Thrill-Seeking for Nerds (who want to change the world)

Today is known as "Thanksgiving" to a lot of Americans. To many Indigenous people, however, it's "Day of Mourning" instead. I'm not Native, and my family got up to watch the parade in New York City on TV today. We made pies yesterday. While it's nice to have these family traditions, the historical (and present!) context of the so-called Thanksgiving holiday is horrific.  A year ago, I didn't even know whose stolen land I was living on. (If you don't either, let's fix that right now! Check out  https://native-land.ca/ .) Now, I really want to learn more about how to support building Indigenous power. Park near my house- Osage and Kickapoo land From supporting land defenders at their protests and talking to our families to pressuring the new Biden administration about policy, there's no shortage of actions for young activists to take.  I learned about these action steps today from a Sunrise Movement email by Krystal Two Bulls, LANDBACK Camp...

Hey, I'm back! Sorry about the hiatus from blog posts, and please forgive me for this one's title. Now that my term paper for U.S. History is submitted and I've taken a few days to recover from the election phonebanking frenzy, I finally got a spare moment to write something. The day after Trump was elected in 2016, a classmate came up to me at school nearly in tears and said "Yara, what are we gonna do now..." I remember being shocked and upset myself, and shakily responding, "We have so much work to do." And when I stumbled sleepily into the kitchen on Saturday morning in pajamas, the conversation went something like this: Parents: *cheering* Me: Did they call it? Parents: Yup. Me: Biden? Parents, laughing: Yup. Me: Okay, I can work with that. The answer is the same, no matter who's in power. We continue to organize and fight for everyone's rights and dignity. I have to say, I'm really excited that my generation defeated Donald Trump. I fee...