Thanksgiving in Indian Country, Essex: Duyukta

I was actually trying not to get worked up–and to keep any crankiness to myself–today. But, Thanksgiving is pretty fraught as hoked-up celebrations go. For some of us, it may as well be called “Historical Trauma Day”–if not “Thanks For Not Killing Us All Day”, as archanglrobriel called it on LJ a few years ago! “Let’s Pretend We’re Not (Still) In The Grip of Wétiko Psychosis Day” would also be appropriate, if not very catchy.

In that spirit, I feel compelled to offer some links. Thanksgiving: a myth-debunking, record-straightening roundup offers a good overview of the historical reality behind the politically convenient mythology.

So, we find out that Powhatan’s people kept feeding the Jamestown crew to keep them alive (not to mention that, indeed, women were chiefs). That settlement would not have survived at all, were it not for local Native help. A lot of the people the Virginia Company sent starting out didn’t even know how to fish or grow food at all, and had to be shown. They even needed help building houses, apparently; thus the same construction materials the locals were using. The site was uninhabited for good reason, and a lot of people died from drinking bad water, not knowing any better. I saw something on PBS a few years back, about some shocking new discoveries about how much practical help they did get, and how many of the initial group married locals–really amazing, since they were mostly young men! Marriage into a matrilineal society (with plenty of food!) was a major reason so many of them went to live with the Natives, hardly the only time or place this has happened under colonialism. A lot of the feast mythology was based on Powhatan Federation people repeatedly pulling English chestnuts out of the fire. I already knew all of this, but it’s hardly common knowledge in the U.S., for good reason.

The area I’m from got multiple waves of coastal refugees, including Powhatan Federation people (Renape), Meherrin, Delaware (Lenape), and escaped slaves of all descriptions (including Irish and Highland Scots). Thus did my family. It’s hard to forget.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman has written an excellent piece: Indians and English Meet on the James, about each group’s attitudes going in. Often overlooked/obfuscated points: this was not the first time the Pamunkeys and related nations had dealt with Europeans around the Chesapeake, and the English saw the Natives as “accomplished people living in highly developed societies…Moreover, the advanced nature of Indian societies was the best indicator of the land’s potential.” The “primitive” slur came in much later, as justification for grabbing other people’s stuff.

So, with all the emphasis on the Plymouth Bay Colony (Massachusetts) in modern Thanksgiving mythology, what really happened there? Daniel N. Paul* shows us some history in his The Real Thanksgiving; the whole thing is worth reading. Hmm, separatist Puritans relied on God to provide, and it happened: through Native compassion, and however gadugi translates in Wampanoag. The author describes nicely how this help was returned.

Bit of a pattern developing here. It does, indeed, seem to have been a common one, with lots of “feasts” involved wherever a colony was started. Mitchell Cohen wrote something good about this.

I tracked down one rather illustrative piece I’d seen before, What are the Underlying Values of Haudenosaunee Culture?. Note that, in the “ethics” section, “To feed others” is listed separately from “To be hospitable,” “To be generous,” and “To share”.** The fact that all of these ideas are individually emphasized might give you a pretty good idea of their cultural importance. This doesn’t just come from the Haudenosaunee; these are all values stressed in my own upbringing.

Living in a house with just Nigel and the animals, immersed in a very different culture, with not a lot of other people likely to stop by, I still consistently cook more than we need. It would be a shame if we did not have enough to feed anybody who should happen by. That’s OK; the extra is rarely wasted, but gets eaten as leftovers and/or dog food. It’s worth it.

This cluster of cultural messages is very strong. On an individual level, my attitudes have been taken advantage of by people from different cultural backgrounds. (Not to mention expectations of politeness, however strained.) This has also played out multiple times within my family. Elizabeth Moon’s fiction actually helped me understand how this difference in approach to giving and taking works in a lot of cases, as I described in the last few paragraphs of this economic post. The assumed power dynamics involved are still very different between cultures. Experiences living in the U.K. have also illustrated this point.

Still, I have to consider living correctly by own standards to be far more important than the fact that some louts are inclined to take advantage of this. I’ve also had to learn to temper this with recognition that, past a certain point, people forfeit any right to the politeness and generosity they insist on misinterpreting as chumphood. They still deserve compassion, but you do not have to carry a snake down the mountain in your shirt.

It ’s a good thing in multiple ways that I’m no longer concerned about sending whatever punk cred I may once have up in flames, by mentioning Billy Ray Cyrus twice in as many weeks. (Though a lot of my earlier embarrassment there came straight from carefully inculcated internalized racism.) Considering the continuing clash of cultural values, I can’t help but think of his “Trail of Tears”:

Too many times you walked away
And was made to feel ashamed
And though you only tried to give
You were often blamed

Yeah, some themes are still very much with some of us after 400+ years. The personal is very political indeed.

Another point I’ve been thinking about a lot today is the anger factor. Again, I try hard to temper it with compassion–in the interests of duyukta–but a lot of people would still consider me unreasonably angry and shrill about things that happened centuries ago. That’s privilege for you, and it’s hard not to see how some of the same crap continues if you don’t have that privilege. I guess it’s more internalized BS that keeps nagging at me that maybe I’m being unreasonable even thinking about these things.

Daniel Paul put it nicely, in one newspaper piece:

I’ve been asked so many times, by non-First Nations people, about the cause of the high rate of suicides, violent crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse and so on within First Nation communities that I couldn’t put a number on the times asked if I tried. My response to these queries has more often than not been, “you figure it out then give me your views.”

In order to help them figure it out, I spent over four years of my life writing a book called We were Not the Savages. I wrote this book for people to use as a tool to help in their efforts to understand. Yet I still get asked the same questions. And, interestingly enough, not more than a handful of the people who tried to come up with an explanation were even in the same ballpark as the answer.

Well today I will try to provide an answer. What has caused and continues to cause children in such places as Davis Inlet to overdose on drugs and substances, the suicides at Big Cove and other reserves too numerous to mention here, the alcoholism, drug dependency, and so on, among our people is quite simple. Try the after-effects of centuries of unmitigated racist persecution for an answer. . .

The trauma you experience by being subjected to racist persecution practically destroys your self-esteem. To overcome the experience of being brainwashed by a foreign society into believing that you are descended from an inferior civilization, peopled by inferior human beings, is nearly impossible. I can vouch for this personally; its been a struggle of mine for more than half a century.

Historical/multigenerational trauma is very real. I am working hard “[t]o overcome the experience of being brainwashed by a foreign society into believing that you are descended from an inferior civilization, peopled by inferior human beings” (in a dubious “New World”, to boot). Learning helps you deal with it. That’s part of the “truth” sense of duyukta helping bring you to the “harmony and balance” and “dignity and honor” senses; most of us could use more of all the above!

Edit: I was about to completely forget the bizarre nature of setting aside one day of the year specifically for giving thanks. To quote Tecumseh:

When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the morning light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food, and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies with yourself.

That’s every single minute of every single day.

Also, from the Haudenosaunee values piece linked to earlier, “People should be thankful everyday.” It seems simple to me, but obviously not to everyone.

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* I have spent some time on (Mi’kmaq) Daniel N. Paul’s website before, and would like to pick up his book at some point. Chilling stuff, bearing an uncanny similarity to what happened further south. The same people were even involved, in some cases; e.g., the Cornwallis family.

** And a lot of them are ways of trying to wrap English around the northern Iroquoian version of gadugi. Another linguistic insight I’ve had? English concepts of “generosity” and “hospitality” map about as well as “charity” onto the values we’re trying to express here. The English versions imply some alien things about power.

Autistic medication: some serious risks

This started out as an endnote to another post I’m working on, but quickly began to mushroom into something warranting its own space.

Most of the cognitive problems I have been dealing with showed up when I was on neuroleptics–for good reason! Lars Martensson’s paper from 1984 is well worth a read, as is one of Breggin’s on brain damage and cognitive dysfunction, for exactly how these drugs cause physical damage. I am just recently, after four years off meds and a lot of work, starting to be able to retrieve language well enough to write much in English again. It really was the equivalent of a series of good knocks to the noggin. Not all of those effects were related to language, by any means. Thank goodness for neuroplasticity!

The abrupt loss of access to near-fluent German vocabulary happened, however, after a couple of weeks taking the antidepressant buproprion/Wellbutrin. It was still in there somewhere, but the gears just stopped meshing so I couldn’t find it (and got railroad-spike headaches when I tried). I was 3/4 of the way through a modern languages BA at the time. Those same mental blocks are still there, though I have learned to work around them to some extent while relearning things. Wellbutrin also caused absolutely terrifying akathisia, complete with sudden self-immolation urges like nothing I’d ever experienced before –or since, thank goodness! If I hadn’t already learned the hard way to deal with lesser versions of that sort of thing, I would not be here. This reaction still was not called akathisia, but was treated as a psychotic symptom of my ostensible bipolar disorder.

Come to find out, autistics have a higher risk of movement disorders from SSRIs; I would be amazed if buproprion and neuroleptics didn’t carry a similarly higher risk for us. I also got akathisia from multiple SSRIs, not recognized as such at the time–starting in 1989–along with immediate tremors and persistent tardive dystonia from atypical neuroleptics.

Not surprisingly, combining SSRIs and neuroleptics potentiates the risk of movement disorders. This makes sense, considering that they both can cause the same adverse effects. They are still frequently prescribed together, including to autistic people. I took them together for a good while.

As Amanda wrote an excellent series about years ago, when you don’t understand how someone’s nervous system works in the first place, but go messing with their neurotransmitters anyway, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. That holds true for “normal” people, much less the neurodiverse. We get all kinds of unexpected drug effects, some of them very dangerous indeed. Nobody needs–much less deserves–drug-induced impairment and disability. There’s also precious little true informed consent out there, when it comes to psychiatric medications. Nobody should be forced or coerced into taking them, especially not when “behavior management” is the stated goal.

