60 posts tagged with aboriginal.
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Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows
Two slightly burnt, fat-covered sticks...... discovered inside an Australian cave are evidence of a healing ritual that was passed down unchanged by more than 500 generations of Indigenous people over the last 12,000 years, according to new research.
Australia: Solar for First Nations communities? Where?
10,000 Aboriginal households in the Northern Territory go without power. Prepaid meters leaving households disconnected
For around 10,000 Aboriginal households in the Northern Territory, mostly in remote areas, getting power and keeping it on can be a difficult task. [more inside]
it's BUNYA NUT season in the northern hemisphere right now
There was a bunya nut on the side of the road next to a bunya bunya (or, false monkey puzzle tree) the other day. I knew monkey puzzle tree nuts are edible, so I took it home and read up on it and checked a sledgehammer out from my local tool library and cracked it open and harvested its kernels. It's unusual around these parts (California) and, like me, my neighbors had questions, so I thought you might, too. Here's some articles on the bunya nut and its trees and history. [more inside]
Canada marks first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
Today marks Canada's first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (formerly known as Orange Shirt Day, previously), a day for Canadians to acknowledge the trauma and suffering of Indigneous people because of the genocidal atrocities of Canada's residential school system. From the 1880s to the 1990s, approximately 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families, forced into church-run "schools," stripped of their culture and language, and severely abused and neglected. Cindy Blackstock, director of the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society: "Approach it as you would Remembrance Day...Keep in mind that children were more likely to die in residential schools than a soldier was in the Second World War." Tonight, across the country at 8 pm local time, there will be a national broadcast on APTN and CBC Radio, TV, and Gem honouring the day. A national crisis line for Residential Institution Survivors is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week: 1-866-925-4419. [more inside]
The ancient seasons of Australia
Aboriginal Australians were acutely aware of the annual cycles of their home. Researchers at the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO have compiled calendars detailing the many seasons of Australia based upon their understanding.
I called 911; they hanged up on me—my girlfriend, her father called 911…
On September 17th, the twenty-first anniversary of the Marshall Decision, Sipekneꞌkatik First Nation on Nopa Sko'sia declared a “moderate livelihood” fishery (photos) as a community exercise of their rights as Indigenous people. In response, non-Indigenous have escalated campaigns of harassment against First Nations people, the Mi'kmaq fleet, and their supporters, cutting lobster traps, firing flares at fishing vessels, engaging in arson, plundering catches, scattering improvised caltrops on shore to burst the tires of cars and trucks, discriminating against Mi'kmaq fishermen in retail stores, and making violent threats on social media. [more inside]
Say G’day to the New Hardboiled Sheriff in Town, Mate
The movie “Mystery Road” introduces us to Detective Jay Swan. Portrayed by Aaron Pederson (and written for him by director Ivan Sen), Detective Swan is an indigenous Australian cop who navigates not being fully trusted by his fellow servants of The Crown for being “a blackfella”, and not being fully trusted by the indigenous communities for being a cop and a servant of the Crown. Swan constantly code-switches between modes of speaking (or not) depending on who he’s talking to, and which community they are from.
Over the course of season 1 and season 2 of the TV show “Mystery Road” followed by the movie “Goldstone”, we get a look at issues of race, money, history, resource exploitation, drugs, corruption, and life in sparsely populated small-town/rural Western Australia, the landscape of which is almost a character itself.
Songlines
In the radio episode "Indigenous memory code," science writer Lynne Kelly and Indigenous health scholar Karen Adams share their perspectives on Aboriginal songlines as technologies of remembering. Prefer visual to audio? In 2016, Sydney Opera House's "Lighting the Sails" featured indigenous artists commissioned to create work on songlines. More context from the Opera's head of Indigenous Programming. [more inside]
Yes, we're making this for us, and we're inviting you to come in
"When Perth Festival's incoming artist director Iain Grandage announced that his first edition would open with a week of exclusively Indigenous work, it was a big deal: this has never been done before in Australia."
Excellent long review by arts editor Dee Jefferson at the ABC. [more inside]
Somebody said it three times, didn't they?
Betelgeuse is also known as alpha Orionis because it is usually the brightest star in the constellation Orion. Right now, though, it is at its lowest recorded brightness, and getting dimmer. This is of particular interest since the difference is obvious to the naked eye, and observers familiar with the constellation of Orion will find that it looks odd indeed.
