I don’t think a lot of people really understand that ecosystems in North America were purposefully maintained and altered by Native people.
Like, we used to purposefully set fires in order to clear underbrush in forests, and to inhibit the growth of trees on the prairies. This land hasn’t existed in some primeval state for thousands of years. What Europeans saw when they came here was the result of -work-
the east coast was all mature and maintained food forests. decades if not centuries of nurturing and maintenance. when the british arrived they were amazed that there were paths through the forest just “naturally” lined with berries and edible plants, like a garden of eden. then they tore that shit down to grow wheat. dumbasses
My mom is an ethnobotanist and getting people to understand this is literally her life’s work. A lot of native tribes just had a whole different way of looking at agriculture. Instead of planting orchards in tidy rows near their villages, they went to where the trees were already growing and tended them there. They would girdle trees by stripping the bark in order to stop the spread of disease or thin out badly placed saplings. And they would encourage the companion plants they wanted and weed out the ones they didn’t, so that in the end the whole forest would be productive while remaining an ecosystem and not a monoculture. It is still agriculture, but it is a form of agriculture that is so much gentler on the landscape that, as OP says, the European settlers could not recognize what they were seeing. To them the natives must have seemed to magically live in abundance while they starved.
They did do controlled burns, but so-called slash and burn agriculture was never a primary farming strategy in North America. They were just way more subtle than that. They also made the amazing Mississippian mound structures so it’s not like they couldn’t do dramatic reshapings of the landscape when they wanted: but they changed their minds about that, walking away from Cahokia and the dense, farming-supported urban structure they had build there in the 13th century, well before any European contact.
My mom says it wasn’t a collapse, it wasn’t a war, it wasn’t a natural disaster; the farmers in Cahokia just voted with their feet. They just gradually left, dispersing in different directions but generally not very far, and it was probably because they’d gotten tired of men’s bullshit.
See, agriculture was a female domain in pretty much all the native American cultures. The specifics differed by tribe, but often they had gender-specific age-grade societies: for example, the Hidatsa Goose Society was composed of married women of childbearing age. Not only did they physically plant the fields, they also had responsibility for conducting the social and ritual events around ensuring the harvest. This included things like digging the storage pits, and organizing feasts in order to bring the whole community together to plant plots for families who were suffering illness or disability, and could not do it themselves.
So, as Cahokia urbanized (at its “height” it was a population center of
between 10,200 and 15,300 people), it is very likely that the traditional, informal systems of land use-right allocations–again, always the women’s domain–became stressed by top down political pressures from the rulers (who were men). And as my mom puts it in her book Feeding Cahokia: “If rights to land ever became highly restricted as a result of a top-down, centralized process of allocation, the likelihood of poorly informed and unfair decision making is extremely high.”
So basically, the farmers took their families and they moved away. Not all at once, no mass exodus, just…gradually, they decided that they’d tried doing things the urban way, and they didn’t like it. They went back to living in smaller villages sustained, not by intensive farming, but by more garden-style plots and the traditional, sophisticated management of “wild” lands that they had never stopped practicing.
It takes a shift in thinking to recognize that was a deliberate choice on their part. Not a failure: Cahokia never collapsed, not dramatically–it just gradually wound down. They were perfectly capable of feeding themselves and they did for well more than a century. They went back to the old way because they liked it better.
And again, different tribes had different specific ways of doing it, but farming was always the women’s domain–and there are also important spiritual figures who occur under different names in different tribes. One of these is Grandmother/Old Woman Who Never Dies: giver of all plant food, protector of children, bringer of summer, and rejuvenator of living and dying things. I’m just gonna end by dropping this passage from my mom’s book because it’s amazing:
“I think it likely that the female flint-clay statues from BBB Motor and Sponemann represent an Earth Mother personage in a manifestation known to all early Cahokians, and that their Woodland ancestors had sought her powers and favors for centuries preceding the Mississippian period, just as Siouan speakers continued to protect her sacred bundles and conduct rituals focused around them long after Cahokia was abandoned. She never died. Several years ago, I accompanied a traditional Hidatsa farmer named Amy Mossett from New Town, North Dakota, to the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center [in Illinois]. When we came to the display case containing a cast reproduction of the Birger figurine, Mossett froze, took a step backward, put her hand on her chest, and said, ‘That’s Grandmother. And the snake is her husband.’“
“By 1492 Indian activity throughout the Americas had modified forest extent and composition, created and expanded grasslands, and rearranged microrelief via countless artificial earthworks. Agricultural fields were common, as were houses and towns and roads and trails. All of these had local impacts on soil, microclimate, hydrology, and wildlife.”
“People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty” - a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines - and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple of days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran. Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend hours tending experimental greenhouses. “They are our love,” said cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov of the tiny flax plants - with which they shared the confines of Salyut 1, the first Soviet space station. At least in orbit, you can look out the window and see the natural world below. On a Mars mission, once astronauts lose sight of Earth, they’ll be nothing to see outside the window. “You’ll be bathed in permanent sunlight, so you won’t eve see any stars,” astronaut Andy Thomas explained to me. “All you’ll see is black.””
