mayasaura:

mayasaura:

imagine trying to understand the locked tomb without knowing anything about whakapapa

ALT

Yeah! That’s only fair, right?

First off, disclaimer that I’m nowhere near an expert. I’ve fallen down a few research rabbit holes, but I live almost as geographically far from Aotearoa as it’s possible to get, so I was starting from zero. I don’t know how much I still don’t know, so I do recommend people do their own research rather than relying on me. But I can provide some sources to act as a jumping off point, and some advice from my own experience!

Māori history is recorded in oral tradition, so there aren’t really any central source texts that can be translated and read. You have to sort of poke around, gather a lot of conflicting information, and then evaluate the sources of that information to see how seriously you should take them. Maybe it’s just because I am like little baby, but I found I had to spiral in on answers. Every new piece of information provided new context for things I knew, or thought I knew, and I found that there was often no one right answer to a question. Māori society has a lot of internal cultural diversity, so multiple versions of the same story and multiple perspectives on the same tradition can be true at once.

You’ll find that many sources use a lot of untranslated Māori words, to the point of being incomprehensible the first time you read them. It may be frustrating at first, but none of these words actually have English translations. Learning what they mean on their own merit is kind of the point. Just keep looking them up, and you’ll learn to understand them from context.

So, sources.

• To start simple, the definition of whakapapa in a Māori-to-English dictionary.
• Here is the article on whakapapa from Te Ara, The Encyclopedia Of New Zealand. The article is credited to Dr. Rawiri Taonui.
• Here is definition from the Ngāti Rārua Ātiawa Iwi Trust, a land trust on behalf of two South Island iwi. Due to the nature of the source, this definition focuses on the role of whakapapa in land rights and legal inheritance.
• Here is a definition from Tākai, a website dedicated to parenting advice. Due to the nature of the source, it focuses on the role of whakapapa in formation of identity and personal security.

This next source I’m linking with the caveat that it is intended for Māori readers searching for their own whakapapa. I happened to find it via googling, but please be respectful of the sources listed in the document. Whakapapa is often considered tapu, or sacred, and it can be very personal information.

• Whakapapa For Beginners, by Raewyn Paewai

I’m running out of time right now, but this is the first place I’d recommend branching out in understanding from just whakapapa:

Mana, Tanu, and Mauri, by Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal

gatheringbones:

gatheringbones:

one of my favorite pieces about being a femme was by this one dyke who regularly enjoyed the company of a rough tough butch who had some sort of complex about having sex anywhere other than in their bedroom with all the lights off. and there was always this whole long ritual of stuff that had to take place before they could move to the bedroom— they had to eat dinner, they had to watch tv, they had to do the dishes— and it wasn’t so much about drawing out the moment as, we were dealing with someone who felt stigmatized about the appropriateness of having sex in the first place and therefore had to make sure that they had the most appropriate version of it every time they did. Which meant not rushing towards it like something you were really looking forward to, not skipping any of the steps, never turning on the lights, and to not under any circumstances allow yourself to be seduced into doing something inappropriate in an undesignated space like the living room couch. And our narrator saw that and understood that and immediately set about doing her best to make herself so incredibly and mindblowingly appealing that the butch would have no choice other than to break every single one of her self-imposed rules and jump her right then and there, lights on and living room couch and everything.

and it had the best photograph too, criminy, lemme find it

got enough requests for the author and since the Perisistent Desire is so hard to get a hold of and the essay is all of four pages I figured I’d put the whole thing up here.

Dorothy Allison is fairly well known as the writer of Bastard Out Of Carolina, the semi-autobiographical novel that blew my mind a while back for framing the circumstances of the main character finding out that lesbianism exists and is a possibility available to her in such a lifesaving and wonderful way that I still haven’t gotten over it. She also showed up in Happy Endings and I transcribed a bit of that section here (“The way I grew up, lesbians were women who got killed; you know, women who drank themselves to death, women who were objects of ridicule. And I was very determined not to be a victim, not to be poor, not to be stupid, not to get stuck in that life.”) and man alive the effect it had on me reading everything she had to say on the importance of writing truth.

anyways here’s Her Thighs, from the Persistent Desire, edited by Joan Nestle, Alyson Press 1992. nsfw text, I don’t have time to transcribe the whole thing but if anyone wants to take a stab go right ahead:

phenomenal piece of writing on any number of levels, from the power play alone to how she chooses to see the femme identity through the lens of her experience, how desire and power and control and stigma play into that and what she decides to do with all of that information once she moves on from Bobby to other lovers— ones who find it a lot easier and a lot less mortifying to relinquish power.

also here’s a writing lecture she did a few years back, there’s some mic issues in the beginning but then she settles in to give you all the warm southern dyke grandma writing advice you could ever hope for:

Image transcription under the read more.

Keep reading

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critter-of-habit:

🌈 Happy Pride from the Burning Shores 🌈

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Why does Gideon struggle to recognise a salad, yet is familiar enough with mayonnaise to use it in a simile? Are there secret skeletal chickens laying eggs on the Ninth?

only-tiktoks:

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uglygirlstatus:

omw to drain the life from ur planet

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russellwilson:

russellwilson:

russellwilson:

russellwilson:

good morning everyone my pig stole a box of top ramen out of the pantry, ate 11 bags, then laid in the noodley carnage how are you all doing

omg i am getting a ton of comments and messages worrying if he’s okay so here’s an update:

he is totally fine! he tears the plastic open and ate only the noodles, didn’t touch the flavor packets either. then he slept it off all day. he actually went to the vet on monday for a check up and they said he is very healthy, just a little fat (150 pounds!)

Thank you all for your concern his royal highness is a-okay he just does what he wants

his royal swineness……………..

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sch-uwu-lchen:

was feeling like a catch tonight 🐠😌

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