In this post, I’m just focusing on cognitive effects and movement disorders. With little kids whose systems are still developing, endocrine disruption should also be a huge concern.

I wound up in the psychiatric system at 13 because they did not recognize what I had as autism in the ’80s, and got heavily medicated as the “treatments” kept not working and causing strange problems. By the time I was 25, I had been on about the same number and variety of medications as Amanda reports. My experience is far from unique. Scarily, though, even a small child diagnosed on the autistic spectrum now is likely to be prescribed exactly the same kinds of medications I was given, to “manage behavior”. The risks–and even the actual adverse effects–are deemed worth it, when they are taken into consideration at all.

When I experienced akathisia, it was treated as severe anxiety and/or resistance to taking the medication, and proof that I needed a higher dose of the same. At first, I was very vocal about stopping taking Prozac due to feeling terrible; after the reaction that kept getting, I just started flushing it down the toilet in private when I was not directly forced to take the stuff. I quickly learned not to say that I was having suicidal impulses at all. After a while, I started half-believing that all this was for my own good; talk about cognitive dissonance! Years later, the agitation from Paxil was considered proof that I was really bipolar. Never was akathisia mentioned, nor even considered AFAICT.

That’s distressing but not surprising. In 1999, it came out in court that Prozac’s manufacturer had been covering up adverse effects, with internal documents showing that researchers had been aware of the incidence of akathisia. From 1978 onward, sedatives were given along with it in trials to hide the rate of serious agitation. The doctor who kept me on Prozac in spite of it apparently didn’t see the continuing recommendations to start people on benzodiazepines at the same time so they didn’t kill themselves. I’m still not sure how I managed never to make a serious attempt to do so; sheer bloodymindedness was surely a factor! Similar things have come out concerning other SSRIs (among other drugs). The FDA has mandated black box warnings for several.

The risk of extrapyramidal side effects from SSRIs is still barely taken into consideration, black box warnings about agitation and suicide or no. One professional article from 2001 admits that movement disorders, including akathisia, are a known risk, but goes on to say that “Mistaking comorbid anxiety for SSRI-associated akathisia may delay or interfere with the appropriate treatment of the patient’s anxiety disorder.” True, but it’s still working the other way around one hell of a lot more frequently, with not just misery but risk of death resulting. A lot of people are getting hurt. Even scarier, concerns about SSRIs’ risks and placebo-level effectiveness have led to atypical neuroleptics being prescribed instead for depression in the U.S. Even more people are liable to get hurt.

Possibly the most evil sentence I have read lately: “Thus, higher-functioning children and adults with autism might think about suicide when they become aware of their deficits.”

This comes from an article in The Journal of Family Practice. Funny, I was on the meds because of my perceived deficits, and got akathisia. This statement is an excellent illustration of just how seriously too many medical professionals treat any problems experienced by autistic people, even more so if we’re deemed to have extra “mental illness” on top. It’s all our deficits, and these attitudes can kill us.

I am all too aware that a lot of people, including medical professionals, would be eager to dismiss what I’ve been saying (references and all), because of my autism and my history in the psychiatric system. I have hesitated to seek specific treatment for the dystonia now that a psychiatrist isn’t giving me muscle relaxants to go with the other meds. I know that a lot of people–again, including doctors–either refuse to take this kind of lasting effect seriously, or will openly say that it’s just the wages of being crazy/autistic/whatever. This also hurts one hell of a lot of people.

Most of the results from any of the cluster of searches on “autism SSRIs/neuroleptics akathisia/movement disorders/EPS” advocate the use of these medications for our betterment.

I did not think there were any still, but Risperdal is the only FDA approved drug for autistic “irritability”, since 2006. “Although there is no cure for autistic disorder or treatments for the core symptoms of autistic disorder, scientists are researching ways to help.” (“Helping build small victories”) Knowing that makes me feel a lot better. I know risperidone helped me.

I feel like a need a bath. With a stiff brush and possibly Clorox.

Regional bias, and racism by association

I wanted to clarify a point neglected in my last (already rambling!) post here, but didn’t get a chance to write more over the weekend.

When I mentioned the ever-popular corncob pipe depiction, I wasn’t suggesting that everybody in southern Appalachia is Native–under either my own criteria nor some people’s more rigid official “blood quantum” based ones. There are an awful lot of us “invisible” folks around all over the Southeastern US, and especially in the mountains, for various historical reasons. There are also a lot of people whose ancestors were mostly European (Scottish and/or Irish, particularly), along with a good number of people who identify as Black.

But, as Dave Peyton pointed out:

Those first settlers who came with the early westward migration made the mountain valleys their home for reasons still unknown. Some claim they were escaping the authorities on the populated East Coasts. Some, including Dr. Simpkins, claim that the Appalachian settlers were primarily Scotch-Irish who left their homeland in Northern Ireland during the 18th Century to escape British oppression.

But the heritage of the culture is disputed. While many adhere to the Scotch-Irish theory, others believe Appalachia was settled by outcasts from England’s big cities, particularly London…

No one disputes, however, that the Appalachian people developed a folk culture that permeated the mountains. The culture tended to absorb those who moved into Appalachia. Whether they were Eastern Europeans, Spaniards or Italians, if they lived there long enough to have children, their children were mountain people.

The fact that the mountain culture was able to absorb other cultures with little or no change itself indicates just how strong the culture was. It wasn’t until the third decade of the 20th Century that the culture was brought to its knees by mass culture.

This was written, incidentally, the year I was born; I’d take the condescending death knell with more than a little salt. (Not to mention the isolation and oddly static culture notions, politically convenient as they are.) The new barrage of forced assimilation has not been easy to deal with, but we hillbillies aten’t dead yet.

There’s popular perception, which begins when Europeans started running inland away from the reach of the authorities. All the research I’ve done suggests that this drove a lot of settlement; some geographical distance particularly appealed to people who were or had been forced laborers (75% of Virginia’s population at times) and those migrants included one heck of a lot of Africans and enslaved coastal Native people. That also accounted for a lot of the early Scots, Irish, and people who’d been “recruited” or flat-out abducted out of London and other British cities. A lot of other people of similar ethnic backgrounds decided to join them. This is hardly controversial–except among those who would whitewash over just how North American colonial economies worked, and focus exclusively on the later wave of Ulster Scots/”Scotch-Irish”.

At the same time, lots of other Native people needed to move inland, to get away from land loss, slavery, and genocide. Not surprising, really.

Please bear with me; this mini-lesson in history is relevant. (Not just in the general sense of learning from history, though that too!)

What the popular perception neglects is that people were already living there–again, this is politically convenient, for obvious reasons. People who’d already been incorporating other Native refugees as needed; look at the Haudenosaunee pattern further north, which is better documented. Further south, we got more documentary genocide. The easy assimilation Dave Peyton notes did not start with the much-vaunted “Scotch-Irish”.

That worked more smoothly at first, with trickles of incomers, a lot of whom must have been really glad to live with or near people who treated them with respect.* That’s why the area I’m from is so full of Indian-identified people with Gaelic surnames, like me. Later on, there were larger groups who mostly cooperated with the neighbors, and mostly got assimilated after a generation or two. (Including a couple of new Irishmen my family picked up not long before the Famine.) That only held up to a point, until we got large groups of incomers with no interest whatsoever in getting along with the people already living there.

It’s also good to bear in mind that the people who were already living there took a very different view of “racial” identity. If you behaved decently and tried to get along with other people, you’d have aligned yourself with the locals. “Whether they were Eastern Europeans, Spaniards or Italians, if they lived there long enough to have children, their children were mountain people.” They would at least pick up the surrounding culture, even if they didn’t marry into or formally become members of one of the surrounding Nations. This approach was based on cultural considerations, pragmatism, and consensus-based decision making, rather than on constructed colonial notions of race and nationality. That pattern does continue to great extent, and there is still a lot of confusion around the very different approaches.

In short, no matter how many or how few actual Indian ancestors most of these folks have by now–and almost everybody in WV, for example, knows they have some–they’ve been tarred by long association. Too many of their people “went native”, and their cultures really do not agree with the dominant one. They’re subject to the same stereotypes as Native people, only revamped as White Trash. As has come up many times on Mingo-L, it’s a lot easier to change the kind of house you live in and the sort of clothes you wear than it is to change the way you look at the world.

When I was at Virginia Tech, I did an Appalachian Studies elective out of vague interest (and hopes of an easy grade). That course was Appalachian Communities. One of the books in particular was a big wakeup call, explicitly pointing out some cultural differences–which explained a lot of things I’d run into dealing with people from the dominant culture. (I can’t remember the title, but that was in 1994!) Forget politically convenient stereotypes. The two I clearly remember are extremely high levels of egalitarianism, and men actually wanting–and feeling free–to spend time with their kids and grandkids, and nieces and nephews. I’d naively assumed that most of the people I came into contact with were operating under similarly egalitarian ideals, and kept getting shocked. Besides assuming that everybody–especially little girls!–went around with their older male relatives half the time, without thoughts of pedophilia dancing in other people’s heads. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. That approach to child care (and “unschooling”) implies and leads to less rigid gender roles, besides leading to fewer hostile environments for the women those Little Princesses will become. (I was amazed the first time I got treated like crap and stared at in a hardware store. Seriously.) As much as some people may want to call these cultural patterns “Jacksonian”**, I can see some far more likely sources.

This kind of egalitarian approach to life does not always go over well, to put it mildly. Especially when the person or people in question don’t accept your authority, not to mention your views of why they should do what you say–and give you their stuff.

