I've always said that I'd rather live my life believing that God is real and find out He's not than live my life not believing He's real and find out He is ...

 

To me,that story is self centered.It's implying the only reward to compassion is death.It's not true.It's a more fulfilling life to live one day with love and compassion than it would be to live a thousand years without it.Without compassion for others,humanity is lost.What point would there be for living?Living a selfish life isn't living at all.It's simply existing.Living,thinking we're better than someone else,for any reason,is shameful and judgmental.

 

Six days later, and I see the 'overly sensitive' one is still at it ... sigh.

 

Don't you just wish I would quit defending those with Gender dysphoria already? How dare I stand up to those who think they're better than others for any reason at all right?
I should be shamed and discredited as being overly sensitive until I cease with this foolishness.If only America would become great again.If only we had someone to come rescue us from our evil ways.

 

No, you should be ashamed for being a hypocrite after calling OTHERS overly sensitive.

 

By Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn

The two-spirited person is a native tradition that researchers have identified in some of the earliest discoveries of Native artifacts. Much evidence indicates that Native people, prior to colonization, believed in the existence of cross-gender roles, the male-female, the female-male, what we now call the two-spirited person.

In Native American culture, before the Europeans came to the America's, "two-spirit" referred to an ancient teaching. This type of cross-gender identity has been documented in over 155 tribes across Native North America (Roscoe 1988).

Our Elders tell us of people who were gifted among all beings because they carried two spirits, that of male and female. It is told that women engaged in tribal warfare and married other women, as there were men who married other men. These individuals were looked upon as a third and fourth gender in many cases and in almost all cultures they were honoured and revered. Two-spirit people were often the visionaries, the healers, the medicine people, the nannies of orphans, the care givers (Roscoe 1988). They were respected as fundamental components of our ancient culture and societies. This is our guiding force as well as our source of strength. This is the heart of Two-Spirited People of the 1st Nations (2 Spirit Nation of Ontario) This paper explores what we know of the past of two-spirit people, compares that to the present experience and looks forward to the role that two-spirit people could play in the future of First Nation's people in Canada and across North America.


Since European colonization, the existence of the two-spirit community has been systematically denied and alienated from their Aboriginal identity. As a result, two-spirit people are often viewed as perverted, untraditional or untrustworthy and two-spirit people have lost their place in society and their dignity. Persecution began by the church and an attempt to eradicate these individuals, often the spiritual leaders and healers of the tribes, and their behaviours based on the church's moralistic code.

The attempt to exterminate Native Americans and their rituals by both the church and the government resulted in a loss of many rituals including those who identified and honour cross-gender individuals. With very few exceptions, there is no longer a place in Native cultures for a man-woman or a woman-man. The tribes have forgotten the two-spirit teachings and many of the ancient two-spirit ways are no longer being practiced. Instead, this role appears as a ghost of the past or a dirty secret. Elders who may know the stories and teachings are often afraid to talk about them because of their experiences in Residential Schools and other forms of colonialization.

Because so many Native American cultures were disrupted (or had disappeared) before they were studied by researchers, it is not possible to know how frequently these spiritual ceremonies happened or the roles ascribed to those people. These alternative gender roles that have been documented, however, occur in every region of the continent, lending credibility to the claim that acceptance of two-spirit people was relatively common among Native American cultures. Today we have to confront a very real problem - it is impossible to define precisely what two-spirit experience was. Although most people now agree that such individuals existed, the particulars of that identity remain for most part a ghost of history. Nonetheless, like many Native American rituals and traditions the two-spirit peoples are experiencing a re-awakening to the validity of their cultural and spiritual roots.

Native American Queer Communities have to deal with unique issues as a result of our history, cultural status, and perceptions as Natives. We come out of a history of genocide, our people have been persecuted, killed, kidnapped, forced into residential schools and assimilated for hundreds of years, and we still face lingering aspects of genocide. We face homophobia and sexism from our own people, racism from lesbians and gays, and racism, homophobia, and sexism from the dominant society, not to mention the classism many Native Americans have to deal with. It is important to remember that we Natives today are not the same as the Natives that lived before the arrival of the white man.

Interaction with whites and the cultural genocide perpetrated on Natives has changed Native Americans' perception of gender and sexuality. Though it is interesting to speculate about how two-spirits were treated in traditional Native American cultures, a focus on such speculation can hide the lives and realities of Native American Queer communities today. Despite the encouraging things written about the acceptance and honour of the 'Two-Spirited' of the past, Queer Natives today face homophobia in their own communities.