Oh, and also because Betelgeuse is the closest star to Earth that might go supernova... [more inside]
how to be a good indigenous ally
How do you cross that invisible line that takes you from being in the Aboriginal 'good books' to being on the s**t list?, writes Summer May Finlay. (SBS NITV) [more inside]
“It is a great responsibilty [sic] to be the only woman here..."
Australia’s Reserve Bank has confirmed that 46 million $50 notes that entered circulation in October 2018 were printed with a typo that misspells "responsibility" in one of its microprint security features: an except from a speech by MP Edith Cowan, who was Australia's first female member of parliament. The $50 note features Cowan on one side and David Unaipon (Ngunaitponi), an inventor and Australia's first published Aboriginal author, on the other.
This is the full text of Cowan's speech to the Australian Parliament (pdf) that's quoted in the microprint. The microprint on the flip side contains an excerpt from Unaipon's Legendary Tales Of The Australian Aborigines.
What's up with the Comanche "savages" in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs?
How the Coen Brothers handle Native American representation in The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs is, to put it mildly, not great...The caricatured Native American characters in Netflix's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs [are] part of the satire, but is that portrayal responsible? Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson and Métis director Shane Belcourt join film critic Adam Nayman in a roundtable about race, representation and making space for non-white voices in film. (Radheyan Simonpillai, Now Toronto) Warning: This article contains plot spoilers for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. [more inside]
Impact of Westward Expansion on Native Americans
C-SPAN and the Aspen Institute: Impact of Westward Expansion on Native Americans (50min video, transcript included)
Yale University history professor Ned Blackhawk and Patricia Limerick of the Center of the American West discussed the interactions between Native Americans and white settlers in the 19th century. They talked about the impact of trade alliances on Native Americans and their struggle to preserve their political and social autonomy.The discussion also includes fascinating details and anecdotes concerning development and progress in the academic study of indigenous history in the U.S. during the past few decades. [more inside]
Híyoge owísisi tánga itá (Cricket egg stories)
Our children’s abusers justify themselves by promising that hurting young bodies can save the souls within. Perhaps it can, but only in the way that drying meat into jerky can save the deer.Dr Katherine Crocker (@cricketcrocker) is a biologist and member of the Kaw (Kanza) Nation, writes a powerful, beautifully-written essay on history, genocide, epigenetics, and grandmother crickets.
Because of her, we can
It's NAIDOC week! This year's theme is Because of her we can!, celebrating Australian indigenous women and their achievements. [more inside]
Ethnobiologists confirm Aboriginal knowledge of firehawks
What Do Wild Animals Do in a Wildfire? When big blazes spark and spread, some species escape, some perish—and some even thrive, as written by Sarah Zielinski for National Geographic. In Australia, Black Kite (Milvus migrans), Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and Brown Falcon (Falco berigora) have been documented intentionally spreading fire to drive out prey, recently confirming what Aboriginal people have talked about for thousands of years. [more inside]
Lest we forget
For Remembrance Day: Although not subject to conscription, many Aboriginal men and women signed up to fight for Canada in the World Wars. Some escaped from the horrors of residential schools to the horrors of the battlefield. Although many experienced equal treatment on the front, upon return they were denied the same benefits and recognition as their non-Aboriginal comrades. Photographer Zehra Rizvi interviews three surviving Aboriginal WWII veterans (and the late Henry Beaudry, who died last year at 95). [more inside]
Resistance is possible and beautiful
There are times in human history — and this is surely one of them — when there comes a sort of collective holding of the breath, an unwilling suspension of belief (to mangle Coleridge) in our leaders, our institutions, and the very idea that we might have some sort of shared purpose in this mess-making we call living.Ian Gill writes on resistances and victories in Skeena River country, British Columbia.
Orange Shirt Day and the legacy of colonialism in residential schools
In 1973, at the age of six, Phyllis Webstad was separated from her family and sent to what was called "Indian residential school." There, the new orange shirt her grandmother had saved up to buy her was stripped off her body and never returned. Today is Orange Shirt Day in Canada, when First Nations, Inuit and Metis people and their allies put on orange shirts to honour residential school survivors and to remember those who did not survive. You can read Phyllis' complete story here and learn why, for her, the colour orange is an important symbol for her experience in residential school: "The color orange has always reminded me of that [first day] and how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and how I felt like I was worth nothing. All of us little children were crying and no one cared." [more inside]
Canada 150 | 150 years of colonization
The Government of Canada has been making preparations for Canada 150, this year's half-billion-dollar birthday party in recognition of 150 years since Confederation, but many First Nations people are pointing out that there is nothing for them to celebrate about 150 years of colonization. #Resistance150 is "a project intended to highlight the many ways Indigenous peoples have historically resisted, and continue to resist, what many see as discriminatory and assimilationist policies of the Canadian government, such as those regarding pipeline construction, access to drinking water and child welfare funding gaps. Perhaps most importantly, the Indian Act itself." [more inside]
“tém:éxw” means Earth, or land in Halq’eméylem
Reporting in Indigenous Communities is a program of the University of British Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, which focuses on Indigenous news stories and how to report on them in a culturally-nuanced and historically-sensitive manner. Their focus is on some of the Coast Salish First Nations and the Urban Indigenous Communities in and around Vancouver. [more inside]
Cut your hair. The buffalo are never coming back.
