• IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    Try being an actual full blooded native person.

    I’m 100% Ojibway, my parents on both sides were born raised and lived in the wilderness. I’m the first generation born in a modern hospital. My first language is ojibway, I spoke it exclusively for the first 15 years of my life. We learned English in school but we all spoke ojibway at home. I learned to hunt, trap, fish and live on the land from my parents and I love spending time outdoors. It’s all natural to me.

    Now I live close to the city in a non native world. My wife is white and we spend most of our time to ourselves.

    My family doesn’t think I’m native enough. White people don’t believe I’m native because I live like a city person. Most people don’t believe I’m native because I don’t have red weathered skin, a crooked nose and long braided hair. Many people have confused me as Chinese, Korean, or an overweight Thai, Cambodian or Lao. Or even Peruvian, Ecuador or Mexican.

    I meet city Indians who have ancestry but have never lived on the land or know their communities or even speak the language yet they wear native stuff, necklaces and everything and get more recognition than me for being native.

    I intimidate other natives when I speak my language because it reminds them that they can’t speak other than to know a few words or phrases. So now I seldom speak and as I grow older, the people I could speak to are now either dead, dying or too old.

    I get funding as a native person but I get very little. I don’t live in reserve so I’m the last to get funding. I don’t get off reserve funding because I have full status with my community where I could live if I chose to. I get tax off on some things but not everything because I don’t live on reserve and doing my taxes every year is a nightmare, so in the end, I pay just about the same amount of taxes as everyone else and save just a little.

    I’ve watched dozens of half breed, quarter breed, 1/8 breed, 1/16 breed natives with scholarships and paid education while I tried to fight for mine and never got it. I got high school but never got more than that.

    I even know a couple of blue eyed, blonde Indians who got adopted into a native family and have full status and more help than I ever did.

    People keep telling me I’m lucky to be native but I’ve experienced far too much racism and stupidity to be happy about who I am.

    I’m neither treated as full native and I’m also not treated as non native either. It’s like I exist in some kind of native twilight zone.

    • BrundleFly2077@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      Huh. TIL all of this. Thanks for typing this out. I did a bit of a rabbit hole on your people over my morning coffee. Was more interesting than the usual crap I read before work 🤣👍🏻

      • DoGeeseSeeGod@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 months ago

        Damn. Maybe it’s just me but your comment reads kinda disrespectful. OP shares their unique vulnerable experience, which relates to the original post. You don’t make the slightest effort to connect or respond to them as person or their story. Instead you google their ppl for a fun fact and pay their culture/story the compliment of “More interesting than the usual crap I read before work 🤣👍”.

        Idk I can’t tell if I’m being overly sensitive, cuz no one part of your reply is really bad by itself. But all together, it’s hella trivializing imo.

        Especially ending on the 🤣👍. Let’s say you post something heartfelt like, I’m depressed, I lost my job, I’m dealing with something right now, and someone replies and ends on 🤣👍. Unless there is a really funny joke before those emojis, pretty sure it would read bad.

        OP thank you for sharing your story. I’m sorry you’re stuck between two worlds like this. Have you thought about if you and your wife have kids, would you teach them to speak ojibway or how to live off the land?

        • Nythos@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          It’s you.

          The only person who gets to judge whether the comment is disrespectful is OP, not you.

          • DoGeeseSeeGod@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            9 months ago

            “It’s you.”

            When you said that were you saying my comment was disrespectful? If so my friend I have it on good authority that the only person who can judge whether my comment was disrespectful was one of the OPs. Since you are not one of the OPs, I’m afraid, by your own logic, you are in fact the one being disrespectful.

            Ultimately, I think I get what you mean. On the otherhand I seem to be judging that comment just fine.

            I’m not trying to be a white knight over here or some shit. I got rude/bad vibes from that comment, mind you not hugely bad vibes, truly just enough bad vibes above the line for me to call it out.