Read more:
Dancing to Eagle Spirit Society - TWO SPIRITED PEOPLE


Wow how times have changed.To any of you out there who are two spirits (no matter your nationality),always know that there will always be haters.There are many however,who though we may not fully understand you,do know that your just as good as the rest of us and you should stand proud of who you are and know your loved just the same.Never let ignorance and intolerance disrupt your walk of life.

 

Yet you insist on labeling their disappearance a genocide.

 

"I" do,or do you mean "Historians" do?


U.S. soldiers bury Native American corpses in a mass grave following the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1891.

Historians believe that California was once the most diversely populated area for Native Americans in U.S. territory; however, the gold rush had massive negative implications for Native American livelihoods — and lives. Toxic chemicals and gravel ruined traditional native hunting and agricultural practices, resulting in starvation for many.

Miners likewise often saw Native Americans merely as obstacles that called only for removal. Ed Allen, interpretive lead for Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, reported that there were times when miners would kill up to 50 or more Natives in one day.

The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed on April 22, 1850 by the California Legislature, even allowed settlers to kidnap natives and use them as slaves, prohibited native peoples’ testimony against settlers, and facilitated the adoption or purchasing of native children, often to use as labor.

California Governor Peter H. Burnett remarked at the time, “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

The Native American Genocide And Its Legacy Of Oppression Today


The “Indian Problem”

White Americans, particularly those who lived on the western frontier, often feared and resented the Native Americans they encountered: To them, American Indians seemed to be an unfamiliar, alien people who occupied land that white settlers wanted (and believed they deserved). Some officials in the early years of the American republic, such as President George Washington, believed that the best way to solve this “Indian problem” was simply to “civilize” the Native Americans. The goal of this civilization campaign was to make Native Americans as much like white Americans as possible by encouraging them convert to Christianity, learn to speak and read English, and adopt European-style economic practices such as the individual ownership of land and other property (including, in some instances in the South, African slaves). In the southeastern United States, many Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee people embraced these customs and became known as the “Five Civilized Tribes.”

Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida–campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers. As president, he continued this crusade. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the “Indian colonization zone” that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. (This “Indian territory” was located in present-day Oklahoma.)

In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether. They made the journey to Indian territory on foot (some “bound in chains and marched double file,” one historian writes) and without any food, supplies or other help from the government. Thousands of people died along the way. It was, one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a “trail of tears and death.”

Trail of Tears - Native American History - HISTORY.com



Native American Genocide or Holocaust?
Germany again confronts its past; the US can't look in the mirror of history
Peter d'Errico • January 10, 2017

Once again, Germany steps forward to confront and compensate for historical crimes—this time, its colonial genocide in Africa.

Germany began a process of national self-criticism after World War II, investigating atrocities of its **** past and creating large-scale education programs. Confronting history was understood as a necessary part of moving forward.

Many other countries have made efforts to recover from historical traumas caused by official violence. The United States Institute of Peace Truth Commissions Digital Collection contains profiles of bodies of inquiry from nations worldwide—with links to the official legislative texts establishing such commissions and each commission’s final reports and findings.

One notable—but unremarked—omission from the list of countries: The United States. No “truth commission” or “holocaust memorial” has ever been undertaken by the U.S. to acknowledge—let alone compensate for—the historical violence against Native Peoples otherwise known as Native American genocide.

In fact, the U.S. government has done more to acknowledge its role in other countries’ genocides than to acknowledge Native American genocide. For example, when Brazil formed a National Truth Commission to investigate repression by state security forces between 1964 and 1985, the U.S. agreed to a special declassification project on Brazil, identifying, centralizing and reviewing hundreds of still secret CIA, Defense, and State Department records from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when U.S. agencies assisted Brazilian state terror.

The National Security Archive (a non-profit, non-governmental organization of journalists and scholars based in Washington, D.C.) review of Brazil’s 2014 final report showed it provided far more information about Brazil’s system of state repression—including names of those who committed atrocities—than the U.S. provided in a 2014 Senate report on official U.S. torture.

In 2009, President Obama signed a so-called “apology” to American Indians—in a statement buried in the Defense Appropriations Act. Maybe that was appropriate, given that the “defense” budget was tapped for many years to carry out the Native American genocide—to kill Native Peoples and confine them to “reservations” (which the ***** cited as precedent for their “camps”). Obama’s signing ceremony was closed to the press; the result was more an effort to bury the past, than to confront it. The possibility of compensation was not even discussed.