One hundred years ago, the US government oversaw the slaughter of millions of buffalo in its effort to settle the West. That meant separating Indian tribes from their historic dependence on the buffalo, or bison, for food, shelter, and also for their spirituality. Indians see buffalo and all living things as sacred. Now, in cooperation with Canada, the US government has returned buffalo to the Blackfoot tribes, who say they are celebrating their long-denied sense of feeling whole again. Correspondent Lucky Severson reports from northern Montana, where Ervin Carlson, president of the Intertribal Buffalo Council says, “They’re just a part of our being, our spirituality—not only the buffalo, but all animals are very spiritual to the Indian people.”
The Cleveland Team
Canada’s prisons are the ‘new residential schools’
In Canada, the Indigenous incarceration rate is 10 times higher than the non-Indigenous population—higher even than South Africa at the height of apartheid. 75 years after First Nations were given permission to travel freely, 50 years after being given the right to vote, and just 20 years since the closing of the last residential school, our history of colonization has been quietly forgotten. [more inside]
How First Nations kids built their own internet infrastructure
Three years ago, the people living in the Ochiichagwe'Babigo'Ining Ojibway Nation in Ontario would crowd in each other’s homes and outside the band office to access what little internet the community had. There was dial-up, there was expensive cellular data, and there was some service from an internet provider in a neighboring town; when the network went down, it would sometimes take weeks for a technician to come and fix the issue. The community’s kids—itching to get their gaming systems online and scroll through Facebook on their phones—weren’t having it. [more inside]
Why are people booing Adam Goodes?
Adnyamathanha and Narungga man Adam Goodes is an Australian Rules football (AFL) player, two times winner of the highest individual award for the fairest and best player, as well as playing in two premiership winning games over his eighteen year career with the Sydney Swans. He works with indigenous youth in detention and co-chairs a foundation (with Michael O'Loughlin) working to empower the next generation of indigenous mentors. Goodes is a former Australian of the Year (2014) who recently said that "If people only remember me for my football, I've failed in life."
So why are people booing Adam Goodes? [more inside]
Parsing reports on murdered and missing indigenous women
Why (Aboriginal) Australia Will Not Recover From the Intervention
'waiting for a heart attack': Ali Cobby Eckermann writes about her first-hand experience of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response as the Art Centre Manager at Titjikala. This includes poetry based on her experiences and this may trigger upsetting emotional issues for some readers as it deals with fall out of colonisation, alcoholism and domestic violence.
Thomas King wins Governor-General’s Award for fiction.
Thomas King wins Governor-General’s Award for fiction In February, King won the British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. On Tuesday, he won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction for The Back of the Turtle, his first novel in 15 years. [more inside]
Inuit facial tattoos
Between the Lines: tracing the controversial history and recent revival of Inuit facial tattoos.
Murderpeg
"Winnipeg is the capital of Manitoba, Canada — and for 16 of the past 33 years, it has also been the country's murder capital. The prairie city is home to just under 800,000 people, about 10 percent of whom are Aboriginal, meaning Winnipeg boasts the largest urban Aboriginal population in Canada. Largely impoverished and facing continual discrimination, the community has given rise to violent Aboriginal street gangs." Vice reports (17 mins).
Tsilhquot’in victory in the Supreme Court
On June 26, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of the Tsilhquot’in people in their title claim to more than 1700 square km of land in British Columbia. The case is a landmark, and was a unanimous decision, supported 8-0 by the justices. The decision, is the first time the Canadian courts have recognized full aboriginal title to a specific tract of land by, and experts in the field expect the ruling to have an impact on future title questions worldwide
(from Vancouver Island to New Zealand, or, one might say, from PKOLS to Aotearoa) [more inside]
Well, maybe a little fallible
Jailangaru Pakarnu
Jailangaru Pakarnu was the first song to hit the popular music charts sung in an Australian Aboriginal language, released by Warumpi Band in 1983. [more inside]
"We want you to take a picture."
