phoenix-falls:

deafonyourleft:

iamchamberly:

My fucking head is going to explode.

“Native American” names?

Why don’t you just label the entire month of November as “promote racial stereotypes and underlying mysticism” month and stop pretending any of this shit is grounded in the idea of realistic education or fact.

My fucking Native American name is Chamberly. My son’s Native American name is Jaiden. Don’t come at me with the spirit animal bullshit while your curriculum completely ignores the real time suffering of an entire population of people.

Let me tell my native friends Kevin, Jeremy, Courtney, savannah, Ryan, Ron, and Mikey that their names are wrong apparently

I still remember this fuckshit vividly over 20 years later, but when I was in primary school we had to do something like this and the teacher wanted to give us all “Indian names” and write them down on these stupid little headbands with construction paper feathers and I had written my Blackfeet name on the headband, misunderstanding the project cause I’m a fucking child. And my teacher comes around and gets mad at me for “ruining” my headband and I didn’t understand the problem and she says I’m supposed to write down my Indian name

And I said I did

And she says “that’s not an Indian name” which I can only assume now she said as much because it wasn’t English and I argued with her, saying that yeah it totally was because my nana had given it me and why was she even mad that I already had a name? 

And the teacher told me “You’re not Indian” 

And I said “Yes, I’m Blackfeet” and this fool ass woman laughs at me and says that’s a “made up” name and that I’m not Indian because, and I quote “You don’t look Indian and most of them are dead or on reservations. You’re not dead or on a reservation, are you?”

I was a smart kid, right? I could read by age three and I started school two years early so I was two years younger than everyone in my class and I was fucking five when she said this to me and I still remember it like it was three days ago. 

I went into hysterics. I was crying so hard that she sent me to the principal’s office because I was scared all my NDN family was going to die now and I was sad that I’m not NDN unless I’m on a reservation. Like? This grown ass White woman had me locked in an identity crisis before I was even allowed to stay up past 19h30 on a weekday

Like, this shit is not fucking cute. Don’t fucking do this racist bullshit. When we have names in our own language, we don’t just fucking pick them out of a hat at random. There is history and Medicine in people’s names and these things are parts of our identity—not to mention not every Native person has a name specific to their Nation’s culture

It’s almost 2015, why the fuck is this still happening?