Meanwhile, since 1980, the U.S. government has supported a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall. Despite its name, the Museum does not focus on the American Holocaust—the Native American genocide—but on **** extermination efforts directed at Jews.

The Museum research collections contain materials documenting the Native American genocide —such as Benjamin Madley’s book about the slaughter of Native Peoples in what we call California, but the Museum stages no exhibition about the holocaust directed at Indigenous Peoples by U.S. forces. Indeed, the Museum uses the word “holocaust” as a noun—designating a singular historical event—rather than as a verb—designating an action, a repeatable event, a process that happened in many places and still happens.

Oddly enough, the restriction of the word “holocaust” to a single historical event threatens to undermine the intention of the Museum to “prevent genocide,” because the further back in history that single event recedes, the less significance it will have for future generations. The best thing the Museum could do to educate citizens and leaders worldwide would be to refuse to see “the holocaust” as a unique historical event—and to see it as a continuing phenomenon in a world driven by vicious religious and political conflict, where governments frequently aggravate violence.

The 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide states: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

To this day, some people dispute whether the Native American genocide by the U.S. ought to be called “genocide.” Even academic writers have trouble acknowledging the historical record. Gary Anderson, for example, wrote “Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian,” a 2014 book of more than 400 pages, filled with details about the principal actors in the American effort to eliminate Indians—and argued that this was not genocide!

On December 29, 1890, Miniconjou Lakota, camped with Chief Big Foot on Wounded Knee Creek, were attacked by more than 500 soldiers in the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry, armed with Hotchkiss cannons capable of firing 50 shells per minute. The Army report stated the number of Indian dead at 290—90 warriors and 200 women and children.

The historical records demonstrate that Wounded Knee was not an isolated event. If we add forced sterilization of Indian women and the transfer of Indian children to non-Indian families by state agencies, we must conclude not only that the American holocaust happened, but that parts of it are still going on.

In 2013, the National Congress of American Indians passed a General Assembly Resolution calling for the U.S. Smithsonian Institution to create a space within the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) to establish a National American Indian Holocaust Museum.

That hasn’t happened; and given the tenderness of American egos and the fallacious notion of “American exceptionalism,” the NMAI will likely remain a place with barely a shadow of a holocaust. Plans are afoot, however, as reported in January 2016 in the American Herald Tribune, to create in Moscow a Museum of the North American Holocaust, in response to the Idle No More Movement.

Meanwhile, Germany and its one-time colony, Namibia, grapple with the consequences of German efforts between 1904 and 1908 to exterminate the Herero and Nama Peoples in what was then called the colony of “German South-West Africa.” Herero and Nama leaders are demanding a role in the negotiations, as they distrust the Namibian government to represent them.

The negotiations aim to determine how Germany will apologize and compensate for its actions. One thing has already been made clear by Germany’s special envoy: “It will be described as genocide.”

Native American Genocide or Holocaust?
Germany again confronts its past; the US can't look in the mirror of history


There were many such atrocities in the American West. But the slaughter at Sand Creek stands out because of the impact it had at the time and the way it has been remembered. Or rather, lost and then rediscovered. Sand Creek was the My Lai of its day, a war crime exposed by soldiers and condemned by the U.S. government. It fueled decades of war on the Great Plains. And yet, over time, the massacre receded from white memory, to the point where even locals were unaware of what had happened in their own backyard.

That’s now changed, with the opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. “We’re the only unit in the National Park Service that has ‘massacre’ in its name,” says the site’s superintendent, Alexa Roberts. Usually, she notes, signs for national historic sites lead to a presidential birthplace or patriotic monument. “So a lot of people are startled by what they find here.”

Visitors are also surprised to learn that the massacre occurred during the Civil War, which most Americans associate with Eastern battles between blue and gray, not cavalry killing Indians on the Western plains. But the two conflicts were closely related, says Ari Kelman, a historian at Penn State University and author of A Misplaced Massacre, a Bancroft Prize-winning book about Sand Creek.

The Civil War, he observes, was rooted in westward expansion and strife over whether new territories would join the nation as free states or slave states. Slavery, however, wasn’t the only obstacle to free white settlement of the West; another was Plains Indians, many of whom staunchly resisted encroachment on their lands.

“Hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees for mercy,” he wrote, only to be shot and “have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.” Indians didn’t fight from trenches, as Chivington claimed; they fled up the creek and desperately dug into its sand banks for protection. From there, some young men “defended themselves as well as they could,” with a few rifles and bows, until overwhelmed by carbines and howitzers. Others were chased down and killed as they fled across the Plains.

