A website attempting to outline the boundaries of Indigenous ancestral territories in North America, and the world over, could become a valuable educational resource, says its self-described “settler” web developer.
Vancouver-based web freelancer Victor Temprano says his interactive mapping website Native-Land.ca is his “dearest” project. He’s logged thousands of hours developing it, and says he’s working to turn it into an Indigenous-led non-for-profit organization and educational tool.
“The site wasn’t built so Indigenous people know their territories better — they know them plenty well,” said Temprano, who described himself as a settler in Canada.
“A lot of settlers are not really aware of the situation with the land, and a lot of people are vaguely interested in it, but there aren’t many resources to explore it. I’m really happy to see that it’s becoming useful to Indigenous Peoples themselves.”
hey guys friendly reminder from your fave Canadian that esk*mo is a slur so please don’t use it!
I see it usually in the context of “esk*mo kisses” which may pop up when people talk about their ships and their headcanon, but it means “snow eaters” in cree and is a slur against Inuit people so please just don’t use it!
and I would appreciate if u reblogged this because people outside Canada don’t seem to know this for the most part
This post is well-intentioned but not 100% accurate.
“Eskimo” is/was broadly used to refer to certain native peoples in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. Most, but not all of those groups find it offensive. In fact, “Inuit” is not considered an acceptable replacement term for all of these peoples. Here’s the breakdown:
Greenlandic Inuit (Kalaallit) consider Eskimo a slur.
Canadian Inuit (Innuinaq, Inuvialuit, and others) consider Eskimo a slur.
Alaskan Inuit (Iñupiat) do not consider Eskimo a slur.
Alaskan and Siberian Yupik people are not Inuit, and do not consider Eskimo a slur.
Also, the provided etymology is incorrect. There are a few different proposed etymologies for “Eskimo,” none of which are 100% agreed on, but “snow eater” is not one of them. The etymology most closely linked to the word’s slur status is “raw meat eater.” Other proposed etymologies are “snowshoe netter” or “speakers of a different language.”
tl;dr OP is correct that you should never use Eskimo to refer to Inuit in Canada and Greenland, but it is acceptable to use for Alaskan Inuit (Iñupiaq) people and for Yupik people. The safest all-encompassing term would be Inuit and Yupik (and Aleut, if applicable).
(If you are more familiar with Alaskan Native people than me and disagree with my sources, please do correct me. For now though, I believe this to be accurate.)
Good information. I knew Canadian Inuit didn’t like the term Eskimo, but I haven’t heard of the opinions of other Arctic people before.
Sara Jacobsen, 19, grew up eating family dinners beneath a stunning Native American robe.
Not
that she gave it much thought. Until, that is, her senior year of high
school, when she saw a picture of a strikingly similar robe in an art
history class.
The teacher told the class about how the robe was
used in spiritual ceremonies, Sara Jacobsen said. “I started to wonder
why we have it in our house when we’re not Native American.”
She said she asked her dad a few questions about this robe. Her dad, Bruce Jacobsen, called that an understatement.
“I
felt like I was on the wrong side of a protest rally, with terms like
‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘sacred ceremonial robes’ and ‘completely
inappropriate,’ and terms like that,” he said.
“I got defensive
at first, of course,” he said. “I was like, ‘C’mon, Sara! This is more
of the political stuff you all say these days.’”
But Sara didn’t
back down. “I feel like in our country there are so many things that
white people have taken that are not theirs, and I didn’t want to
continue that pattern in our family,” she said.
The robe had been
a centerpiece in the Jacobsen home. Bruce Jacobsen bought it from a
gallery in Pioneer Square in 1986, when he first moved to Seattle. He
had wanted to find a piece of Native art to express his appreciation of
the region.
The Chilkat robe that hung over the Jacobsen dining room table for years. Credit Courtesy of the Jacobsens
“I just thought it was so beautiful, and it was like nothing I had seen before,” Jacobsen said.
The
robe was a Chilkat robe, or blanket, as it’s also known. They are woven
by the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples of Alaska and British
Columbia and are traditionally made from mountain goat wool. The tribal
or clan origin of this particular 6-foot-long piece was unclear, but it
dated back to around 1900 and was beautifully preserved down to its long
fringe.
“It’s a completely symmetric pattern of geometric
shapes, and also shapes that come from the culture,” like birds,
Jacobsen said. “And then it’s just perfectly made — you can see no seams
in it at all.”
Jacobsen hung the robe on his dining room wall.
After
more needling from Sara, Jacobsen decided to investigate her claims. He
emailed experts at the Burke Museum, which has a huge collection of
Native American art and artifacts.
