Saturday, June 11, 2016

... On the X-men: Apocalypse billboard

When I came up with this blog it was supposed to be a place to help me deal with the minor annoyances, vexations and oddities that come with being a modern citizen of the internet. I'd rage at the stupid silly things that came across my various social media sources and get a good chuckle out of the process. It was a way for me to be negative about the things I was seeing on the internet that angered me in a positive way, fully knowing they weren't extremely important. For awhile I also took a stab at positivity with some of the other posts that happened here. Especially during Women's History Month. But now I'm back and oh boy, do I have some opinions on some silliness that's been occuring lately strap in ladies, gentlemen and non-binaries because this is going to be a long one! Unfortunately, I think the topic we're dealing with today DOES matter. That's why I'm mad. It deals with critical thinking in fan culture and a frustrating level of cognitive dissonance. 

About a week and a half ago, I started noticing people reacting to an ad for the new movie X-men: Apocalypse. They were reacing well... let's just say they weren't reacting well. Or I should say, they weren't reacting to a reaction well. What does that mean? Well... here's a trigger warning for the folks that need it.











And so... it starts. -_- 
   

The ad showing Apocalypse choking the hell out of blue Katniss *cough* I mean Mystique, didn't sit too well with some folks. They pointed out that it was problematic and 20th Century Fox issued a statement and took the ad down. That should have been the fucking end of it! Instead the internet lost their damn minds. I should be used to this by now but I swear, it never fails to surprise me and I'm not sure who's the dumb one because of that. Me, or the people angry at the people who are angry.
Let's start with my opinion here because lord knows I've got one. The question you're probably asking is, do I think it was right to take the ad down. Well here's your answer.

Obvious yes is obvious no? Wait...


What the unholy heck did you expect? I put a damn trigger warning in the post for crying out loud. Ought to have been clue enough. Seriously, the reason this got taken down should be quite plain but I've seen a lot of people bunching up their undies over its removal and it's just sad guys. I mean REAL sad in the most damning sense of the word. So just for funsies and to raise my blood pressure for your amusement, I'm going to explain and dissect this nonsense as best I can.

The Reactions
Alright, in order for me to cut this apart we're going to need to first look at the dumb reactions that set me off in the first place. Please understand what follows is opinion but nevertheless some folks are probably about to have their fee-fees hurt.

Oh LORD did I miss getting to use this thing! 

Let's start with one that isn't the first of the reaction memes I saw but it was the one that infurated me enough to set fingers to keyboard so it gets its ritual disemboweling first.

Pictured ladies and gentlemen, the meme you have to blame for this particularly
effusive rant! 


Sweet merciful heavens where do I even begin with this thing? This meme is like a poster child for all the things I actually loathe about memes. It's shallow, lacking in an ability to engage in critical thinking or analysis, ignores any concept of context and wallows in a level of smug, glib condescension that smacks a juvenile's need toward self-importance and agrandiizement. How utterly fitting that it have Deadpool as a spokesperson. Deadpool; the poster child for juvenile, glib self agrandizement.  The major difference here however, is that Deadpool is actually funny. There's several serious problems with this and I'll come back to them later at the end when I'm done raging with a hint of sarcasm in the writing here but do you know what this argument sounds suspiciously like to me?

It sounds a lot like the people who whine at POC's when we point out the problematic nature of white washing in films, or POC life and death in stories being used solely to motivate the white leads and willfully refuse to understand why it's a problem but then pitch a hissy fit when a black actor gets cast as a historically white character or when a formerly male character is reimagined as a woman calling reverse racism or reverse sexism or *gasp* hypocrisy! I swear I feel like this meme crawled out of the hairy unwashed jock strap of a reddit forum with its fedora tipped, screaming "M'lady," at the top of its lungs. This meme comes from the same place as the people bitching about a female ghostbusters, a black Heimdall or Human Torch and claiming that people who would be mad at a white Black Panther are hypocrites in that case. Hint: They're not and I think that I shouldn't have to make clear AGAIN why that's the case.

