11. Contrary to what movies will tell you, we don’t need rescuing. Tell Kevin Costner: Dances With Wolves and other Hollywood westerns perpetuate the white savior narrative. Instead, watch films written, directed, and/or produced by Natives.
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15. Expose your children to as many Indigenous activities as you can. The more children are exposed to the truth of a people, the less they will be affected by stereotypes.
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25. Recognize that DNA does not equate to culture. Ancestry.com and 23andMe, for example, are in the business of biotechnology, not culture. Culture is the community, not your spit.
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39. Stop buying “sage wands” at grocery stores. Sage, for traditional purposes, is not to be purchased. Sage, or “smudging,” as we call it, is meant to bless and cleanse a person or place. Purchasing some hippie sage wand diminishes its sacred meaning.
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64. Don’t even think about calling anyone/anything your spirit animal.
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66. Just because you lead your local Wiccan circle does not mean you understand 500 years of genocide. First, worshipping the gods and spirits of nature, which is a tenet of Wicca, is not directly comparable to Indigenous spiritualities, and second, please do not compare the Salem Witch Trials to the genocide of Native Americans. That’s not cool.
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75. It’s worth remembering that reservations were first established as prison camps, and Hitler was inspired by them. America doesn’t want you to know that one.
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87. Going camping with your pals whilst pounding booze in Patagonia jackets isn’t a “vision quest.” Please just go camping. No need to call it a “vision quest.”
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93. Stop using the words, “tribes,” “tribe,” and “tribalism” as hip words for interest groups or groups of shared interest. This usage undermines the political, legal and social unique status of tribes.
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99. Stop saying “Native Americans believed…” We believe. We survived. Being a better ally is about getting to know who we are and who we are not. We are not mascots. We are not mere relics of the past. We are writers, doctors, business owners, your classmate, neighbor. We are still here.
I love what fleas look like from above vs. from the side
I didn’t realize this was surprising to so many people!
This lateral flattening allows the flea to “swim like a fish” through fur, aided by the many backwards-facing barbs and hairs along their sides.
If you’ve ever tried to pick them off a dog or cat you’ve seen this in action, it really is like they’re gliding through a liquid environment and amazingly fast, hardly even using their legs to do it.
This is also why they don’t have wings, which would get in the way of this trick, but they compensated with incredible jumping ability that may as well be flight.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, though, fleas couldn’t jump and they were flattened top-down:
This is because fleas were originally parasites of dinosaurs, and while dinosaurs often had feathers, feathers have a different density and the “fur swimming” wouldn’t have worked yet.
The first fleas similar to today’s fleas probably began evolving towards the end of the dinosaur’s run, adapting to the increasing number of our ancestral mammals. Dinosaurs shrank into modern birds so rapidly, it seems, that their original fleas vanished entirely.
So basically whenever you get bit by a flea, you caught that from a dinosaur.
I was thinking about this again earlier and do that many people also know that a sperm whale’s mouth has the same flatness?
every single cartoon and game assumes they have this huge wide gaping maw because I guess you usually see a side view and just assume there’s more of a third dimension
ALSO IMPORTANT:
They have only lower teeth, no upper teeth, and a teeny tiny throat. This set up is for slurping up squids like pasta and nothing else.
Basically no big whale exists on our planet at all with the giant, open toothy mouth of Monstro.
Well, not any more. There used to be a considerably toothier sperm whale with a considerably less absurd and more terrifying face.
good news everyone. crows no longer need instructions to build tools and have started building them from memory, as well as passing the knowledge onto future generations of crows. oops!
better news everyone. crows have learned to construct these tools from unrelated items! they no longer need to follow the original blueprint they were given, and are able to improvise using their surroundings.
a couple months ago i re-opened my etsy shop because we’re having money troubles. about 2 weeks ago i sold a $65 item, but today when i went to look at my balance i had negative money. why? because etsy had automatically opted me into their “boosted posts” marketing feature, which costs $1 per day. i had to go find the option and turn it off manually.
etsy is opting people into paid marketing without their permission. if you use the site, make sure you aren’t getting charged.
the New Bloods are 4wks old now. pretty much as big as the adults but tbh its mostly fluffy feathers.
i wanted to keep one of the pharaohs (the two darker birds in the blue tub) but its looking like both are male, and i need a hen. theres a small chance i’ll keep one of them, but that really depends on their temperament once they mature. if their docile, like Left Beef is, then i’ll give them a chance at sticking around and do some breeding with them.
I love them! It’s like a bunch of feathery footballs that all want to know what you’re up to.
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