Dear Ones,
I know that I am one of the people in your life that ‘rains on your parade’ through asking you to keep questioning the norms. I hope I provide sufficient encouragement and creativity to balance out the times I ask you to pay attention and labour towards justice. I am not apologizing, I am acknowledging.
As a community and those of you who are listeners here, I want us to be as awake as we can be about the power structures present in the places we live, especially ones that seem invisible, or that would be unpopular to bring up.
Like - can’t we just have a 4th of July, Thanksgiving or Christmas without Shiloh busting our myth? Well. Sometimes. But mostly I am going to bring it up.
As part of our work and financing revolutionary work, we are having a gathering focused on justice and creativity a week from now - through the Intentional Creativity Foundation in collaboration with Sacred Echoes of the Well - Musea’s Black, Indigenous and Women of Color sisterhood. I hope you will join us.
Thinking of you. Of us. Of my hope for justice that just keeps moving through me.
Shiloh Sophia
RESOURCES
Smithsonian article that is updated with Native stories regarding the 4th of July https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2020/07/01/do-american-indians-celebrate-4th-july/
“Jefferson's reference to Indigenous people as "merciless Indian Savages" was in his 27th grievance against King George, in which he accused the king of encouraging "domestic insurrection" by Native Americans against white colonists.” Russel Contreras
Article on the line in the Declaration about Native Americans - have you even read it and did you know this was in here? https://www.axios.com/2023/07/04/merciless-reminder-indigenous-history-july-4
“Black people in the early years of the United States had a complicated relationship to the Fourth of July holiday, Spires says, confronting a “national double-speak” in which white Americans celebrated their freedom of political expression while supporting the enslavement of Black people.” Derrick Spires
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/07/july-fourth-and-early-black-americans-its-complicated
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