Editors, Please Help... Crying

I can't remember if I blogged about my seizure. I'm writing my debut piece for the website I told you guys about in my last blog and I keep forgetting words. I've struggled with vocabulary since my May 25, 2015 seizure and now I can't even remember things like the difference between distinguished and well fuck now I can't even remember the word that I lost it over to begin with.

This has been happening all day. I made it to 245 words and my brain turned to mush. I'm shooting for 2k but 1600 is also acceptable but I just !! don't !! know !! what !! to !! do when I see that my vocabulary (I just typed covabulary fml) is 11-12th grade level instead of college graduate. Every time I add a few sentences I read through and spot repeated words and missing words like my sentences are coming through backwards. I'm so frustrated that I'm sitting here crying. I don't even know that I can submit the 1-3 articles per month on top of editing for The Pulp Zine when we get no quality submissions and people sign up for calendar dates and drop so us editors have to fill in. I don't want to quit though. I can't. Writing is all I have and even if I'm not getting paid, I'm doing something I love. Plus also I have no money to higher a blog layout maker to make over my blog so if I left The Pulp Zine I'd have nowhere to post my non-political/ethnic-al? (honestly what the fuck word am I talking about I know one of you will know) posts.

Please if there are any of you that edit writing and can catch any mistake or buff vocabulary, I'll accept any kind of edits. I'm just over 1/4 of my goal and I'll paste it here. And yes Injuns was actually intentional. Y'all know that's my ish when I'm trying to be condescendingly sarcastic.

((Also I'm playing Lemonade because I just had to get it even though all I did was cry during the video for Forward and dance even though it hurt my back muscles through all the man-slaying anthems. My Queen's voice makes me feel a little bit better. Seriously, thank you nefertiti; But please suggest songs so I can listen to something else before I do the 2-week-repeat-then-trash because I have nothing else to listen to rn))
What started out as a tale of friendly Thanksgiving in elementary school evolved into half truths about how Native Americans were violent toward settlers, traded their land for blankets, etc. etc. I’m sure most of us learned the story of European settlers and how they pushed the Injuns further along the west coast in US History - something had to be done if they were not willing to coexist, right?

From the beginning we were treated as if our cultures did not matter, shown that our bodies did not matter, and made to feel as if the only important thing about us was the land that we lived on. This was proven in many ways: boarding schools, mass genocide, land theft, and broken treaties. And while many people claim these things happened hundreds of years ago in order to accuse us of clinging to the past, that is simply untrue. 1996 saw the closing of the last Indian Residential School, #MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) shows us the continued disregard for our lives, and things like the Keystone XL Pipeline prove that our land really is the only thing that matters. These are all truths that I see denied time and time again, and I can go along with that - maybe these things happened for other reasons, maybe we are important and cared for.

But then there is always that person who decides to be vocal about what has been suspected all along. That person who includes something seemingly innocent like All Lives Matter - which was started to derail Black Lives Matter - in their bio online or the person who goes far enough to say something like #WhitePride or White Is Right. These are the people who scare me: the people who make their hate known, who give a face to their own blatant racism.

“Native genocide was necessary to the survival of Europeans.”

“Killing the Indians was necessary for the progress of America.”

“We should have wiped out their inferior, infested race a long time ago.”

My people were, and are, referred to as savages. The only savage thing I see is murder and the defense of it. These above quotes, one might think, are ages old. Sadly, they have all been heard within the last 365 days. What I struggle to wrap my head around is how any of this can be looked upon as okay, how it can be excused as something that won’t have any effect on us. After all, sticks and stones break bones but words can never hurt us. Except for when words incite violence, of course. The words themselves may not be grabbing guns, knives, rope, or making fists but cause and effect is often unfortunately and wrongfully ignored.

The former two are a prime example of something Frederick E. Hoxie said: “Most Americans instinctively view Indians as people of the past who occupy a position outside the central narrative of American history.” Within two pages of This Indian Country, Hoxie hits the nail on the head with a prominent problem settlers and their descendants have - centering themselves. Through school I always learned that the United States of America were founded following the immigration of Europeans and the Native Genocide on the basis of religious and political freedom. How this land was acquired - read: stolen - is a red flag where freedom is concerned. Did the freedom of the people already here not matter? Did righting the wrongs of the very first settlers not matter? For everything I find myself asking more and more questions but always getting the same answer.
July 2nd, 2016 at 12:48pm