions (they will not answer it directly, the point is to get you to think for yourself and ask more questions that can lead you to thinking more deeply about this and how you can personally take action towards better practices of solidarity)
These are limited resources that mainly deal with North America and English-speaking countries, because that’s the context I am coming from. If you have resources from other regions and other languages, I welcome them here, or anything from your local context.
also, here is your reminder this indigenous peoples day… make sure to help us and respect us during the rest of the year as well.
follow indigenous news organization on social media.
follow news on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.
help us claim sovereignty over our land again.
donate to our organizations.
support our businesses.
reblog our art, writing, and creative works.
stand up for our peoples.
come to our rallies and be there for us.
help boost our voices.
i’m not the best for finding links so i apologize, but fellow indigenous bloggers feel free to add links in your reblogs! check the notes for these links if you want to help us! don’t just reblog donation posts one day a year, but do as much as you can to help us out!