            If OP says comment was disrespectful I’ll apologize, but I’m not gonna stop calling shit rude when I see rude shit.

    • southernbeaver@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I am also the son of two worlds. From the age of 6, I was always treated differently with one group of people compared to the other.

      I didn’t get better until I was older, I thought it would in my twenties but it’s actually in my thirties that I found people who accept both sides of me but I always feel like it’s one side more than the other. It has made me a very withdrawn person.

      On top of being autistic, I just would rather not deal with people.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      I would love to learn even half of those things. No one really taught me, I remember going camping with scouts before and another guy was catching shellfish with his bare hands and I was so jealous that he could do it. But in the UK half of its illegal and the other half requires land owner permission which pretty much makes it for the rich only as they own the land. I like the outdoors, but it feels difficult to see and even harder to do so legally. Plus no one I know now has any interest in it so its always a solo activity when I do go out.

      And yeah that guy catching shellfish was breaking the law by doing it, its illegal to use anything other than a fishing rod in freshwater and that requires a license and land owner permission too.

  • Baggie@lemmy.zip
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    9 months ago

    This reads like a young man who hasn’t learned how to do things for his own enjoyment yet.

    • TwoBeeSan@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The former gang member and former meth fiend who taught me to cook can attest to this. (Different people)

      I’m sure they’d upvote this if

      1. They were on this gay ass forum
      2. Had enough feeling in their fingers to actually hit the button

      But they’re busy being people.

      because op doesn’t want to accept his innate normieness.

      • kungen@feddit.nu
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        9 months ago

        How can he be a former meth fiend if he works as a line cook? Or did he simply get a new drug-of-choice?

        • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          As a former bar back and then bartender at a restaurant, maybe cocaine. We did a lot of that with the kitchen staff after hours.

      • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world
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        9 months ago

        Stay there long enough and you’ll fuck hot waitresses and hostesses all day long and you’ll realize they’re all more fucked than you’ll ever be.

  • Eq0@literature.cafe
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    9 months ago

    Is this anyone else’s experience? I don’t fit neatly in any box, I have friends in all of them. I have friends in traditional marriages with the woman as the homemaker, I have all sorts of queer friends. I have friends that think videogames are edgy, others playing D&D every second day, others in sword battle reenactment, others in crochet. Never struggled relating to them or them to me. I moved around a lot, still found “my people” in no time. We are all multifaceted people with a variety of interests and thoughts.

    • kartoffelsaft@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      The part where he talks about video games definitely feels like my experience, at least when it comes to meeting people outside of the context of a specific game and its community.

      When I’ve gotten into convos in these situations, usually it’ll be evident they mostly only play some set of the following games:

      • Overwatch
      • Rainbow Six
      • Genshin Impact
      • Stardew Valley
      • Helldivers 2
      • Last of us
      • God of War
      • GTA
      • Red Dead 2

      That’s not a complete list, but for the most part it will be a bunch of games like that with a sizeable, committed, “normie” following that I don’t play. I can’t bond with these people over games even though on a surface level we’re both “gamers”, because the only game we’ll have in common is Minecraft.

      I think the gap here is that for someone like me or anon, we have interests and want to find people who are also interested in that thing, but from the sounds of your post you’re finding people and getting your interests from them. In the latter case, of course there’s no trouble connecting with people, because you’re more willing to mold yourself to do so.

      • Eq0@literature.cafe
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        9 months ago

        I have been mulling over your comment for a couple of days.

        I think the set up is different. I have a lot of things I am interested in, but none that is fundamental. So I can easily start a conversation over a shared interest, even if the other interests do not align. Sometimes I pick up extra stuff on the way, but mostly I use a limited shared interest to set the foundations from which to develop a friendship. I find that once you get talking for a bit, you don’t need a specific shared topic anymore.

        Do you aim to build friendships fully connected to your interests?