Soule estimated the Indian dead at 200, all but 60 of them women and children. He also told of how the soldiers not only scalped the dead but cut off the “Ears and Privates” of chiefs. “Squaws snatches were cut out for trophies.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...o1hjwtpQJJO.99



Move over Hitler.Here's the US governments past and even present.Just because your different doesn't mean your less of a person.I may not understand Gender dysphoria very well but I do know what it is like to be looked at as lesser.
You good folks stand up and stand proud.Your special.Don't let hatters get you down.They have no power over you.

 

Probably because the accusation of genocide is too spurious to be taken seriously. The vast majority of Indians died of disease without ever coming into contact with European people. Many others were killed by other Indians. If we call that a genocide then just about every people on earth has been genocided at some point and it loses all distinction.


Maybe. But you're not the only one.

 

Your entire statement is about how YOU see it. You're trolling this forum perhaps? I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but oh well, education opportunity is here.

Only thing that is crazy is that you seem inconvenienced by how someone lives their life. That is like being in a restaurant and saying, "Waiter, that table cannot have cake because I cannot have cake, so no one should have cake."

Land of the FREE!

How many freedoms do you want to take away from people?

No one is taking any freedoms away from you by asking you to respect who they are. You are still free to choose to dis-respect them.

But if you want to be hateful, choose your prejudice / racism / able-ism / sex-ism / etc-ims: (what do you hate today, and how is it distracting you from living a better life?)

Hi, I'm Nick, I'm Gay, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm Black, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm French, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm Russian, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nicola, I'm a woman, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm Native, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm disabled but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm a Veteran, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm a reformed criminal, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm a recovering alcoholic, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm a recovering drug addict, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I was abused sexually by Priests as a child and still deal with it to this day, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I was orphaned and came up through the Foster care system, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I was raped repeatedly by my female high school teacher and survived, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I'm Jewish, I was captured by ***** and survived the Holocaust, but accept me anyway.
Hi, I'm Nick, I stood in front of a tank in Tianamen Square, but accept me anyway.

Hi, I'm Muhammed Ali and I refused The Draft service because my real enemy is my home country and I've already been fighting for 400 years for my freedoms!

Let go of Hate.
Spread understanding, don't spread division.

 

You're joking right? LOL! Tell that to the Christian bakers who were fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for being disinclined to provide wedding cakes to homosexuals. Remember when it was "we just want to be left alone"?

Well that was then, this is now. Today it's "Bake the Cake, or We'll Run Your *** Out of Business." I'm not particularly religious in the church going sense but it's obvious there is a decidedly anti-religious element to all of this. Why can't homosexuals accept Christians for who they are?

 

A troll to this section of the forum, perhaps...but my post count and rep shows I'm hardly a troll to FTE.

You are correct...my entire statement is exactly how *I* see it; its how I was raised and how 99% of everyone else was raised, too. Unfortunately, in the last decade or two the media has been used effectively to normalize things that are not normal and through the process of desensitization, the general masses who were raised the same way as I was have gradually come around.

Then there is your last statement..."let go of hate, spread understanding, etc."

This is a very common phrase used by people against folks who disagree with them, even on moral grounds. I was raised in a christian home. So most of my beliefs are based upon their being a God who wants us to behave a certain way. When I object to specific practices being legalized, celebrated, and protected under law...that apparently makes me a hater. I'm actually a major advocate for personal freedoms. You want to do things that are very abnormal, like have a same-sex relationship or pretend you're a man when you're actually a woman...have at it. But do it in privacy. I don't want to see that in public, and I surely don't want it taught in the schools. Because when the educators who are entrusted to teach my children tell them being gay is normal, "x" percentage of the class may actually be gay, and it is normal to physically be a man but want to dress like a woman, etc...then guess what...my rights are being trampled all over the place as well. If you haven't noticed, traditional "rights" are being trampled all over the place in favor of ending so-called 'discrimination' against tiny minorities. Look at the baker case: These bakers were in no way "mean" to their gay customers. They simply stated from a moral / religious / how they were raised perspective that baking a wedding cake for a gay marriage was something they couldn't do. The fact that there is any legal recourse against these bakers is mind-blowing. Exactly *whose* rights are being trampled?

 

People who believe in the invisible superman will believe anything.

 

Can I go work out at the womens only gym then?
Or is that still frowned upon?

If the mens bathroom is busy, can i use the womens?

I think I should be allowed to according to some.

 

All of this would be perfectly acceptable if you announce you are 'transitioning' lol.