Pictured, a near accurate reenactment of my reaction to that meme above and deciding the line had to be
drawn somewhere! 


But nevertheless I've seen this shitty meme spouted off routinely by people I'd have NEVER expected to share it. People who would never fall into that reddit style sewer. People of great intelligence and fortitude of thought who's momentary cognitive dissonance made me wonder how a black hole didn't open up and swallow them from the level of fracture it should have caused. Some are even utterly brilliant people which just goes to show even a finely tuned sports car can have a hiccup now and again. For whatever reason this caused a few usual rational people to miss an some important points.

Now we come to another reaction meme and this is the first one that I saw.

I have trouble believing that "Kaos Amalgam" is this person's real name


Once again I see the same bullshit arguments of "Stop ruining our fun!" "Stop reading so much into things!" "You wouldn't be this upset if X, Y, or Z conditions were different." To me, this reads much the same as some ignorant fucks saying, "not everything is about race" to derail legitimate discussions about how we handle racial issues in the U.S. because to someone dealing with the systemic affects of racism everyday, EVERYTHING is about race in one form or another. Similarly, when someone deals with sexism day in and day out yeah, everything is about sexism and confronting that is fundamental. You don't get to tell us to take comic book movies seriously and then say they don't mean anything or not to read into them. That's what you do with media when you take it seriously.

But let's talk about one of the major issues with this thing that I think a lot of people miss and on a certain level, it's because we don't teach pictoral literacy in school with art classes being cut constantly. The reasons that images like this are so problematic is because they rely on what I like to call visual cliche. And here's the thing, I've dealt with this sort of thing before. Fun fact, Magic: the Gathering had almost this EXACT same controversy a few years ago.

If you're unaware, MTG tells its story on hte cards but because of the nature of the game, often cards aren't seen in the contexts necessary to get the full measure of things. Especially when the same story is told over multiple cards. The two cards in question here are called Triumph of Ferocity on the left and Triumph of Cruelty on the right.
You really could teach a composition class with these two images


It was one of the few times people have gotten seriously up in arms about a bit of MTG art in my memory and the images divided the community pretty strongly. Triumph of Ferocity even had a few MORE things going against it than the Apocalypse image does, including the fact that the composition wants to focus on the woman's (Lilliana's) face but just draws your eye to her boobs and the post felt to many, myself included kind of rapey. It even has the same mildly sexist (and I say mildly as an understatement) title/tagline thing going on. Triumph of Ferocity is a great card name in a vacuum but when coupled with a semi rapey image the connotations get uncomfortable and I think people grossly misinterpret why this is. It's not about not being able to show a woman in peril in the middle of a fight with a man, it's about how well you do it. Two things will get you forgiven a lot, context and technique and both are actually working AGAINST the image here. It's not about who's threatening whom to me. From an artistic standpoint, it's all about power differentials and visual depiction. 

As I said before, if we're not careful as illustrators it's easy to go to the easy way out to solve an artistic problem. ESPECIALLY on a tight deadline when you need to put food on the table and pay bills. But we need to step up our game here because I'm not sure I could have come up with a more on the nose depiction to show a visual cliche in action and how it can get a negative reaction from even an immensely skilled artist like the one who worked on the image. When we're not careful the powerful male figure strangling the delicate seeming woman weakly struggling becomes that easy way out. This could have been solved by body language and compositional changes on the part of the woman in both the X-men image and Triumph of Ferocity. Both could have shown greater struggle and hinting at teh woman's ability to overcome the obstacle or a complete change in composition and image structure to avoid the cliche. Contrast this with Triumph of Cruelty where we see the ables have turned but the composition doesn't make the same mistake and make the male character seem as helpless a and submissive in his body language as the other image does. The low image, setting us below BOTH characters emphasizes that we are weaker than both characters and thus elevates their power. The focus is on the main character, Garruk, being strangled and grabbed and we see him struggling actively against the zombies with focus paid to his muscles and giving us a sense of his struggle. In Ferocity, the flat camera angle robs Lilliana of her powr in the composition. We see her readying a spell and her face contorted in rage but look how hard it is to see, even in that blown up image and her pinned down body posture with her arms spread doesn't read as effectively fighting. It reads as a subconsciously submissive body language and believe me, submissive is the LAST word you use to describe Lilliana. I understand the ire from both sides but as an illustrator I come down on the side that it's up to us to do right by our characters and treat them with the care in depiction they deserve and it's time to come up with a better way to picture conflicts like this. Want to know why I think that? Because Wizards has demonstrated before they can show these two in conflict without resorting to that cliche. Don't believe me? Here!


