Disclaimer: I am woefully ignorant on a vast number of cultural topics. I get things wrong. I screw things up. Right here, I am reclaiming the sentiment from the hands of thousands of racist diatribes over the years - "At least I'm not THAT guy."
It's been a month of excruciating WTFOMETER needle burials. The only thing we were missing was Eve Ensler's declaration of her new Tribal Art collection... but wait! What's this?
New Internet Dumb Guy, Kevin Flynn, took to the twitters to respond (well, "Nope" isn't really a well reasoned argument - but it's all he had when presented with them) to the slanderous, Oh, right - Not Slanderous - accusation that he wrote an Op/Ed in the University of Saskatchewan newsletter in the name of not knowing a single thing about what he was discussing.
Warning:
Kev is a White Savior Cowboy sporting two pearl-handled revolvers of "Save-you-from-yourself, Lil' Derogatory Nickname For A People Lady," and he's happy to use them. I only have Triggers. Many Triggers. Trigger warnings for Triggers. It gets uncomfortable. How could it not?
A little Background:
Kev is head of the U of SK English Department. I am fairly 110% sure that he is on the game show life-line speed dial list for neither the Social Anthropology department, nor History. Pretty sure Sociology is out as well as Psychology while we're at it. As for his SOLID feminism credentials, one tweet exchange offers a dictionary explanation of the word "Excellent" in response to someone asking why Kate Middleton was called this for having a boy "first try."
A misogyny observing tweeter responded with, "I think he gets that. Point is why is she "brilliant" or awesome or excellent for producing a boy."
Some time later Kevin responds with "Oh. Yeah. Good question."
So, I offer a link to the piece in question: Page four, "Honour traditions but with inclusive ceremonies."
Kevs takes the bold stance of being a white nobody in a line of white nobodies who approach Native People for the last two hundred plus years and tell them how their culture works, and how it's wrong, and how it should run the way the white mans tells them it should. Oh also he doesn't like Jews. But that's not our focus here...
No my focus is that it is very, very ballsy of Kevin to be protecting the rights of Native Women who need the white man to come tell them how to be honored properly because they can't clearly do anything for themselves. That's what white people are for.
Sandy Creek. It's one example. There are so many.
700 US soldiers descend on the camp of Cheyenne peace envoys coming to negotiate in good faith. Such good faith in fact that all the soldiers get to start murdering are women, children, and elderly when they first open fire. John Chivington gets the men good and drunk the night before, and after the dawn they set about committing genocidal butchery. The specifics are horrific. They are indefensible. They are enraging. Among the callous hatred and inhuman carnage is the most vile trophy collecting of fingers, toes, ears, scalps, and genitalia - any body part the Soldiers fancy. They sever the genitalia from men and women, using the women's genitalia as saddle decorations... as hat bands. They parade genitalia on sticks, and hunt those who flee into the brush, killing as many as they can chase down. They throw infants around like balls to land in the road and leave them for dead. Eventually they put on their newly decorated hats and leave.
When John Chivington goes home, he tells tales of a fierce battle and heroism on the part of the brave soldiers, because that is what the oppressor always does - tell you how things were.
Truth comes out fairly quickly, because even then people knew how things actually were, and in two years the US Government is apologizing with a treaty of restitution it does not let dry before breaking.
So please, Kevin Flynn... Sit your entire body and soul down, shut up with every fiber of muscle in your being, and learn a damned something. I am not going to speak for Native Women, because as they have said they do very well on their own. But I can reflect on some history. When the European met the Indigenous person, first he stole North America, then he stole the men, the women, the children, and often made disgusting ornament and toy out of their dissected bodies. Now he steals their culture to wear, as he wore their body, and tells Native People how to do it right. For the women's sake. Kevin doesn't ask anybody about it, because he's white...so he was born perhaps "knowing better." A POC asks him if he has ever actually talked with the "diverse community" around him that he finds" the most rewarding aspects" of his job - and he literally tells them he never had time to talk politics with any of the Native Women because he was "too busy helping them!"
The modern history, from the outside (as might be argued it should be
viewed) is of a culture that is continuously invaded even in the small
space it is left - one which is attacked for it's "otherness" while
being fetishized for it's "exoticness" and never for it's humanity. Native women suffer rape at roughly double the rate of non Native women, and often it is White men.
Flynn leaves a Twitter trail of denial of white privilege while discussing the cultural inferiority of Native men and traditions in nurturing and supporting women. "Learn how to spell "privilege" right and then we'll talk" is one tweet. Another deals with his insistence that he doesn't come from a place of privilege, "I don't have it!" Throughout is the New White Male Ally Script. It starts with attacking the group you purport to be allied to (on the topic of native spiritual beliefs, "It is time we moved beyond superstition and fully embraced the modern world"), mocking dismissal of protest follows in every imaginable patriarchal, racist, classist way, (one tweet establishes that any POC who challenge him are "not up to the intellectual" caliber of FN that agree with him, so he "prefers" to talk to them).
Finally an inability to handle all the mean accusations of White Savior meaning exactly what White Savior says erupts into their furious departure.
This time it was a matter of hours. @ProfessorFlynn is no more, the account deleted to pop up as another sock savior sometime later. They should all be so brief.
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