One of the things that really gets me when it comes to online witchcraft and magic spaces is how hard people push the narrative that beginner magic is dangerous. It really isn’t. No demon is going to show up and suck out your soul because you accidentally summoned it. No deity is going to go out of their way to harm you. Most spirits can be dealt with using a basic banishing spell. It is extremely uncommon for witches to hex each other, but you wouldn’t guess it from the fear mongering that goes around about it.
What IS important for beginner witches is learning mundane skills like discernment and critical thinking. Because when you’re just getting started, the most dangerous thing you are going to encounter is other practitioners preying on newbies. Know how to spot grooming. Know how to spot cult-like behavior. Know how to read books critically. Know how to spot bullshit when you see it.
Have fun with beginner magic. Get messy. Make mistakes. Fuck around and find out. There’s no need to be afraid of it. No one ever cultivated a craft or skill by being too afraid to DO.
Shopping for laptops fucking sucks ‘cause I don’t know shit about computers. I’ve never had a computer with a functional webcam or microphone or the ability to play computer games made later than 2005 or a speaker that could play anything loud enough to hear from more than a foot away. How the hell should I know what I want?!
wow that would be such useful advice if only desktop PCs were small and portable and did not require desk tops on which to place them and I could take them with me when I traveled
I know this is a haha funny post, but for anyone who needs it, here’s a quick-and-dirty of what you’re most likely going to see while shopping for a computer/laptop (w/Examples)!
Cores/Intel Cores (Ex. i3, i5, i9)= Processing Speed= how fast your internet and other programs run. More cores is better.
Hard [Disk] Drive(HDD)/Solid State Drive(SSD) (Ex. 250GB, 480GB, 2TB)= How much you can store on your computer (files and apps and programs). A Terabyte(TB) is 1,000 Gigabytes.
*HDD is cheaper and more storage while SSD is faster, more durable, and uses less energy.
Memory/RAM(Random Access Memory) (Ex. 4GB, 8GB, 16GB) = How many different things your computer can do At The Same Time.
Ex. A computer with 4GB of RAM will probably shit itself if you try to play a game with with the internet open.
Video/Graphics Cards (Ex. NVIDIA, Intel HD Graphics, AMD) = How much visual complexity your computer can handle without throwing a tantrum. Only important if you play video games, do digital art, or watch a lot of movies on your computer. (When you’re watching a video and it pixelates and lags when the action stuff happens, that’s a bad/small graphics card)
Also the “avoid refurbished computers” tip is dead wrong.
‘Refurbished’ means it’s been in a technician’s hands recently and can’t be sold as new. That’s it. That’s all. In the US the FTC makes it illegal to sell something new if it’s been sold to an end user, so by definition a lot of perfect, ready-to-go hardware must be ‘refurbished’ in order to sell it again, no matter the circumstances.
Reasons a machine might be a refurb:
- Customer bought the item, decided they didn’t like the color, and returned it
- Customer bought the item, couldn’t figure out how to turn it on, and returned it
- Retailer opened the box for some reason and lost some of what gets shipped inside (manuals, cables, charger) and returned it
- Company bought 100 computers but went out of business before they could be installed or used
- Customer got a replacement for a damaged computer under warranty, and the manufacturer fixed what was wrong with the old machine and is now selling it as a refurb
I HAVE PERSONALLY WITNESSED ALL OF THESE SCENARIOS
Bottom line: ‘refurbished’ hardware has been repaired, tested, cleaned, and renewed back to original specifications by a trained technician. If anything, it’s probably MORE reliable now that it’s been doubly-tested.
All responsibly refurbished equipment comes with a factory warranty… the only refurbs I would avoid are items sold ‘as-is’ without warranty. That’s dangerous unless you know what you’re doing, like buying stuff for parts.
A lot of my most reliable hardware – servers, laptops, tablets – were bought as refurbished goods at huge savings. When I go shopping for a new thing I always look at the refurbished options first.
tl;dr: Refurbished is great!
This helped me recently and you might need it as well :)
You are my brother, and upon this cliff, should you slip, there is no distance to which I cannot catch you, so gaze with me with wonder at the weirdness of our unearthly home.
You are my brother, and I have followed you into places dark and strange, well beyond a reasonable man’s bravery or understanding, and I traveled, afraid but unimpeded by fear because you are my brother so I am never alone.
You are my brother, and I will sing at your wedding, and tell tales of the time you burned the garlic bread at age three, when mama was making a sauce and you couldn’t wait a linguine width longer for our family to feast
For we have never had much but we we have each other and that is more than enough.
You are my brother, and I am yours.
Meanwhile…
God gave me a brother, ambition too, and I am the villain to you?
stop listening to music and start listening to the sounds of nature. the “eagles?”The “rolling stones?” The “beetles?” Come into the beautiful forest with me and you will find all of those things friend…. I promise….If you just believe<3
In the beautiful forest you will also encounter the “mountain goats” and “corn” and “monkeys” and the “killers” and the-what do you mean what was that last one? Nothing haha don’t worry about it…………… <3