Full disclosure, this wouldn't have worked for the card art but it demonstrates my point about how there's not one singular way this interraction between the two of these characters could have gone down. 

But "Arwin, you loquaicious degenerate you, even if I bought your point, that only deals with Collossus. He's struggling sure but how do you explain the dude in the bar?" I'm getting to that figment of my imagination I may have kind of strawmanned there but I don't think so because it's a valid question. Remember what I said about context? That scene is in the movie itself and we already know this guy isn't just some random schmuck. He's one of the two weakest characters in the movie in a fight but he has a massive amount of pull with the mercs in the story and half a second later everyone in the bar has a gun drawn on the the woman strangling him. Unlike Mystique, he was in no real danger and we knew it because it wasn't sitting out unaccompanied on its own. More on that in a minute. 


And now we come to the serious stuff. The big point I've been building to and saving for this. A lot of people calling this capitulation to SJW's (Social Justice Warriors) or claiming that this is another example of how easily offended we've become or claiming that this was just done because some people are abusing the term "triggering" I think missed the real reason for the outrage. First of all, the images the first meme I showed cite from Deadpool were both in the movie proper. They weren't used in the ad campaign and thus, shown divorced from their contexts. That's why I know the problem wasn't with Apocalypse strangling Mystique. Because nobody called it out in the movie. Folks were just as fine with that as they were with the stuff in Deadpool. 

The issue here is that it was set on a billboard, devoid of context with the line, "only the strong survive." Mystique is given no sign that she has the ability or agency to prevail and thus, the image tells us that she is unlikely to survive and that she is not strong. That she is, in fact, weak. And on some level, this also invalidates the arguments in the second meme. Because if it were a male character, they wouldn't be meekly holding onto Apocalypse's arm. Wolverine would be digging in his claws, Cyclops would be shooting off his optic blasts, Gambit would be brandishing a playing card etc. Mystique doesn't seem to be afforded the same chance to be fighting. Heck, Even Xavier would probably have his finger to his temple in the universal symbol for "Telepath doing telepath things!" 

Furthermore we're talking about a company using violence perpetrated against it female lead to advertise and sell. To me, and I'm not sure that some of the people arguing in favor of the billboard's removal have articulated this or done so in the clearest manner, that's the most damning problem. Think about that for a second! Think about it that in a society that has women killed for refusing to date men, a society that threatens women with violence for merely walking down the street in tight clothing or little clothing (I can't be the only one who remembers Mystique is nude most of the time) what that says about how little we value women when we're ready to make a spectacle of the violence against them and we have them meekly submitting to it rather than actively working against it to sell tickets to a movie. Especially when Mystique's character is one defined in the comics from what I understand, by guile, ambition and extreme cunning befitting Magneto's right hand spy. 

So this isn't about hypocrisy. This isn't about SJW's trying to ruin your ability to tell stories (And I hate to keep harping about it but I bet people complained about some similar pejorative term for people who care about moving society forward trying to get people to stop doing black face in movies too), it's about how a company lacked the foresight to understand that their ad played in some ugly, sexist, visually cliche space and not recognizing a massive out of context image could have a negative impact in the real world. 