“I got this eloquent email
back that said, ‘We’re not gonna tell you what to go do,’ but then they
confirmed what Sara said: It was an important ceremonial piece, that it
was usually owned by an entire clan, that it would be passed down
generation to generation, and that it had a ton of cultural significance
to them.“
Jacobsen
says he was a bit disappointed to learn that his daughter was right
about his beloved Chilkat robe. But he and his wife Gretchen now no
longer thought of the robe as theirs. Bruce Jacobsen asked the curators
at the Burke Museum for suggestions of institutions that would do the
Chilkat robe justice. They told him about the Sealaska Heritage
Institute in Juneau.
When Jacobsen emailed, SHI Executive
Director Rosita Worl couldn’t believe the offer. “I was stunned. I was
shocked. I was in awe. And I was so grateful to the Jacobsen family.”
Worl said the robe has a huge monetary value. But that’s not why it’s precious to local tribes.
“It’s
what we call ‘atoow’: a sacred clan object,” she said. “Our beliefs are
that it is imbued with the spirit of not only the craft itself, but
also of our ancestors. We use [Chilkat robes] in our ceremonies when we
are paying respect to our elders. And also it unites us as a people.”
Since
the Jacobsens returned the robe to the institute, Worl said, master
weavers have been examining it and marveling at the handiwork. Chilkat
robes can take a year to make – and hardly anyone still weaves them.
“Our
master artist, Delores Churchill, said it was absolutely a spectacular
robe. The circles were absolutely perfect. So it does have that
importance to us that it could also be used by our younger weavers to
study the art form itself.”
Worl said private collectors hardly ever return anything to her organization. The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires
museums and other institutions that receive federal funding to
repatriate significant cultural relics to Native tribes. But no such law
exists for private collectors.
Bruce
and Gretchen Jacobsen hold the Chilkat robe they donated to the
Sealaska Heritage Institute as Joe Zuboff, Deisheetaan, sings and drums
and Brian Katzeek (behind robe) dances during the robe’s homecoming
ceremony Saturday, August 26, 2017. Credit NOBU KOCH / SEALASKA HERITAGE INSTITUTE
Worl
says the institute is lobbying Congress to improve the chances of
getting more artifacts repatriated. “We are working on a better tax
credit system that would benefit collectors so that they could be
compensated,” she said.
Worl hopes stories like this will encourage people to look differently at the Native art and artifacts they possess.
The Sealaska Heritage Institute welcomed home the Chilkat robe in a two-hour ceremony over the weekend. Bruce and Gretchen Jacobsen traveled to Juneau to celebrate the robe’s homecoming.
Really glad that this is treated as hard hitting news, no really, I am
hey guys friendly reminder from your fave Canadian that esk*mo is a slur so please don’t use it!
I see it usually in the context of “esk*mo kisses” which may pop up when people talk about their ships and their headcanon, but it means “snow eaters” in cree and is a slur against Inuit people so please just don’t use it!
and I would appreciate if u reblogged this because people outside Canada don’t seem to know this for the most part
Also if you want to refer to ‘‘eskimo kisses’‘ and not use that term the Inuit term for it is ‘‘kunik’‘. It’s a traditional greeting usually between relatives or a child and an adult, although it’s a little different from nose kisses so most Canadians call it ‘‘Inuit kiss’‘ and I’ve heard other people call it ‘‘bunny kisses’’. Either way there’s no excuse to use ‘‘eskimo’‘ in this context or another.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
The aboriginal people of Australia have a history in the country that starts at least 30,000 years ago. Possibly as long as 60,000 years ago. They are believed to have been among the very the first diasporas out of Africa.
Just think about that. We’d been confined to a single continent for all of human history. And this group invented migration and sea-crossing and got to Australia. They probably went via Asia, but on the other hand there’s no genetic evidence for them spending any time in that continent.
It hardly seems plausible they just sailed from the Somali coat heading east across the vast India Ocean with their fingers crossed they’d hit land, hundreds of thousands of years before sea-going was even A Thing. But then the idea of this band going the long way round – across desert, mountain, sea and jungle; through Western Asia, then the entire India sub-continent and then hopping from island to island – hardly seems possible either.
Nevertheless, they made the journey.
No one survives that, and then goes on to thrive in Australia (which is well documented as being a hostile landscape even today) by luck. These were sophisticated people.
Aboriginal people know what they’re about. They saw the world before most people knew there was a word to see. If they say there were giant kangaroos, there were giant kangaroos.
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