The specifics may have changed a bit, but reactions and ideological differences remain very similar. So does the fact that some people have resources that other people want to take. Some recorded comments the man Powhatan offered are still uncomfortably apt:

What will it availe you to take that by force you may quickly have by love, or to destroy them that provide you food. What can you get by warre, when we can hide our provisions and fly to the woods? whereby you must famish by wronging us your friends. And why are you thus jealous of our loves seeing us unarmed, and both doe, and are willing still to feede you, with that you cannot get but by our labours? Thinke you I am so simple, not to know it is better to eate good meate, lye well, and sleepe quietly with my women and children, laugh and be merry with you, have copper, hatchets, or what I want being your friend: then be forced to flie from all, to lie cold in the woods, feede upon Acornes, rootes, and such trash

In the 19th century, it was still OK for hostile observers to point out all the too-brown grannies smoking pipes while they ran the farms as prime evidence that we Hillbillies were Not White Enough, and thus inferior.*** Now we’re supposed to forget that anyone besides (the carefully constructed) Nasty White Trash ever lived there, and that said White Trash is still experiencing land loss and environmental destruction. We’re not supposed to know nor care that whole mountains are getting knocked over–ones that people were living on–nor that this is polluting an amazing amount of water and directly endangering people’s lives. “Water is going to be more important to future generations than coal. You cannot drink coal.” #

Whatever happens to these people, they obviously deserve it, if nothing else for being in the way of Progress. It’s obviously their own fault that a number of them are poor, and the rest of us are having to take up the slack (in our minds, if not in reality). They deserve to become butts and scapegoats.

Does any of this sound familiar? There’s a very good reason indeed that southern Appalachia has been referred to as “The Paleface Reservation”.
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* As one man put it, in a later period:

Among the whites I was nothing but a poor journeyman tailor, and never could be any thing else….There’s a great deal of talk about liberty, equality, and such great things, among white people; but the divil a bit of liberty or equality did I ever find till I came amongst the Indians… [T]here’s no one to drive you, nor can you drive any body but yourself, and that’s what I call liberty and equality.

–White Workingman living among the Seminoles [ca. 1830] (1)

** Which is enough to make my head want to explode, anyway, considering some of the crap Jackson got up to. Also, see the note above.

*** While a lot of people lost land to mining companies through threat of exposure of their Native ancestry, in the same era as the Wounded Knee massacre. It was illegal for Natives-on-paper to own land in West Virginia until 1964; if they didn’t fight losing that particular piece of land, they wouldn’t be outed and legally prevented from owning more. (Not to mention the not-so-subtle threats of physical genocide.) Of course, most of them couldn’t afford much if any other land after that! No wonder there was a lot of no habla and denial of literacy going around, to avoid signing things. This apparently applied to people with any recorded Native ancestry whatsoever. Even when people have tried to buy back land, most of it in the coalfields is owned by mining interests who won’t sell it even if they’re not using it.

Some really ugly faces of wétiko

The WordPress site is malfunctioning, so I couldn’t post a further comment reply. (It also mangled the last comment I posted, and I’m going to have to fix that after it’s up again.) Thinking about it more, I thought I’d bring another over to its own post.

But first, while I’m thinking about it, a bit of recent news that illustrates how far from hyperbole Jack Forbes’ Wétiko (Cannibal) Psychosis model really is: Peruvian gang killed victims for their ‘fat’. The quotes are inappropriate there; an apparently Mestizo gang ambushed and killed up to 60 indigenous people with the aim of rendering and selling their literal body fat. They have apparently gotten away with doing this for 30 years.

Disturbing in another way: even with the quotes thrown in, my first assumption was that gangs in Lima had been taking the bashing of fat people to an extreme point.

What the first few American reports of this story I read omitted: they sold it to European cosmetic companies. “The prosecutor’s indictment said the gang allegedly targeted farmers and indigenous people on remote Andean roads, tricking them by offering jobs before killing them.” A couple of Italian citizens are also under investigation, presumably on the buying end. From the first couple of articles, you might pick up the impression that those “savage” South Americans have been lining up to smear this expensive stuff on their faces.

From the same (Australian) article:

Signs of “an international network trafficking human fat” first surfaced about two months ago, according to General Felix Burga, head of the police criminal division.

Peruvian press cited him as saying the fat can be sold for $US15,000 a gallon ($4200 a litre) in European countries.

Cannibalism? You decide. Unfortunately, it’s just a couple of steps above a lot of the other stuff that goes on, for all its horror value. Compare to the “offering poor women jobs” aspect of (usually) less immediately lethal human trafficking, which has been going on for a very long time indeed. Compare to “just” working people to death under awful conditions, while continuing to blame them for being poor. It’s all cannibalistic, just quicker or slower.

But, back to what I was intending to write. My slightly expanded comment from earlier:

Yeah, I think it’s way past time for our own version of “Black is Beautiful”. Glad somebody could identify with that post (well, sorry in a huge way, but…). Don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately.

I couldn’t resist doing a similar photo post recently on the Dread Childhood Obesity.

Jack Forbes summed it up pretty well in Columbus and Other Cannibals. The relevant bit in the book is actually quoted from “Colonialism and American Education”, one of the excellent pieces available on his website:

A colonial system always assigns low status to virtually all Native customs and, if racial differences are apparent, also assigns low status to the physical characteristics of the conquered population. The conquered people are made to feel inferior and this inferiority is used as a weapon of psychological warfare to control them. It also serves to “justify” colonialism and prove that the invaders “deserve” to be in a ruling, superior position.

Jack Forbes’ observations have also made me look at hateful crap like this quite differently. (Another piece I just ran across.) I’m “fat” according to racist BMI, I’m Type 2 diabetic, I smoke, and I was born in West Virginia. My family still lives up and down the same river system where Huntington is found; I grew up on it myself. There are a lot of people like me in West Virginia. “16% – the highest rate in the nation – of men chew tobacco”, and so did my g.g. grandmother. She grew her own heirloom tobacco to make it. A lot more women smoked pipes, and we still get the corncob pipe images used against us.

They were made from corn, for the purpose of smoking tobacco. How that does not make people think “racist imagery” still astounds me.

Exactly the same things get bitched about in relation to reservations; these horrible people are costing us so much money, they’re so unhealthy (possibly due to Bad Genes, even when there’s evidence to support more reasonable explanations), they’re just trashy and offensive to think about, they’re to blame for any poverty they experience, and so on. In short, they need to be controlled for their own good.

Also compare the expressed need for control over us fatties to how Lawson described people living on the same river system ca. 1700: “tall, likely men, having great plenty of buffaloes, elks, and bears, with every sort of deer amongst them, which strong food makes large, robust bodies.” (That page also mentions attacks on Native religious uses of tobacco.) Elsewhere, Virginia Indian people got described as “of superior build”, while “[t]heir bearing is noble and proud”. My, how the tone changed once we got thoroughly colonized! The need to attract more colonists has been gone for a long time. It sounds like a way of diminishing a perceived threat. Unfortunately, one comic artist has apparently taken down an excellent illustration of this one, with the man Powhatan very realistically towering over a shrimpy John Smith, pointing out how little threat the few starving Jamestown colonists seemed to offer at that point. This focus on our physical size has a lot in common with the same culture’s attempts to physically diminish women through shame.

Back to that hateful “health” article, I wonder who has a long history of chewing tobacco, and why the mainstream considers this such a lowly thing to do these days? I can only imagine the reaction if 16% of women were still using it too. It’s not even clear whether the 16% includes snuff, which is also popular. That figure is mentioned just for shock value, since there’s not much health risk. The EU ban (outside Sweden) on smokeless tobacco was based on debunked research, but you still can’t buy it in Europe. Living in a hostile environment, I was strongly encouraged to find any type of tobacco use “backward” and embarrassing, something only done by stupid hicks. I’m rather ashamed to admit that I did buy into that for years, when I was in school, and particularly looked down on people who used smokeless tobacco as poor “white” trash.

Purposely inhaling any kind of smoke obviously isn’t good for you–I would be amazed if anyone living now doesn’t know that–but there’s still an amazing amount of condescension and classism thrown in attitudes there, before we even start seeing racism and/or racist regional bias. Look at all the screeching about smoking rates in the Southeastern U.S., with West Virginia at the top of the list.

Once you recognize what’s going on and the kind of ideology that’s driving it, all the implications start to unfold. And that is from just one wétiko tactic.

Forbes goes on to describe, step by step, how the old Divide and Conquer is employed, creating different castes based on things like skin tone and “blood quantum”, and pit them against each other. Everyone is supposed to “rise above” indigenous customs and identity. It’s unfortunately easy to see how this has played out in English-colonized areas, not only in Peru and other parts of Latin America. It’s fed a whole spectrum of nasty attitudes and behaviors, from the familiar “squinchy eyes” shaming, to honestly considering your Mestizo self entitled to ape your “superiors” and kill “worthless Indios” for any reason you can find/invent.

And it’s a logical extension to personalize the physical characteristic insults (“It’s nothing to do with race, it’s just your own badness!”), so that the individual has trouble seeing that tactic for what it is. It’s even better if individuals come to believe that they “don’t look indigenous” at all.

Yeah, Forbes is one of the writers who made me wake up about things like taking on other people’s loudly expressed opinions about my appearance. “Fat” is a particularly strong smackdown in this culture, and you’re unlikely to pick that one up and bludgeon yourself with it if you haven’t been hearing it from other people. I still have to try hard not to beat myself with that one, but it will probably get better with time and awareness!

Interesting about your reaction to your grandmother’s picture. I had the same reaction looking at the (varying quality, you’d think they were trying to paint a space alien) portraits of Thayendanegea/”Joseph Brant”. My first reaction was that he was one ugly sucker, then it hit me why.

Beating yourself up over internalized racism isn’t going to help, trust me. Awareness and doing my best to stop the hurtful self-talk has gotten me to the point that now I just have attacks of “my hideousness is an objective fact.”

It helps to remind myself that the wétiko is the truly ugly thing here.

Neurodiverse women: aggravating as hell?

FWD/Forward pointed me at a disturbing post at Sociological Images: ADHD Website Tells Women They’re Annoying in Relationships. The comments are more than worth a read, too.