But on another note as to the absurdity of the violence against men by women being okay while the violence against women by men being cringeworthy double standard I just have to ask some people what fucking rock they've been living under! Yes it's a double standard. To quote a comedian I like a great deal, those are about the only standards we have! Just like slavery and its legacy are part of the reason white washing is shitty but POC moving into roles previously monopolized by non-POC is kind of cool, the enduring patriarchal dominance of western society is the reason Collossus gets to be slapped around a bit but this billboard causes problems. It's called punching up in comedy and it's important to examine here. Yes, violence against men by their partners happens both male and female but when I can go to google and get over 200 million hits for searches about women being violently assaulted by men for the most trivial of reasons and even the first stories when I search for men assaulted by women actually deal with the former rather than my search, there's a problem. 

In a world where Ke$ha's producer, Bill Cosby, James Dean, Johnny Depp and others who've assaulted women and gotten off scot free or relatively scot free there's a problem. 

In a world where Daniel Hortzclaw spent years abusing women and nobody cared to stop him until years later there's a problem. 

In a world where just this fucking week the Standord rapist was sentenced to only 6 months for raping an unconscious woman, of which he'll only serve 3 there's a fucking problem! 

But please, continue to propagate a meme that completely ignorese all of this in an attempt to seem clever but fucks it up to high heaven and just comes off looking misogynist. 

I await your angry responses in the comments. 

I promise you I'll be quite unbothered. 

Thursday, March 31, 2016

... On Mikaila Ulmer [Day 31]

This month we've used the way back machine a fair bit and travelled throughout history looking for intersting women and their stories here on the blog. And to say the surface has barely been scratched would be an understatement. That's part of the reason these stories should be examined all year round even if I'm only taking the month as a highlighting exercise. But here's the thing, we must also be mindful of the present. It's not often you get to see history being made in front of your eyes. But before we talk more on that (yes I'm burying the lead big time) show of hands. Who opened a lemonade stand as a kid?


I love the concept of the lemonade stand. It's one of those seasonal events that I think every kid should be given an opportunity to get in on. It's another one of those areas where you can teach kids the value of money, and some basic business skills. Sometimes you even learn things like teamwork, ingenuity, public speaking and the art of persuasion. 



Sometimes though, the kids push it beyond the simple roadside stand. Sometimes their ambition and drive can't be contained to that small an endeavor and in those instances, the kids sometimes end up planting a flag on the terrain of history. One example is the young entrepreneur, Mikaila Ulmer.



There's not a lot of biographic info to spout here. The girl's only 11 years old but she's already managed more than most people twice to nearly 3 times her age (myself included). Things were ticking along just fine for Mikaila and she was probably living life like any other kid until she had an origin that sounds more like it came out of a comic book than real life as coincidence visited her in two ways in rapid succession. First, her great grandmother sent her and her family an old cook book that had the matriarch's recipe for Flax Seed lemonade (sweetened with honey) and around the same time, she was stung by a bee. 


Now not everyone reacts the same way to bee stings but I remember when I was her age a bee sting just made me skittish around the bugs. Instead of causing her long term fear (short term she freely cops to) and leading her on a bee destroying crusade the girl went and learned pretty much everything she could about the dang things. Of course it probably only took her a single internet search to discover they had a population in decline and Mikaila decided she wanted to get involved. 

In another perfect confluence of events a local children's entrepreneurship fair was coming up in the family's town and Mikaila got an idea. She created Bee Sweet lemonade in an effort to both make some money, and raise awareness for the plight of the bees. A portion of the profits from her endeavor at the event would go to beekeepers and efforts to protect the all important insects. 


Things got serious though after she ended up on the show Shark Tank. You know, that place where people try to separate rich borderline sociopaths/psychopaths from their money to try to get them to fund some kind of dream, invention, project or business the contestant has going on? Well she talked one of the sharks out of 60.000 dollars for an investment in her company and even got a contract with Whole Foods recently. At the age of 11 she's already giving talks about bees and how to save them as well as lectures and panels on business. She regularly sells out of her product at events and at her various stands and the demand for her product is strong. The girl's definitely going places. The future for Ms. Ulmer seems... quite sweet. 