This iconic photo of the first Aboriginal woman to enlist in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps was used as a recruitment tool, and "appeared all over the British Empire [in 1942] to show the power of the colonies fighting for King and country." Its original caption in the Canadian War Museum read, "Unidentified Indian princess getting blessing from her chief and father to go fight in the war." Its current caption in The Library and Archives of Canada reads: "Mary Greyeyes being blessed by her native Chief prior to leaving for service in the CWAC, 1942." But as it turns out, the two people in the photo had never met before that day. They weren't from the same tribe or even related and Private Mary Greyeyes was not an "Indian Princess." 70 years after the photo was taken, her daughter-in-law Melanie made sure the official record was corrected. Via [more inside]
15 years of Aboriginal title in Canadian courts
It has been 15 years since the Supreme Court of Canada released their decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia. The decision was perhaps the most important Aboriginal rights decision in Canadian history, radically framing the notion of Aboriginal title and creating several legacies in common law. [more inside]
The Notwind
Frog Dreaming, aka The Quest (North America), aka Go Kids (UK), aka The Spirit Chaser (Sweden) features Henry Thomas as an American orphan in Australia investigating an aboriginal legend at a flooded quarry in Devils Knob national park. And yes, it's available in its entirety on youtube.
The 8th Fire
The CBC debut: The 8th Fire draws from an Anishinaabe prophecy that declares now is the time for Aboriginal peoples and the settler community to come together and build the '8TH Fire' of justice and harmony. [more inside]
Rain falls on Uluru
The Devil's Pool
The Babinda Boulders is a beautiful and exciting place in far-northern Queensland, Australia. It also conceals the Devil's Pool, which is traditionally believed to be haunted by a young Aboriginal girl calling for her lost lover. At least sixteen young men have drowned there since 1959. [more inside]
Babakiueria
Northwest Coast Archaeology
Ruby Hunter
We were supposed to really actually forget about that lifestyle. But it'd come back to me in song.Ruby Hunter, award winning songwriter, has died.
12 Beautifully Animated Stories of the Aboriginal Dreamtime
Dust Echoes is a series of twelve beautifully animated Aboriginal Australian dreamtime stories from Central Arnhem Land. The themes of these stories tell tales of love, loyalty, duty to country and aboriginal custom and law. Each story comes with descriptions on its history, what the story means and the text of the original story as told by local story tellers. Be sure to check out the downloads section for free desktop wallpapers and MP3 bonus tracks.
The devil is in the details.
First Nations (aboriginal) communities in Canada often have levels of squalor and health outcomes comparable to developing nations [PDF]. Abuse of alcohol and other drugs is rife. Generally low health care levels in these communities has led to outbreaks of H1N1 (swine flu). While the distribution of hand sanitizer might help control these outbreaks, the Canadian government is hesitant to do so out of fear that the alcohol-based sanitizer will be ingested. Some argue that this is nothing more than continued paternalism that has reduced the First peoples of Canada to their present state.
Healthy Country, Healthy People
An opinion piece in the Age states that the Northern Territory Government "plans to, in effect, close down indigenous outstations". [more inside]
Killing The Indian In The Child
Canada has apologised for forcing more than 100,000 aboriginal children to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools aimed at assimilating them. Controversial former Minister Kevin Annett has written two books on the subject of residential school abuse in Canada [Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust and Love and Death in the Valley]. Unrepentant - Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide reveals Canada’s darkest secret - that the Canadian residential school system, the Christian churches along with state authorities implemented a policy of genocide against Canada's native population. Related: Deliver Us From Evil
First People's Film Making
Isuma.tv is an amazing video sharing site for indigenous filmmakers. Isuma is perhaps best known for their incredible work on films set in arctic Canada (Atarnarjuat, Journals of Knud Rasmussen and the upcoming Before Tomorrow). Isuma.tv is a fantastic place to work by all sorts of First Nations film makers and is a much needed voice for the generally ignored indigenous artists.
Isuma was last discussed on Metafilter in 2002.
Isuma was last discussed on Metafilter in 2002.
How to catch and eat a rat
How to catch and eat a rat. Really. This is for if the bartending or the blacksmithing don't work out. [more inside]
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