I couldn’t get past the first page of the ADDITUDE slideshow article in question, because I almost blew a gasket looking at that one. Not because it’s somehow a new and shocking idea that it’s the responsibility of women (ADHD or no; they just relied on gender stereotypes) not to annoy men in relationships, but because I’m sick to death of the same old story. This piece does somehow manage to be more condescending, in both text and images, than what you’d find in Cosmo. It’s terrible how we women ruin relationships by, you know, having anything to say.

Talk about intersectionality.

It’s apparently a symptom of illness if you aren’t quiet and calm all the time, when dealing with a man. There’s a new one, too.

Incidentally, I can’t help imagining the hideous offspring of “specially annoying ADD women” and Simon Baren-Cohen’s (same spectrum) “hyper-male” twaddle. It’s making my brain hurt, but the result makes at least as much sense as either one alone! In case any of us doubted that gender stereotyping and stereotype-based biological determinism were really popular, these “experts” provide a couple of great examples.

I’d read some similar research before, but found a good link in the comments: The gift of gab is not a gal thing (coincidentally, from the Roanoke Times). Also an excellent one from Deborah Cameron, on the content of speech: Speak up, I can’t hear you.

What got me thinking enough to start on a post was one comment; I’ll quote part of it:

The gendering in this article is COMPLETELY unnecessary. My husband has ADHD and every single piece of advice in that article can be applied to him…
This is taking the side of the person that does not have ADHD. “You’re just talking,” “What’s your point?” and “You’re rambling again,” are all complaints I’ve had with my husband. But if you listen to his side of it, he considers “just talking” without a point as worthwhile communication. To him, the act of speaking and the act of listening is more important than having a specific message. While it’s not the easiest thing to live with, I can’t say his point of view is invalid.

My experience tells me that living with someone with ADHD is a matter of compromise, not molding him to act “normal,” which this article is trying to do. Point by point, I’d say:

1. “Just talking” is a form of communication.
2. “Talking too much,” is a matter of perspective.
3. Losing focus isn’t a sin.
4. Squirming out of responsibility when you panic is the opposite of confrontation!
5. Can’t disagree here.
6. “Make your point clear and concise.” I would add: and make sure you, as a partner, are forgiving when the person with ADHD can’t do that because they have ADHD!

Yes! This struck me very personally, since I do talk a lot. Probably not hard to tell from my writing style! That’s one of the reasons I was assumed to have ADHD From Hell. (Yes, some auties do talk. A lot, in some settings.) I think part of it is another type of verbal tic–dealing with people I’m comfortable around, I really do have trouble stopping talking about whatever is on my mind at the moment. I also fight getting repetitive with it sometimes. “[T]he act of speaking and the act of listening is more important than having a specific message.” My mom likened it to echolocation more than once, and didn’t mind it. Also, how much sense my chatter makes depends very much on how the listener’s mind works, and how inclined they are to actually listen.

What struck me most overall (well, besides the earlier sexist drivel)? People other than my family have no doubt reacted to it much worse because I’m female. Talk about replication of power structures. When I look at the ADDITUDE article’s shaming, I see precisely the same crap I experienced in school, even when answering questions. I was also clearly perceived to ask and answer too many of those. All of it was my problem, and all of it was a bigger problem because I was a girl. If I opened my mouth, it was seen as a problem, and I must be a drama queen.

See also j.field’s comment. I was physically hyper–I still think better when moving, in a lot of cases–and I was not allowed to move around. Even under a “good” teacher who liked me, and let one of the boys wander at will as long as he wasn’t obviously bothering anybody else. I also got humiliated for reading while several teachers were talking. Almost all my behavior was cast in terms of disruption, even quiet reading and writing.

I also have clear memories of repeatedly breaking down crying over communication difficulties/”failures”. In retrospect, a lot more of the confusion (and mocking) had to do with unexpected content coming out of my mouth, than ever had to do with my rhotacism from a slow-maturing palate*. Jonathan Ross’s speech is very comprehensible, and mine was no more severe once I was over three. These experiences–including being humiliated for taking up even more time and attention with the foolishness of crying–are also part of the reason I don’t talk much now in a lot of settings.

This stuff is deeply entrenched. Even now, having been aware of most of these factors for years, I just put together that there’s a very good reason I worry about bugging the crap out of Nigel–with chatter, and otherwise. I have lightened up some with worrying about how my “crazy” neurodiversity affects him (not the most neurotypical of souls himself!), but am still more than occasionally concerned about talking his ears off. I can see how I have been trained to perceive it differently when he starts talking about one of his special interests at length. When boys and men do that, it may even be considered cute in a “little professor”** way. I stopped doing it away from home–and try to keep a check on it even there–after enough “annoying smartassed know-it-all” feedback. By now, I tend to assume that nobody else is interested, and do talk to the animals a lot.

It’s considered my responsibility to cover up who I am and keep the relationship going smoothly, on top of all the other weird gender-based expectations.

It also occurred to me that I probably really don’t talk as constantly as I have been encouraged to think I do.

__________

* Though I did get stuck in speech therapy over it, in spite of a professional evaluation that it was just part of normal developmental variation. The excuse given was that it was to keep the speech therapist in a job, and my parents decided it couldn’t do any harm. I got ridiculed for the rhotacism and for getting sent out for speech therapy. Meanwhile, the therapist in question ridiculed my rhotacism, telling me that I obviously wasn’t trying hard enough while playing back tape recordings at me, then spent most of the time trying to “correct” my accent. Apparently, sounding like you’re from West Virginia (when you are) constitutes a speech impediment; she outright told my mother this. She eventually got fired over treating one of my friends who stuttered in basically the same way, which made her stutter thrice as bad. Yeah, the “speech impediment” thing is still a sore point.

** Yes, there are quite a lot of things wrong about that link, but it does reflect popular perception. Notice how male-focused the tone is, to the point that after reading it I did not remember the carefully gender-neutral language. With the exception of the “Where Are My Traction Engine Y-fronts?” heading, though those might have appealed to me as a kid!

Intersectionality: it’s a way of life!

I hadn’t thought about writing something for this Disability Blog Carnival until I ran across Amanda’s post at Ballastexistenz. In fact, I’d totally forgotten that this month’s theme is “intersectionality”, and the topic intrigued me.

My expressive language ability is not great today, but I still wanted to write something about this. That makes it harder not to get verbose, trying to wrap words around ideas, so please bear with me.

I, too, have a hard time getting away from intersectionality, and most of the things I write here involve the concept to some extent. By now, I can’t help but see it as a special sort of privilege when someone does not have to think about intersectionality regularly.

Why do I have a hard time avoiding it?

Since this is a disability blog carnival, I’ll start with being disabled. I have both invisible and now-visible disabilities. I only found out that I’m autistic a few years ago, at about age 30. Before that, I was up to my neck in the psychiatric system from the age of 13, with an alphabet soup of diagnoses including bipolar. Now I’ve got loads of psych/medical-related PTSD, on top of the existing PTSD from earlier abuse I suffered, in part due to being “strange” in the first place. When I finally admitted in (forced) therapy, through all the instilled shame, that I was being seriously bullied and experiencing other social problems in school, I was stuck in a social skills group. Way to blame the victim! I also have largely verbal Tourette’s-style tics–earlier considered a manifestation of OCD, when everything was being interpreted in biopsych terms–and, in fact, fit Tourette diagnostic criteria. Only recently have I recognized them for what they are and started becoming more comfortable with them. The earlier coerced psychiatric medication has left me “looking more autistic”, and my verbal ability/IQ is not nearly what it used to be. This has affected how other people perceive me, and made obvious some nasty things I’d internalized.

On the more “visible”, physical front, I now need to use a walking stick when out and about because of what I now know is tardive dystonia from neuroleptics. One of my legs stays pretty stiff, and is liable to spasm out from under me. I haven’t had a pain free day in years, and have considered suicide at times. This chronic pain has also been called fibromyalgia, which is a tough enough diagnosis on the stigma front, but I have really hesitated to seek out specific treatment for something I got directly from “crazy pills”. I’m going to have to, as much as muscle relaxants helped before. This also gives me migraine-type headaches from muscle spasms, back pain, you name it. The treatment I get out and about has changed quite a bit with the added visibility of a walking stick, and I now get more looks of pity (over being gimpy and young-looking, I guess) than irritation. The perceptions continue to irritate me just as much.

On the less visible front, I also got early-onset Type 2 diabetes and other endocrine problems from all the psych medication. (I also have unrelated gluten intolerance, so my food choices away from home are rather limited, and frequently seen as unreasonably “picky”.) This is aggravated by not always remembering to eat, and having trouble procuring and preparing food, with autistic inertia and executive function problems.

Blaming people for developing diabetes is popular enough these days. I did get fat from the medications, directly from their causing endocrine problems like insulin resistance. Thanks to being built the same as most of the Warriors of AniKituhwa guys, a lot of people see me as fat when I am actually underweight to the point that I’ve lost muscle mass. (Like I am now, due to illness and forgetting to eat.) That included when I was younger and engaging in disordered eating behavior. Even at an unhealthily low weight, my BMI runs at least 27 or 28, which has caused me some problems in medical settings. My bare skeleton would be bigger than Western women are supposed to be these days, especially my ribcage and shoulders. This is not hyperbole; when my mother was dying of cancer last year, she never went below 140 lbs. while they could still weigh her without breaking her rotten bones (covered in skin, and not much else). That kind of brought things home, literally and figuratively. Even though I am mostly able to see that I am not actually fat these days, I have become very interested in fat acceptance, and body acceptance in general. This affects us all, especially if we’re female.