Yes I know it was bad and I don't feel bad in the least. 


Hopefully Ms. Ulmer's efforts to support Bees and Beekeepers are successful. At some point in the future, it's possible we may even be seeing a great deal more from her, even if her entry here is short. With that thought though, this month comes to a close. It's been a blast but it's been a major struggle to be positive for so long. This blog was built for snark and a little ridiculousness. We return you to your regularly scheduled programming next time. See you then. 






Wednesday, March 30, 2016

... On Patty Duke [day 30]

Today, as of writing this, is March 30, 2016 and yesterday it turns out we lost someone who meant a great deal to a great many people. So this post will highlight the achievements and life of Patty Duke, who is best known for being the child star who played Helen Keller in the Miracle Worker and starred in the Patty Duke show.

Actor, Activist and mental health advocate.
1946-2016


Born in 1946 in Elmhurst New York Ms. Duke would play Helen Keller in the Miracle Worker at the age of 16 (in 1963), even winning an Oscar for the role. This made her the youngest recipient of the reward at the time. She'd had plenty of practice. She'd been playing the role for some time on Broadway before that since as a child, she'd been introduced to a pair of talent managers who were interested in her brother. 

Beyond her work as an actress Ms. Duke (born Anna Marie Duke) was a powerful and forthright voice fighting to remove the stigma of mental illness. Before our world turned into sharapalooza with social media, she actively sought to educate, help and ensure people could get treatment for invisible illnesses, even going so far as to lobby Congress for improved funding and research into treating mental illness. 

I admire anyone who thinks they can make these clowns do something worthwhile!


This empathy likely stemmed from her own life long battle with bi-polar disorder (then known as Manic Depression). Beyond that, it's possible part of her desire to ensure others didn't suffer came from the amount of suffering she herself did. See, her early life and child stardom wasn't fairy tale rosey. Those talent agents, John and Ethel Ross, that helped her get on Broadway? They turned into a pair of controlling monsters once they got their claws in her. Things like bi-polar disorder run in families and her mother also suffered from the condition. Her father was a drinker who her mother thew out of the house when Anna was 6 or so and she struggled with financial stability even before that. Eventually the couple who were managing the young "Patty Duke" (they legally changed her name for acting purposes, trained her to lose her thick New York accent and constantly told her that ''Anna Marie Duke was dead'') started to show their true colors. First they convinced the struggling and depressed mother to let them take over the life and raising of her youngest daughter, taking young Anna away from her mother and family. They too turned into booze hounds. In interviews and books he'd reveal that the couple gave her drugs on a regular basis and that molestation wasn't uncommon at their hands. 

Well that got dark! I'd put a meme here to lighten things but it doesn't feel particularly right. 


The controlling and abusive behavior of her managers was such that she wasn't even allowed to attend her father's funeral as his daughter. Only as the actress Patty Duke. Things like that forced schism of personality aren't easy for a kid to deal with and the Ross's weren't helping. It was actions like this that would keep Anna Marie Duke in therapy for years. 

Over the years Ms. Duke would grow to seek treatment for her mental illness as well as encourage others to do the same. She wanted people to get the help they needed and to not be ashamed to seek it out. Outspoken and driven, she chose to use her trauma as a tool of inspiration for others. She tried to ensure that others knew it could get better. That treatment could work. That medication and therapy could help those like her and by extension all of us, cope better with the pain that doesn't always show itself. 


And with that, we have only one more profile to go. Join me tomorrow as we close out Women's History month for this year. 