        • kartoffelsaft@programming.dev
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          9 months ago

          Everything you just described is my experience too, minus the part about having a lot of interests already.

          The thing that I was describing is that, for whatever reason, the things that I find interesting are niche enough to others that I won’t find people who already know/care about the same things organically. That’s not much of an issue if you have enough interests to balance that out, but I don’t really have that.

          To put it another way, I’m not filtering for people who already have most of my interests, I’m filtering for people who share any of my interests, but that’s already filters most because I’m into few things with little popularity. So, “connected to [my] interests?” Yes. “Fully”? No.

          That probably sounds really lonely, but I honestly don’t mind that much. Like you’ve described, most of the friends I’ve had for a while I can talk about whatever with. What I’m describing is mostly a mild inconvenience when meeting new people.

      • IronBird@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        apparently the overwhelming majority of gamers just play 1 game series/type, or follow the herd to whatever the game of the momth is

    • Hanrahan@slrpnk.net
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      9 months ago

      I definetly don’t fit in but also have friends and a partner i live with (of 10 yrs)

      I mostly LARP at it though because I don’t fit in. Am 58, m and don’t want to fit in :)

  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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    9 months ago

    This fucking normie playing pardox games? Don’t talk to me unless you are at least compiling CDDA from source code on a Linux phone. Fucking casuals.

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
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    9 months ago

    I mean i kinda get what anon means but maybe the first step could be getting off of 4chan? That shit melts your brain and you already see it from this normie/wierdo split that isnt really a real thing. Irl you WILL find the people who think like you because were all on a spectrum.

    Edit: just to clarify i mean spectrum in the way of personality, not the autism spectrum. Tho id argue that some neurotypical people relate more to autistic people than other neurotypicals but thats a story for another day.

  • don@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    Get off of 4chan, to start. Keep trying to diversify your friends, find people more open minded than the five you currently have.

  • RBWells@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I am not like people at my work but I like people at my work.

    None of that being different matters if you can just listen and talk to others without needing them to be like you.

    I will say on the video games it may be a generational thing, my kids love both indie games and Minecraft/Genshin. Penultimate kid liked Disco Elysium so much. Youngest likes horror, I got them Amnesia and they loved it, said it was too scary to do much at one time.

    Anyway, just let other people do what other people do. You can like them, you don’t need to change yourself or then

    • wkk@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Off topic but speaking about generational things I see you opposed indie games to Minecraft/Genshin when I still vividly remember the days when Minecraft was very much indie x)

      • RBWells@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Ha! Well I can remember Pong and having to go to an arcade for anything more interesting. But yes I always thought of those two as wildly successful, so must not have been aware of the beginning time. Amnesia, I was so happy to surprise my youngest with, it was older and they had not heard of it but available for PS4 (& the penultimate kid is PC gamer, uses our old Dell which is a beast, I did some upgrades)

        I am not a game snob, lol, play Pokemon Go all the time, myself. Often things are popular because they are good. But do love indie media of all sorts, and absolutely love when I can scoop the kids on something they have not heard of.

  • Prethoryn Overmind@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Stop viewing the world from this perspective? People ar just different that doesn’t mean their aren’t certain categorizations that classify as “normal” but self pity or just not finding a therapist to talk to. I know it is cliché to say, “help yourself bro.” It isn’t fair people hurt every day that need help and it isn’t that easy.

    But going online to get self justification on being “weird” and not fitting in with “normies” and feeling judged is why you feel out of place because you filter yourself into this, “I am not normal… And normies do not like me and women loath me and I don’t understand why.”

    That and 4-chan is a cesspool “justify me non normies who also feel they are not normal and are justified in their beliefs of being racist and sexist. Help me justify the feeling of feeling that way please.”

    • deaf_fish@midwest.socialBanned
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      9 months ago

      Ehh, it can definitely push you further down that path, but thought doesn’t magically make things happen. Otherwise we wouldn’t have an incel problem.