Which brings me straight to the next point(s): ethnicity and gender. That’s at least a triple whammy for me. I’m a multiracial non-Treaty Tutelo/Cherokee from the Virginia mountains (a.k.a. Hillbilly White Trash). “Blood quantum” is a highly racist concept anyway, but it’s particularly absurd in the East, where we had to band together to survive, and took in all kinds of maroons. I have low enough winter melanin levels to “look White”, yet have been made painfully aware of having non-European features, and of having a typically Indian physique. (That’s even before we get to cultural considerations, and perceived/invented “craziness” and “backwardness”.) Come to find out, low base melanin levels were common at the time of Contact in the East–including the grey eyes and reddish-brown hair that half my family has. My mom actually bore a semi-disturbing resemblance to much-darker Wayne Newton, which is not surprising given that he’s from the same area and background. (And who, even identifying as Indian and having experienced discrimination in Phoenix, AZ schools, keeps getting referred to as White.) I readily tan as dark as either one of them does, in the same tone, even in the U.K.’s paltry sunlight. Overall, it’s a good adaptation to an Eastern U.S. climate, not so suited to Britain. Here, I feel awful if I don’t supplement vitamin D year round.

Still, as Barbara Mann put it, colonial racism as it’s developed insists that “if Eastern Natives are ‘white,’ they got that way through the ‘dilution’ of intermarriage with Euro-Americans. Otherwise, their light skin is taken to mean that they are not actually Indian, at all.”–and that message has been absorbed by a number of Western Natives, besides leapt on by Euro-Americans. You’re suspect already in some circles if you claim Cherokee ancestry in particular, and that’s reinforced by the fact that a lot of “full blood” Cherokee–some of the Original Hillbillies–have always been pale.

Enter the Hillbilly White Trash, along with legal 20th Century eugenics getting started over top of our (female) “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South” bodies. Carrie Buck was indeed a “Mongoloid”; she was a Virginia Tutelo. Judging by the photo on that link, we look a lot alike. She got forced into (“higher-class” White) foster care/domestic servitude, raped while there, judged “feebleminded”, and forcibly sterilized for her troubles. That happened during my grandparents’ lifetime, not far from where they lived. It’s kinda hard to forget that sort of thing.

In 1650. Virginia instituted a £75 scalp bounty (not at all shabby, in those days), with “any Indian children under 12 years of age to be sold into slavery.” Until 1924 –also in my grandparents’ lifetime–anyone identified as Indian could be shot on sight if spotted on “someone else’s” land. Continuing on the pen-and-ink witchcraft/documentary genocide front, Virginia also later got a eugenicist, Walter Plecker, in charge of vital records, and he went on a crusade to racially reclassify all Natives because they were really stealth Black people. West Virginia added a lot of incentive to identify as other than Indian on paper, since Native people could not own property until 1965; “According to newspaper reports, individuals were being shipped away to Oklahoma reservations as late as the 1950’s.” Overall, in the East, it was hard not to get turned into a “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites”, at least if nobody eyeballed you as “part-Black” and wrote that down somewhere. From the 17th century on, a lot of people headed west into the mountains, to get farther away from the people enforcing these things. I know people whose parents moved from Virginia into West Virginia as late as the early 1960s, to get married out from under the Racial Integrity Act. Some of my relatives still won’t identify publicly as Indian, no matter what they do in private.

I only found out about most of these things within the past five years, and had to do a lot of historical digging. It should be embarrassing! It’s much harder to pretend that things are peachy keen these days, looking at the context. And it’s easier to understand why an awful lot of people filled to the brim with politically convenient encouraged ignorance are certain that they know who we are better than we do ourselves. That doesn’t make it any more palatable, much less reasonable or ethical.

The whole thing gets even more complicated when you know that probably a quarter of your ancestors were White and/or Black, so no matter what culture you were raised in, you’re subject to weird (and genocidal) racist snarking. There are an awful lot of us around, especially in Appalachia and the rest of the South.

And, of course, if you’re perceived as either a Hillbilly or Native woman, you’re going to get creepily sexualized. You’ll also be at much higher risk of sexual assault, with at least 86% of the reported attacks perpetrated by non-Native men. “Some Indigenous women interviewed by Amnesty International said they didn’t know anyone in their community who had not experienced sexual violence. Though rape is always an act of violence, there is evidence that Indigenous women are more like than other women to suffer additional violence at the hands of their attackers.”

Dealing with more than one gropy asshole, I have gotten oh-so-humorously squawed–interesting how I suddenly did “look Indian” when it worked to someone’s twisted advantage. My mom was suddenly readily identifiable as Indian when she ended up in one local ER with symptoms they could dismiss as her being a stupid drunken (and uninsured) Indian woman making a big deal out of nothing, while hardly able to stand up. She collapsed from undiagnosed cancer and broke multiple eaten-up ribs; they tried to force her into alcohol treatment, and the ribs never got treated. Needless to say, she didn’t even drink. I can’t make this crap up. (That was a strong wake-up call!) I won’t even go into all the familiar “run faster than your brother”-type creepy-ass “jokes” Appalachian women of any description get to hear ad nauseam, which tend to reflect attitudes toward us as the butts of an ethnic group already treated as butts. Rape and incest are such humorous subjects, anyway. Cue the Deliverance banjos.

It looks like there are too many quotation marks in here, but I’m not about to dignify the senses in which some of these terms are applied by letting them stand on their own. My apologies if it makes reading harder for anyone.

My ethnicity has been forced into mind a lot more since I’ve been living in the U.K., married to a ethnic Swedish man from a Stockholm middle class background (which carries its own special privilege baggage, oh my!). It’s been painfully obvious how much of the colonial racism did start out here–for obvious political reasons–and a lot of it lingers on. Sometimes I can’t help but feel like the stealthily pale multiracial Ghost of the Empire, come back to haunt them. (A few people have reacted as if I were, finding out that *gasp* I’m a living American Indian.) In some ways, I do have melanin-based privilege, but in other ways not so much. I picked up multiple kinds of internalized racism and shame, which I am trying to work on now.

That, in turn, raises the issues of class and gender/sexuality. I can totally understand Amanda’s comments about classism and disability, and I am also tempted to identify as “mixed-class”. When I was little, we were firmly middle class, then my mom got financially wiped out by a divorce (largely to get shed of an abusive man) and her later disability. My stepfather had multiple health problems–including a serious car wreck and two bouts with cancer–and disabilities, and a lot of the money they did manage to earn went straight to paying off medical debt not covered by insurance. Over some periods when I was in high school and college, we were trying to live off no income at all, when both my parents fell into a disability hole. Neither one could work, nor were they eligible for unemployment or disability benefits. My grandmother and some other people pulled us through with gadugi, and I am still very thankful. We were completely uninsured for better than five years–with health problems–and I hobbled through community college and then a couple of years at Virginia Tech on Pell Grants, books bought by my grandmother, petsitting and other part-time jobs, and sheer bloodymindedness. Looking at it stated that way, that looks like one more reason to have gotten overwhelmed enough to have a breakdown, and go crashing out of college!

Now I am very aware indeed that I am no longer poor, but technically middle class again, just because I married a man who makes decent money in IT. I am unable to work, and am still fighting feelings of terror at being so financially dependent, and one divorce away from serious poverty. (I have also become very aware that I don’t have another home to go to back in the US, now that my mom is gone.) I strongly resent the way things are set up, so that a lot of women are not eligible for disability benefits while a man is financially “supporting” them. This vulnerability can lead to a lot of abuse, and I feel much luckier than average to have found someone who actually respects me, and treats me like a real human being. Then those feelings of luck turn into outrage that this is far from a given.

This also ties back in with ethnic/racial stereotypes and expectations. Yep, I started out middle class, as an Indian in “savage” Southern Appalachia. Even when we were poor, we had indoor plumbing, high intelligence (just to counter stereotypes!), and plenty of food. (Some of that came from gardening and other people’s hunting/fishing gadugi, and I still feel lucky to have been poor in a relatively rural area.) I was also pushed pretty hard into higher education, even when we were dead broke. Still, I get sick of having the option of (a) trying to prove I’m not some stupid, backward, uneducated hick, and probably “easy” and generally submissive to men, to boot; or (b) letting people draw their own ridiculous conclusions, since they’re going to do so anyway.

So, yeah, I agree with Amanda’s observation that “Permanent, involuntary downward mobility exists in the world, even if I’ve virtually never heard it discussed when people talk about classism. Which itself probably has something to do with the fact that disabled people are invisible, and that most discussions of classism seem to revolve around the struggles of the working class.” Women, poverty, and disability all go together, around the world–including the EU. Throw in ethnic minority status, and you get a real mess. Women With Disabilities Australia offers one of the few excellent online collections of information on how all these factors play out.

What’s left? Gender and sexuality. I wrote a post not too long ago, Gender, sexuality, identity, and binaries, on how some of these things have played out in my life. The short version: I just don’t seem to have an innate sense of gender at all, and find “bisexual” a clumsy label at best. The most important thing to me, overall? Getting treated like crap because I have a female body, and because some people feel threatened by the way I perform gender (or just don’t, as the case may be)–to an even greater extent than most women run into. The Sense of Gender thing is another complicated one, in terms of privilege. In some ways it makes things easier; in others, as hard as if I had the more usual type of gender conflict going. I did have trouble understanding where a lot of other people are coming from–despite trying, and realizing that something wasn’t lining up for them–until that mini-enlightenment.

Another relevant bit I included in the endnotes to that post: ‘Much like African American women, American Indian women haven’t had the luxury of being “weak”. One of the areas in which I’ve been struggling for balance is the harmful pattern formed when “I have to be strong and hold things together” runs up against impairment and disability.’ I’ve been handling that one a little better lately, just trying to keep it in mind.

I grew up in a feminist household–my mom was a radfem, with some pretty peculiar contradictions going on–but have turned increasingly to anarcha-feminism as I’ve recognized more how all kinds of factors do intersect in a “benefit from treating people like things, so you can consume them in one way or another” way; Jack Forbes’ highly contagious, cultural Wétiko Psychosis model describes it very well indeed.

