Imagine how pissed you have to be to engrave a rock
Ok but there was this guy called Ea-nasir who was a total crook and would actually cheat people ought of good copper and sell them shit instead. The amount of correspondences complaining to and about this guy are HILARIOUS.
Are you telling me we know about a specific guy who lived 5000 years ago, by name, because he was a huge asshole
More like 4000 years ago but yes. Ea-nasir and his dodgy business deals.
And we haven’t even touched on the true hilarity of the situation yet. Consider two additional facts:
He wasn’t just into copper trading. There are letters complaining about Ea-nasir’s business practices with respect to everything from kitchenwares to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. The guy was everywhere.
The majority of the surviving correspondences regarding Ea-nasir were recovered from one particular room in a building that is believed to have been Ea-nasir’s own house.
Like, these are clay tablets. They’re bulky, fragile, and difficult to store. They typically weren’t kept long-term unless they contained financial records or other vital information (which is why we have huge reams of financial data about ancient Babylon in spite of how little we know about the actual culture: most of the surviving tablets are commercial inventories, bills of sale, etc.).
But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters – hundreds of them – and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?
I’m a slut for sitting in comfortable silence while both of us do our own thing and occasionally show each other something dumb on our computers like that’s the good shit my dude.
Dawn Adams was only a child when her mother’s parental rights were terminated by the United States government; two years later, her adoption process began. Then, at age 15, Adams, a child of the Wabanaki community in Maine, was taken from her home and placed in foster care. Like other Indigenous children throughout the U.S., Adams, who was named Neptune prior to her adoption, was led to believe that her people didn’t want her, and was placed with a white family to live out the remainder of her childhood.
The Maine resident is just one of the many Indigenous people profiled in the new documentary film Dawnland, which puts a spotlight on the United States government’s history of systematically taking Native American children from their homes and placing them with white families. The film, directed by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip, was produced by the Upstander Project, a Boston-based educational collaborative founded in 2009 that aims to raise awareness about social injustice, turning “bystanders” into “upstanders.” Dawnland, which airs on PBS at 10 P.M. EST on November 5, centers around the United States’ first government-sanctioned Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Maine, which gathered testimony from Wabanaki families who were affected by this practice.
Mazo was initially drawn to the film’s topic when he first learned of the TRC from a 2013 NPR broadcast. At the time, his team was promoting their documentary film Coexist, about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. “We would often say at workshops, ‘We’re teaching about genocide in a far away place, but we also want to acknowledge genocide in this country’s history,’” Mazo told Teen Vogue. “We were actively wondering how we could teach more about genocide in this country’s history when we heard about the commission.”
The specific instances of devastation and loss highlighted in Dawnland are reflective of the way the U.S. government has historically treated Indigenous families. According to the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), by the 1970s, approximately 25-35% of all Native children in the U.S. were being removed from their homes, and 85% of those children were placed with families outside of their community. In 1978, the U.S. government passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which established standards for the placement of Indigenous children in foster homes, and required courts to involve the child’s tribe and community in all decision-making. However, these issues are not a thing of the past; the NICWA notes that even today, Native families are four times more likely to have their children removed from their home than white families. Additionally, Native children are overrepresented in the U.S. foster care system, which, according to the NICWA, “has increased trauma” to Indigenous families.
likeanantennastraighttoheaven 