Untitled | Benjhicks

She was like an exclamation mark in human form.

Jenna Evans Welch (via books-quoted)

Adopted Native, Happier Connected with his Roots

@sire-aie asked:

my MC is half native half white.he is not close to his culture+background because his native parent doesn’t not live with him.where he lives it is also considered by others shameful to be native because of political reasons.he later on meets a group of natives and starts to become more spiritual and happy w/ himself. is it bad to make him happy only when he starts to learn more about his heritage? is it cliche? he also starts to grow his hair at this time to feel more connected to his heritage.

Alright so. I’m going to remind everyone that if you’re going to send in a question, pick a tribe. But this question in particular is hitting a note with Indigenous cultural experience that I feel very, very necessary to address.

Forced seizure and adoption of Native individuals is a very real part of being Native. A Cree elder I spoke to is a lawyer who specializes in stopping these seizures. One particularly memorable reason she had to stop a child being taken from an “unfit parent” was the parent didn’t have laundry on site. That’s just one of many ridiculous examples that happened, and still happens to this day.

If you’re dealing with somebody mixed who doesn’t have his Native parent live with him, you’re potentially dealing with an unfair custody ruling and a whole whacking bunch of racism around the start of it. The assumption that he lives in an area where it’s shameful to be Native points to a massive lack of cultural sensitivity from the white parent, which is sadly extremely common. As a result: it would be very much not cliche to have him be happier when he reconnects with his heritage. He’s going to stop learning to be ashamed of himself and start undoing the colonial legacy of the 60s Scoop and residential schools. He could always feel conflicted about what to pick, but starting to accept part of your racial identity is a good thing! It means your self hate goes down, it means you stop feeling like you can’t exist the way you are, it means you start to breathe.

I wouldn’t treat it as a completely magic pill— the amount of work that goes into not hating part of your identity is an incredible amount— but no, it is absolutely not cliche to have reconnection= an increase in happiness. 

Just please, please educate yourself on the reason Native kids are taken away from their cultures, and understand the white parent should be treated as not a very good person for putting their child through that. Because they aren’t. Teaching your child to be ashamed of their identity is abusive. While you haven’t mentioned the parent directly, that parent still moved to a place where there weren’t many other Natives and there was a cultural message of white as superior. Unless they advocated for the child’s identity, they’re an abuser, full stop.

~ Mod Lesya

she disappeared on the horizon

by Denny Bitte

Songs To Listen To Right Now, part 3

Heart of Gold-Johnny Cash

A cosmic barbecue: Researchers spot 60 new ‘hot Jupiter’ candidates

Yale researchers have identified 60 potential new “hot Jupiters"—highly irradiated worlds that glow like coals on a barbecue grill and are found orbiting only 1% of Sun-like stars.

Hot Jupiters constitute a class of gas giant planets located so close to their parent stars that they take less than a week to complete an orbit. Second-year Ph.D. student Sarah Millholland and astronomy professor Greg Laughlin identified the planet candidates via a novel application of big data techniques. They used a supervised machine learning algorithm—a sophisticated program that can be trained to recognize patterns in data and make predictions—to detect the tiny amplitude variations in observed light that result as an orbiting planet reflects rays of light from its host star.

Millholland and Laughlin searched systematically for reflected light signals in the observations of more than 140,000 stars from four years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission. The Kepler spacecraft is best known for enabling the detection of thousands of exoplanets that transit their host stars. During a transit, a planet passes in front of a star and causes a periodic dip in the observed starlight.

Reflected light signals can be difficult to distinguish from stellar or instrumental variability, the researchers said, but a big data approach enabled them to pull out the faint signals. They generated thousands of synthetic datasets and trained an algorithm to recognize the properties of the reflected light signals in comparison to those with other types of variability.

The reflected light signals hold rich information about the planets’ atmospheres, according to the researchers. They contain characteristics such as cloud existence, atmospheric composition, wind patterns, and day-night temperature contrasts. Read more at: phys.org