I know I have a lot of privilege as a woman of naturally “bisexual” and “polyamorous” inclinations, married to a man. (Besides that category becoming prime wanking material in popular culture. No “hot bi babes” here.) The layers of unfairness there was one of the reasons I didn’t want to get married at all. It’s a harmful institution anyway, but I ended up doing it because I wanted to be able to live in the same country as Nigel.

Still, I’m dealing with some internalized biphobia, a lot of that picked up at home. My mother was big on the “gay people are OK because they can’t help it, but people who say they’re bi are just confused and in need of psychotherapy” view, which made me feel even crazier. Any time I tried to bring up the subject through mentioning openly bi people I knew, she recommended counseling for them; when I was 18 and she ran across an indication that I might be bi, she blamed the “confusion” on (her own mental version of) my biodad’s abuse (!). For years, I went back and forth between identifying as straight and lesbian, with all the associated mental distress. It was only ca. 2000 that I could identify that way to myself–and not until 2006 that I got fed up enough just to tell her that I’m also attracted to some women, and don’t think it’s a sign of confusion at all. Her telling response? “But everybody is like that to some extent. Did you really think I was so narrow-minded?” (By all indications, yeah, even dealing with some of the same yourself.) Internalized hatred abounds, and trying to cram people into constructed binaries does all sorts of damage.

Another example of how appealingly destructive this kind of response can be: dismissing and discrediting people through deeming them crazy and/or previously victims of crime, so lacking any kind of perspective or insight. You don’t have to listen to things you don’t want to hear, employing that tactic. It’s just a slightly updated version of the old “evil influences” and “God’s plan” approach.

I could identify very well with a comment from mjules I ran across just last night, while reading sparkindarkness’s Growing up gay part # 2 Coming Out:

By the time I came out for real, I’d already been through ex-gay therapy and several years of questioning/wrestling, so I was pretty much, “I’ve learned who I am by fire and trial, and this is me, so fucking deal with it.”

So that trembling, vulnerable state of coming out to someone… I don’t really remember it. Because I went into everything defiantly and with the knowledge in front of me that I was prepared to kick everyone out of my life who had a problem with it. Blame it on years of trying to kick my sexuality out of my life for the sake of those people.

That is pretty much my attitude toward being vocal about my neurodiversity, my sexuality, my gender identity, my ethnic/racial identity, my multiple disabilities and chronic pain–you name it–these days. People have acted like these things were all signs of craziness and/or projected bad motives onto me when I could not bring these “bad”, “sick” aspects of myself into line with other people’s expectations. Or just cram them in a closet. I am simply not going to cooperate with that anymore. “I yam what I yam and tha’s [not] all I yam,” and other people can learn to “fucking deal with it”, indeed. I’m not going to help people shame me into shutting up and trying to be somebody I’m not.

Giving in to that kind of pathologizing and shaming pressure also makes things much harder on other people who have the same characteristics, and hopefully my talking about these things in public can help somebody who’s as truly confused as I used to be. Reading and hearing other people’s experiences gave me enough hope (and anger) to start dragging myself up out of my own personal snake pit of PTSD I picked up along the way.

I have also come to recognize how often depression is a good indication that something is wrong in your life–and it ain’t just your neurotransmitters. I can also recognize how much of biopsychiatry depends on pseudoscience, while being used for social control: ‘The surface is all there is….Modern psychiatry now foists on patients the view that their deepest and most private ills are now medical problems to be managed by physician-psychiatrists who will take away their symptoms and return them to “normal functioning.” This is more than a bit malignant. ‘

This has run long and personal, but it should give a pretty good idea of how I’ve been seeing intersectionality play out. Nobody and nothing exists in a vacuum. Everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent. If you try to look at the world through a filter of “good” vs. “bad” oppositional dualism, all kinds of categories of people are going to be “bad”–and many of the “bad” people will fit into more than one category of badness. Then you get all kinds of amplification and feedback, not to mention emergent properties–so the filter gets to work even harder to keep the constructed model going. Yeah, I really hope humans can somehow break out of this kind of pattern.

On the whole, the concept of “kyriarchy” describes the pattern better. (Thanks to Adelene for pointing it out!) It still isn’t a perfect way of describing all the Bogus Hierarchical Crap, but it seems to cover more complexity than the term “intersectionality”.

Time to meditate?

Today I’m going to try to scratch the surface of a huge topic: making time for things you know are good for you, and will help you heal. This has been one of my concerns for a while, but has taken on even more importance lately. Not only have I been trying to learn to take care of myself better (as I’ve written about here a couple of times lately), I’ve been seeing more results from meditation and know that spending more time on it would help a lot.

A post is probably coming up, on some of the ways in which I’ve found meditation practice helpful in learning better emotional regulation, preventing and sailing through depression, dealing with “anxiety” from sensory issues and PTSD triggers, and coping with chronic pain. For now, I’ll just say that I know it’s doing me a lot of good in all these areas, but still have a hard time making myself slow down enough to do sitting meditation. Moving meditation is helpful, but it needs balanced.

I’ve been trying to come up with words to wrap around this complex of ideas for a while, and got a further nudge today. Through a link from FWD/Forward, I ran across an excellent (and very timely) piece by Karen Brauer: The “Usefulness” Factor. I’ve been struggling with a lot of the same things for years now, partly thanks to our old friend disability shame.

I refer to this as the “usefulness” factor. It is much easier to derive satisfaction in life if you feel you contribute meaningfully in some way. This can be quite a challenge if, prior to the circumstances that sidelined your career, you were accustomed to saving/changing lives or were incredibly physically active…
But that does not mean you have become useless. It is very easy to fall into the trap of believing that, especially when people say things like, “it must be so nice to be home all the time and do nothing!” It is not particularly nice to have no impressive answer when people ask what you do all day, but if you are able to ignore that and realize that everyone is on this earth for a reason, you are on your way to finding a new sense of purpose. Maybe not a financial one, but perhaps a spiritual one, which is even more important.

My situation is closer to DH Kelly’s, in What do you do? (which I remembered and finally tracked down in the BBC’s Ouch! archives). I have held a few jobs, but my disabilities became painfully obvious in college, and I have only had one (short-lived) paid job since then. With the emphasis on paid work in our society, how do we respond?

It wasn’t that my life had been empty before, rather that it just hadn’t occurred to me that any of my pursuits were worth mentioning, not compared to other people’s proper jobs. I had written poetry and pieces for charity magazines, I had painted pictures, composed songs and ran an online support group, as well as trying to finish my education, but I hadn’t recognised “What do you do?” as an opportunity to talk about any of these things.

I also identified very strongly indeed with Jane’s experience in comments (can’t find a direct link to that one, unfortunately), over at Bipolar Recovery:

One of the things I constantly struggled with is the psychic pressure that I was supposed to be doing something with myself. I was supposed to somehow getting a degree when I had in fact dropped out of school. I was supposed to settle down and have a relationship and make grand kids yet I was insane! I wanted to own more things, more clothes, better apartment, etc. while making shit for wages. It was like a script that kept telling me I was a failure for not doing those things.

I had to give up wanting things and the program I had inside me to *do* things with myself.

By surrendering my life to simplicity, I reclaimed a lot of energy, removed stress and anxiety. By giving up, I actually gained. I gained peace and room to think and breathe about who I really was and what I really wanted versus what I was programmed to want or need.

I think this is a problem for a lot of us who, as Melissa put it in the next comment, “have been pressured to be certain things. And I’ve felt the weight of not being good enough, and the feelings of inadequacy that come from being raised in a dysfunctional family.” I’ve dealt with a lot of conflicting demands, and have persistently had very little idea what to do with myself; then I’ve beaten myself over the head for Not Trying Hard Enough to figure out what to do. Whatever I end up doing, I am painfully aware of the potential for Letting Other People Down, the fear of which has also tended to paralyze me. All of this is another way to continue inflicting psychic self harm on ourselves, in some cases. (Thanks to Jane for bringing that idea home; it’s sneakier and a lot of the time does more harm than the straightforward physical type.)

Not surprisingly, when I first read about existential psychology, I thought that it might be very helpful. What I read of Viktor Frankl’s perspective, in particular, looked very applicable to people who had lived through any kind of trauma; he was a Holocaust survivor who emphasized “finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living”. Most of us haven’t lived through the same level of trauma, but that’s still a theme in a lot of our lives, AFAICT. Lately, I’ve been finding inspiration from non-Western philosophers rather than Heidegger or Kierkegaard, but have been working on a very similar wavelength.

How does all this tie in with the theme of not making time to do things we know will help us, such as meditation? If we feel compelled to stay busy for the sake of doing something, lest we be considered “lazy” or “not trying hard enough”, we’re unlikely to find/make the time to do things that actually help us. This is an important companion to stopping hurting ourselves.

Michael Tlanusta Garrett, in his deceptively simple Walking on the Wind, devotes a chapter to the question of balancing “being” and “doing”. Both are necessary for our overall health–physical, mental, and spiritual. “And what happens when we run out of things to do? Well, this rarely happens. But when it does? We just find more “things” to do! It’s like drilling a hole in water–only, in this case, we act as if the value of our existence depends upon whether or not we succeed.” Ouch.

He also points out that a lot of this frenzy of activity is something we use, mostly without realizing it, to keep from having to examine our inner world too closely. I know that I have been prone to doing this.

This works in with what he calls “The Rule of Opposites”, and the insights/lessons he derives from it:

1. Opposites are extensions of themselves, like two opposing hands of the same body; one opposite implies the other.
2. We choose our own (discordant) opposites wherein we are the true source of the difficulty we experience.
3. Everything serves a meaningful and important function in our lives.
4. Asking the right questions, instead of asking for the right answers, allows us to know the function rather than the effect of our choices.
5. Questioning our assumptions allows us to recognize underlying meanings or truths and the relative value of choices made.
6. Understanding underlying truths eliminates any need for discord in our lives.
7. Through choice of perspective and appropriate action, we are free to balance ourselves as we see fit.

