Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Just a few words from a GREAT article by Stephen Graham Jones, a writer in horror, fantasy and the really wobbly genre that is non fiction. He speaks from participating in one too many panels where the focus is on speakers' identity instead of their art.

Open Letter to Cons From the Indians No Longer in the Background of a John Wayne Movie

by Stephen Graham Jones

We’re Here to Talk Books and Writers, not representation and diversity. So, if you can resist that urge to put us all on the same panel to talk about “The West” (we’re not all from the West…) or “The American Myth” (myth being what the big religion calls the little religion), that doesn’t mean that the big change sorter has to deposit us on the representation and diversity panels. And, anyway? Listen to the Q&A of most of those panels. The subtext is always a request to validate parking, to give some sort of tacit permission for people to cosplay as us for a story or two. Never mind that none of us are authorized to give that particular permission. What to pay more attention to is that that’s asking us to cut out construction-paper feathers for people to wear home from school, because being Indian is fun, harmless dress-up—it’s a way of honoring us, really. Or, you know: “honoring” us.

https://www.tor.com/2021/05/19/open-letter-to-cons-from-the-indians-no-longer-in-the-background-of-a-john-wayne-movie

Popula is a new-to-me news site which runs on Civil. Five articles free/month then the paywall goes up. Lots of interesting reading, including Aaron Bady’s linguistic historiography on the chestnut “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow.” Bady points out it is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. Includes a pictorial dictionary of actual Polar people’s words for snow, as well as somewhat salvaging Whorf’s reputation.

White Words

( 300 tantalizing words )

FROZEN RIVER explores racism, ethics, power & money head-on, with sympathy, clarity and grace. The lead characters are Mohawk and White, played expertly by Misty Upham and Melissa Leo. They're total strangers who end up conspiring to make money by breaking boundaries.
(skip) The mothers team up to transport "illegal" aliens—Chinese and Pakistani—from Canada to the US over an ice road that's wholly within the Mohawk territory.
Living in close proximity, the White woman is reluctantly willing to work with the Mohawk woman, but her racism prevents her from recognizing the humanity of other people they encounter.

FROZEN RIVER is a beautiful, bleak, gripping and heart-breaking movie. Shot on the New York-Ontario border, it captures life in the cold. It doesn't turn away from the hierarchies present even in poverty: the Mohawk woman lives in a rusty camper; the White woman's rusty trailer at least has a bathroom. It shows how the tribal justice system attempts to foster reconciliation and healing, while the US police deal in racial profiling and big-dick nightstick boundary patrols.

Even with the grimness, I was glued to the couch for a second viewing with director's commentary.

Here's a trailer in small screen Flash player, auto starts, no captions or descriptions; sadly, Melissa Leo dominates the screen here because she's White and more well-known (Kay Howard from Homicide). That's not the case in the movie itself.

This post is part of the linkalicious International Blog Against Racism Week 4 July 27 to August 2, 2009.