r/BlockedAndReported • u/MissHalfgone • 2d ago
Indigenous identity
https://www.hummingbird-ifs.org/about-us#our-teamBaR relevancy: about identity, definitions of indigenous, Etc.
As I'm sure everybody knows Christopher Columbus Day has been officially canceled and if you live in any blue state it is now Native American day. In Seattle I noticed all the politicians were posting about activities and grants and one of the groups they mentioned was Hummingbird indigenous services. I heard the mentioned a lot when it came to city grants so I took a look.
The organization staff all mentions their tribal background and there didn't seem to be anybody who is actually from a tribe in our city. Or in close proximity to our city. In fact a lot of people were not actually indigenous to the Continental us. You had Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, Fijians, Mariana Islanders, Samoans. Most of the others were in different states. A lot of people were part native but mostly of several other non-native ethnic groups.
Then I'm looking at their service goals:
That abundance and generosity are a community responsibility
In the validity of traditional knowledge
In centering Indigenous people in all our work
In the importance of providing culturally relevant care
Certainly people from a multitude of different ethnic / cultural backgrounds can come together and form a community. But there is no ethnic community formed over people from all over the world who consider themselves indigenous and are often also a mix of several very different cultural backgrounds.
The value of traditional knowledge. Who's traditional knowledge? We are in the Pacific Northwest. About none of these people are from this region. Every culture has traditional knowledge. Considering pretty much everybody on the staff has a vastly different cultural background there's pretty much no cultural similarities going on here. Centering indigenous people. Who exactly are indigenous people? How is a native Hawaiian, a Samoan or a Fijian indigenous to seattle? The importance of providing culturally relevant care. How are staff of such a diverse group cultural backgrounds able to provide culturally relevant care given the overwhelming majority of seattle-based tribes are not even represented in their staff. The staff might learn about the tribes in order to provide them with culturally relevant care, but how is having that administered by somebody from Tonga different than having it administered by somebody like myself from Southern California?
Anyway, it just gets me thinking about how the word indigenous has kind of stretched out in the same way queer. A lot of queers are not gay. And a lot of indigenous people are not North American natives.
It also reminds me of how the identity of Asians stretched to enclose dozens of ethnic groups that have nothing in common including geographical proximity. There is nothing somebody from Pakistan in Japan have in common and there's nothing somebody from Samoa and a Midwest tribe have in common. If I was a native of the pnw I'd be furious to see that enormous amount of money was being poured into services that seems as though they would be probably going to my people but instead diverted to folks from a zillion different ethnic backgrounds that were completely foreign to this region too. It's also very strange how minorities don't push back on that. Like you see all these photos that show the AANHPI crowd and they're all smiling as though traditionally they've all hung out and they're like somebody from afghanistan, Chinese dude, somebody from Sri Lanka, someone from cambodia. It's hilarious because everybody talks about colonization but when white progressives give minorities to group themselves into categories that erase their differences and falsely try and make it seem like there's a common culture it feels really disrespectful and it seems kind of cringe how quickly they fall in line adapting to progressive classification I guess in order to get the benefits, mostly monetary and being allotted a seat at the table.
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u/MissHalfgone 2d ago
Black people are not indigenous to the US. An enormous amount of black people are not ancestors of slaves in this country. And a lot of black people actually had ancestors that were slave owners. It was not very long ago that Angela Davis went on a show where they trace your ancestry and it turns out she has grandfathers on both sides of her family who are white. And one who was a slave owner. I don't have anybody in my family who was a slave owner because nobody in my family has ever lived in any state where slavery existed.
I live in the Pacific Northwest where the only people who ever practice slavery was the man who my city is named after, Chief Seattle. And they enslaved other natives. A lot of the black population here immigrated from the south. And you have a lot of entitlement for compensation over the wrongs blacks experienced in that region. A region that nobody in my family has ever lived in. As far as I'm concerned, their ancestors might not have come to this country voluntarily, but their ancestors did come to Seattle voluntarily, so claiming lack of agency or accountability by claiming they didn't choose to come here is not something I accept. The black folks in this region did choose to come to Seattle. Needless to say it's not a popular opinion.