Yes, this also bears some similarity to certain Buddhist philosophical/psychological ideas. Thich Nhat Hanh approaches this sort of thing from a slightly different direction. I’d recommend reading both of them. Michael Garrett offers some very incisive commentary on these insights, well worth reading if you can see this playing out in your own life.

It’s uncomfortable as hell, but I can see that this “taking time to relax and meditate, when I know it helps me in a lot of ways” vs. “buzzing around like a dyspraxic hummingbird, and exascerbating my physical pain” is one of those conflicts I’m setting up for myself, in my own head. Even looking at why this is happening, it’s still proving hard to break out of this pattern. Part of this is probably a form of inertia, since my nervous system seems prone to that. Change is also uncomfortable, even if you know that it’s likely to be more pleasant than the status quo. That’s on top of the more usual barriers pointed out in a rather good Finding Time to Meditate piece, which offers some good practical suggestions. (Though I do suspect that some of the “deeper” factors are also keeping a lot of people in a rut of busyness, while they try to rationalize this away.)

On the whole, I would go further than Karen Brauer did: ‘If you can ask yourself, “am I doing the best I can with what I have to work with?” and the answer is “yes”, then you have found your usefulness factor. Keeping yourself as functional as possible will go a long way with you being at peace with your situation.’ Closely examining what you describe as “doing your best”, not to mention what constitutes a “functional” human being, will bring you closer to peace with any situation you may find yourself in.

I’m running out of steam here, but this subject is quite the mindfull.

Edit: One important bit that I’d intended to mention more than in passing is the perceived difficulties of spending much time on meditation and other recovery activities if you’re not living alone. This is definitely something I’ve thrown up as an obstacle, in much the same way as some people’s perceived need for silent conditions for meditation. I am married, with a lot of animals in the house, and do have an extra set of responsibilities there. What’s mostly been getting in my way? Not separating real responsibilities from the kind perceived through that (hurtful) “Not Letting People Down, possibly through Laziness”, “showing that you’re not Useless” filter. In short, through trying to keep up a bizarre front of being capable in ways that I’m just not right now. If everyone’s needs are taken care of, there’s not a problem. That includes your own needs.

It’s helped me some to look at things in terms of physical therapy and rehab after an injury. Getting myself straightened out surely falls on the same priority level. Very directly, in the case of the dystonia-plus-accumulated-injuries “fibromyalgia” pain, but the emotional regulation part is just as important. I know full well that I’ll be more capable and easier to live with if I continue to work on that, and less likely to really Let Other People Down. To do that, I have to place as much importance on my own needs as on those of the people around me. Again, it’s all about duyukta

“Hair problems”, and control over other people

I have been trying to let my hair grow out–in part, metaphorically encouraging my mental processes to develop–and am so tempted to cut it off again. It’s already starting to tie itself into knots in the back. I may not have been startled by glancing at Kim Jong-Il in the mirror, but I keep seeing “Trail Of Tears”* Billy Ray Cyrus. On a very bad hair day indeed. (Without the soul patch or the old mullet, thank goodness.)

This is with the stylist and the gallon of hairspray. It could be worse; it could be the morning after the straightening iron. Had I ever been tempted to try one, I think I’d pass. It doesn’t help him much.

“How can this world be so dark, so unfair, and so untrue?”, indeed.

Besides just wanting to vent a little, this is actually related to a point it’s taken me too long to get back into my head. I used to be embarrassed to go out in public with my hair doing what it does best, and went to great pains to try to keep it “under control”. But, I had to consider the other day that I do have a right to go around with strange flyaway waves of the stuff exploding out of my head.

I’ve known for years that some of my own personal Hair Problem comes from a double dose of internalized racism. As Eric Gansworth described it his “Identification Pleas” piece in Genocide of the Mind, “No matter how much I might brush my hair out every morning, invariably I looked less like any Indians in Edward Curtis photographs and more like Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead, or Gilda Radner playing Roseanne Rosannadanna, on early Saturday Night Live episodes (yes, they do look like one another, and yes, I looked like their child). My brothers, being brothers, insisted on reminding me of this resemblance every single day”

And my mom enjoyed goading me by pointing out the resemblance to old Billy Ray, in the early ’90s. IME, brushing makes it worse, unless you like the “finger in a light socket” look.

A lot of us from the East get this effect going; I suspect that’s part of the reason the Wendat picked up the epithet Huron, not to mention why European observers noted the Monacans’ individualistic hairstyles. (Bit of a joke in our house: little did they know how much of that was unintentional!) Before my hair grows out heavy enough to fall over, it bushes up into a fauxhawk by default, like half my family’s. I really used to hate this, which is a lot of the reason I’ve kept it very short for years. My hair has baffled more than one British hairstylist. The sheer volume of it baffled even one local hairstylist back home, and she had to raid another stylist for more equipment. (A spiral perm was not a good strategy, even when they were in style.)

The bigger issue here? It’s my hair, it has a right to do what it does, and how it grows is my own business.

Just like it’s my business what I do (or choose not to do) with what little leg hair I’ve got. Or, as long as it’s not too offensive or distracting, how I control my tics (or, again, choose not to) in public. Or what kind of expression is on my face at any given time; as long as I don’t grin while somebody is talking about their dog’s heart attack**, that’s nobody else’s business. It’s nobody else’s business what size my body is, or if I choose clothes for it based on comfort over fashion. At the base of things, unless it’s actually impacting someone else, it’s no legitimate concern of theirs. Yeah, this does tie back in with my last post.

Some other people may try to control things that they have no legitimate right to control, but I don’t have to help them.

With any luck, later I’ll get to the post I intended to write today, on taking the time for mindfulness in daily life.
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* That video shows exactly what my hair does when it’s long: gets curlier and snarlier the more it grows. Probably why he kept a hat or bandanna on it! What they don’t show: the group repeatedly stopping for old Billy Ray to work the wind-dreads out, so it took twice as long to get to Oklahoma as if he’d just braided it up in front of the camera.

** That did happen once. And, no, the expression had nothing to do with what the other person was saying, but with something that had just passed through my mind. Now, that was embarrassing.

Attitudes, disability, and violence

I’m rereading Living Stories of the Cherokee, collected and edited by Barbara R. Duncan, who is Educational Director of Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, NC. This is a great book, and I am interested in picking up some of her others.

Maybe more so on rereading, I’m also running across more lessons I’d do well to relearn. Besides general entertainment, most traditional stories have been used–still are–to teach, accessible on multiple levels as a person’s understanding develops. (Which is rather different from what usually happens when folklorists get hold of them and try to come up with “definitive” written versions, without understanding that there are layers of metaphor. Not to mention at least one version per storyteller.) I have enjoyed reading different versions of some of the “animal” stories I heard as a kid, but have also been interested in some of the more contemporary stories and autobiographical anecdotes.

The passage which caught my eye today falls into the contemporary and autobiographical categories. Davey Arch (b. 1957) shares some of his experiences growing up, in “Grandpa and Grandma”. I’m getting rid of the original free verse formatting, which does highlight storytelling rhythms, but is distracting to the point that Nigel just couldn’t read the stories.

And something else that I heard, probably on an everyday basis, was that you can do anything you want to, you know, as long as you don’t offend anyone, and as long as that’s what you want to do. No matter what it is or how hard it is, you know, there’s a way to do it if you really want to do it. And that’s something I’ve always thought, too, that I’ve always been able to do anything, and have done, just about anything I’ve always wanted to. And there’s something else–I didn’t hear “No” as much as I heard “You could do it this way instead of that way.” They tried to give you an alternative instead of a denial. This was something that, I think, got the work done without a lot of fuss, in the parents’ view, and it also taught a lesson. That’s how I grew up.

That’s mostly the kind of thing I heard, too, before I hit school in Radford, and neurodiversity suddenly became an issue. It’s also something I need to relearn, and use to replace some of the harmful crap that later got internalized.

It fits well with some practical things I’ve been reading lately, such as How to be Productive and Still be Kind to Yourself and How to Learn Without Memorizing. If a more-reasonable-than-usual teacher hadn’t recognized that rote memorization just wasn’t working with my brain, so sent me for a couple of special ed sessions, I still wouldn’t be able to do basic multiplication*. As Adelaide summed it up in a comment a while back, ‘“Try differently, not harder” has become my motto.’

This is a very different approach, with pretty wide implications. Even if you don’t understand why someone is doing a certain thing, much less why they’re doing it that way, they have a right to do it as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. And there is not One True Way to go about doing something, but only what works for the person doing it and gets the job done. This way of looking at things implies that everybody is different, and needs their own accommodations. A community, down to the family level, is necessarily made up of individuals with different needs and abilities. (My post on gadugi touched on some related themes.)

A lot of it has to do with the longtime Native emphasis on pragmatism and consensus-based anarchism. (See Jack Weatherford’s Indian Givers for a good overview of this.) Nobody was considered to have the right to tell another person how to do things if it wasn’t hurting anybody–nor did anyone have the right to speak for another person, using disability as an excuse. That’s a morally saner system.

Sequoyah is a good historical example of this attitude in action. His nickname comes from Sekwi-ya, or “pig’s foot”, for a physical impairment.** He may have been born with a deformity, and then gotten further injured while hunting. Sorting through all the conflicting stories, it didn’t get in his way much. He was an artist and silversmith, and he either developed or–more likely in the political situation, IMO–simplified and popularized the syllabary still used to write Tsalagi (heavily modified once it hit the printer’s). He apparently fought in the War of 1812, gimpy leg and all. According to descendents, in 1816 he was branded, and got his ears and fingers chopped off by assimilationists who’d seen potential power and grabbed it. He was part of the anti-assimilationist Black Drink Resistance movement, along with Osceola, Tecumseh, and Tenskwatawa (PDF). He was a medicine worker, and led a–not always popular, to put it mildly–political faction which saw the writing on the wall and moved west of the Mississippi well before forced Removal. He died in Mexico, after tracking down another group of Tsalagi to reunite with them. (There are still a bunch in Mexico, including some of his descendants.) Overall, the man does not seem to have been very disabled.

Even if the specifics are not so striking these days, I know a good number of people in real life who are not noticeably disabled, in spite of having bodies and/or minds which work differently. Most of them are older, except for one guy with spina bifida I knew in college, whose home and educational experiences also seemed to be in serious conflict. My aunt didn’t talk until after she started school, and it wasn’t treated as a huge problem–just as well, since she’d have probably been institutionalized, instead of leading a life more “productive” than mine is ATM. My Left Foot probably struck me differently than it did a lot people; I was used to the “so my brother needs a trolley to get around, so what?!” approach.

Now I need to finish evicting the ghost voices of people who would make a huge deal out of that fact from my head. This is another case where, metaphorically speaking, it may as well be the continuing effects of dark magic placed on me.

I’ll close with another quote from the same story told by Davey Arch, which reminds me of some other posts I’ve written:

Most everybody that I knew growing up was happy. You didn’t hear about mental illness and depression. And everybody drank, you know, and stuff, but you didn’t hear about alcoholism being a destructive element in families…There wasn’t any fighting and shooting and all this stuff that’s associated with drinking that happens in the community today. And the attitude was completely different. The people that drink and carry on now don’t have any respect for anything, not even themselves, you know…”well Tom,” he said, “now that you’re gettin’ this lease money off of this land down here, I guess you’ll stay drunk all the time, won’t you?” Uncle Tom said, “Hell, I stay drunk all the time anyway.” He said, “Now I’ll just drink better liquor.” But there was always that kind of camaraderie, and joking and carrying on. Nobody had their feelings hurt. Once in a while there was, I’ve heard about violence in the community, but it wasn’t usually associated with drinking, and things like that, not like it is today…[continues with observations about the traditional social setup, and clan system, having broken down]

This was not the 1650s; Davey Arch is almost ten years younger than my parents. I have heard about what would now be considered mental illness in my own family, but it was handled completely differently, definitely not as Broke Brain Syndrome. One great-grandfather kept having to take retreats to his family’s farm, to spend a lot of time sitting by himself (meditating) up on a mountainside or taking care of the animals when things got too much for him in town; one great-great-uncle who liked looking after kids filled that extended-family role when his voices wouldn’t let him do paid work. He watched my mom and her cousins a lot, and sometimes had conversations with people in France without the aid of a phone. (So much for stigma, and fear of exposing kids to “inherently dangerous” “crazy” people!) On the whole, there used to be a lot more recognition that some people are just the way they are, and there’s not much to do besides to work from there.

A couple of relatives were prone to sometimes-violent meltdowns, and (with varying success) people around them mostly tried to change the situation to prevent the meltdowns until the person learned to control it better. One of my mom’s aunts would sometimes go off and try to spear other adults with a fork at the supper table. Some people did drink in an attempt to self medicate, but that was not deemed an excuse for becoming violent. There was no acceptable excuse for hurting other people, especially their own family members. That does, unfortunately, seem to be changing, especially when women and/or children get hurt. I can’t help but think that the current disempowering approach to “mental illness” and drug/alcohol abuse have a lot to do with this shift in attitudes. (On that link, scroll down about halfway to the “Beliefs” and “Labels” sections.)

I also ran across an excellent article at Beyond Meds, yesterday, Dharma not pharma. Leah Harris might have been describing some of my experiences. It’s well worth a read.

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* It didn’t take long for the special ed person to figure out that looking at it in terms of patterns was what worked for me. Looking at a table full of numbers (with my dyscalculia, particularly) just made things start swimming in front of my eyes. And, in that environment, I faced ridicule for needing to go to the “dummy shed”.

** Unflattering nicknames were/are not uncommon. My mom’s family has a “Pig”, a “Squinchy”, and a “Chubby”; my biodad’s ancestors include such characters as “Whisky Bill”, “Crippled Billy”, and “Twelve-Toed John” to distinguish them from their contemporaries with the same English names. I got off easy with “Goose”. The intent is not to insult, though it can sound that way! There’s just not the shaming power behind it.

Childhood obesity, in photos

Dealing with a fresh wave of grief, today I sorted through my mom’s purse for the second time since I brought it back with me, about this time last year. I’d already taken all the packets of tissues and old receipts–most of the bag detritus that collects over time–out of there, so today I ended up going through her huge wallet. Besides the now-useless collection of things like funky-shaped store credit cards in my biodad’s name (they split up in 1981; I haven’t seen him since 1986) and Blue Cross cards from 1985, I found her store of wallet photos.

Gosh. Stabby describes it pretty well.

One of the things I couldn’t help but notice, trying to distract myself from starting to blubber all over the place, was that in the Shrine to Urocyon 1976-1987 section, that kid looked much leaner than I remembered through the mental filters I’ve since picked up. It’s funny the things that will catch a person’s eye sometimes. (I also didn’t remember my hair going so reddish before all the brown pigment came in on top!) Partly to make a point to myself–and partly to make a larger point in general–I scanned a few photos.

Here’s an assortment of photos from ages 3-6. Looks like the same kid displaying an expected rate of growth, eh? There is one major difference*, though: a few months before the last portraits of this child were taken, she was declared Overweight! (complete with underlining and exclamation point) on paper, when the school/health department collected their regular child measurement data, thus becoming part of the horrible Childhood Obesity Epidemic. You’ll notice that she is sitting up very straight, and looks happy and confident enough. Her strong-looking shoulders and arms already stand out. At that point, she was also the tallest kid in the school’s first grade, and one of only two who were 4 feet tall going in (perception later confirmed by seeing a sample of the health documents**). The only other kids who came close in measurements were members of the same ethnic /racial group.

Going by the available, more recent 2000 CDC data on girls (PDF), she looks to be in the 99th percentile for both height and weight. Fiddling dates to use the CDC’s child BMI calculator, ” Based on the height and weight entered, the BMI is 22.8 , placing the BMI-for-age at the 98th percentile for girls aged 6 years 7 months. This child may be obese and is likely to have health-related problems because of weight and should be seen by a healthcare provider for further assessment.”

I had to fiddle the dates by 10 years, and do not know how these figures have changed from the ones current at the time. There are plenty of claims that BMI has gone up across the board.

The next portrait available is from December 1987, when she is a couple of months shy of 13. In the meantime, she has taken to avoiding cameras, and was upset enough at being forced to sit for Christmas portraits that she refused to remove her jacket. Note the half-grimace, and the shoulder slump. By this point, she insists on keeping her pointed-out-as-fat arms covered, and has developed a habit of hunching in around her D-cup breasts. She has consistently been classified as overweight since the last portrait, and is now verging on “obese”. She stands at 5′7″, close to her full adult height, and weighs a little under 170 lbs. (Again, the only other kids at her school whose measurements came close were others of local Tutelo/Cherokee heritage, including some who identified as Black.) She has started engaging in disordered eating behaviors, with a weight goal of 125. Her broad, flat face is on the verge of sinking in.

Using the same chart and calculator, how do her height and weight compare? By now, she squeaks in at “only” the 93rd-94th percentile for height, and the 94th-95th for weight. “Based on the height and weight entered, the BMI is 26.2 , placing the BMI-for-age at the 95th percentile for girls aged 12 years 7 months. This child may be obese and is likely to have health-related problems because of weight and should be seen by a healthcare provider for further assessment.”

Some school districts are now sending home BMI report cards, based on the measurements they collect. “Critics worry about stigmatization of overweight children, misinterpretation of BMI results sent home to parents, and placement of children on harmful diets.” The methods used to determine BMI for adults are dodgy enough; the CDC’s information on BMI as used for children and teens inspires even less confidence. Neither method has much connection to reality near either end of the scale, nor do they distinguish body fat from lean body mass.

If I didn’t know that the girl in question was me, I would not cringe and start thinking “fat cow” before even starting to look at these photos. Keeping more in the way of perspective is why I decided to use third person references. Looking at them now with a little detachment, I see rude health. Except for the signs of strain starting to show in the last one. Raising awareness of the Dread Childhood Obesity is so beneficial for mental health, in a lot of cases.

Another one that caught my eye, once I started thinking along these lines:

This is one of my younger cousins, probably taken in 1998 judging by the state of his teeth. He was also officially “overweight”–probably “obese”, since they’d started using that distinction–at the time of this photo, though I am not even going to guess at his measurements at that point. Another statistic in the Dread Obesity Epidemic, though–as a boy–he has been socialized to internalize it less. He’s still rated as “obese” by BMI, since at last check he was a little shorter than I am while outweighing me by >40 lbs. Of muscle. He still plays baseball, and has added football (defensive line) and weight training since then. He’s really bulked up a lot the past few years; our family is good at that!

You can probably get an idea of what I think about the standards used to declare a Childhood Obesity Epidemic. (Besides the adult version.) You can probably also get an idea of how I feel about the stated goals of making us healthier and happier through a focus on pointing out and Preventing Childhood Obesity, based on experience. Some people are truly out of touch with reality.

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* Before this, the sense God gave a turnip was applied to measurements and norms. I was about twice the size of my (SE Asian) pediatrician’s daughter of the same age, and he just concluded that I was a very healthy Amazon child. I have yet to reach his projected height of 6′4″, alas. How much of the gap comes from starving myself in early adolescence, I have no idea.

** Circa 1989, when I could not do PE because of a torn knee ligament, I was set to doing something or another with the whole year’s student health files to keep me busy. Yes, I peeked, and got angry even then, when the self-hatred was strong.