Tuesday, March 29, 2016

... On Melanie Klein [day 29]

Today I wasn't sure who to write about and realized I was running shorter on time than I usually like. I was also struggling to come up with an interesting and witty way to engage with any possible subject matter I might select for today. I did a personality test with someone new today and found it most enjoyable but it did get me thinking about women in Psychoanalysis and how we often think of Freud when this subject comes up (regardless of the fact that most of his ideas got proven wrong). But there were more than a few notable women involved in the practice as well including one of Freud's daughters. However, I didn't want to focus on her here because her name would still make her more recognizable than the woman on the docket for today: Melanie Klein. 

Due to the obscurity which she finds herself in, I felt that she would make a better pick for today. And in an effort to switch things up a little bit and for those who want a break from reading long things, I felt I'd embed a video from a Youtube channel called the School of Life that deals with philosophers and various thinkers from history. So without further ado, Melanie Klein. 


Monday, March 28, 2016

... On Juliette Gordon Low [day 28]

Welcome back. Let's start off with a question. Who likes Girl Scout Cookies?


Mmmmmmmmm



Oh put your hands down! That was a rhetorical question! Everyone likes Girl Scout cookies and if you don't you're a liar! In fact, if you're like me, spring has a nasty habit of turning you into something that looks like this and sucking all the money out of your wallet.

Portrait of a cookie addict

It probably goes without saying that a woman was the founder of the Girl Scouts but I didn't know the woman's name. So, to remedy this, I submit today's profile on Juliette Gordon Low. 

Philanthropist and Founder of the Girl Scouts

Ms. Low, also known as Daisy and "Crazy Daisy" due to some rather notable eccentricties for the time (such as *gasp* empathy for non-whites and a desire to see girls be independent!), was born in Savannah Georgia in 1860. A Southern Belle by many accounts this actually only sort of holds up under scrutiny. See, she was born not long before the Civil War and her family was, like many in the time (as often happens in a 'Civil war') divided on the issue. Her father, staunch Southerner, agreed with the Southern Secession and its desire to carry on slavery. Her mother on the other hand was a northerner supported abolition and the Northern efforts to restore the union. You know, suddenly that Juliette name is beginning to make a bit more sense. 

The war ended when Juliette was 4 and her mother relocated herself and the children to live with their maternal relatives in Illinois to get away from the hostilties of their neighbors. Oh did I mention that Low's family was kind of loaded?

Maybe not Scrooge McDuck diving into money rich but definitely loaded.

How loaded? I'm talking helped found Chicago loaded! So Daisy was rolling in more than a little bit of privilege while living up north. Her Grandfather was saavy investor and established a number of city functions. The monied upbringing could have made Low into a selfish, aristocratic brat but instead, exposure to the different groups of people her Grandfather would deal with on the regular opened up her empathy and awareness of cultures and ideas outside of her own. She'd eventually return to the South with her reunited family in 1865 but her attitude would stay with her. 

Fast foward several years and young "Daisy" (remember the nickname) was torn between traditional duty and her own restless soul. After a spat with her mother over finances she convinced her family to let her study painting since it was considered an "appropriate" profession for someone of her status and gender. She still got saddled with a husband at 26 who ended up distant from her. He ended up taking a mistress and then drinking himself stupid and eventually to death before the divorce proceedings he asked for could be finalized. 

OOOOOOOH MY!

So afterwards, Juliette Low travelled extensively. As a child she'd lost her hearing due to an infection and in what should have been an omen that some shit was going to go down, she lost hearing in her other ear when a bit of rice got caught in it during her wedding ceremony to the individual I'll be dubbing "The Dead Douche." So on these travels she was looking both for a treatment for her deafness and something to occupy her skills and time. A purpose. Somewhere to put her vast energy. 

Well she got one of the two. See while spending time in London she met the guy who founded the Boy Scouts. A fellow named Sir Robert Baden-Powell was struggling with a problem of all the girls who were showing up at his rallies wanting to be involved in scouting. He needed a solution to this. Now he could have just integrated the scouts but this was the early 1900's. Women still didn't have the right to vote yet and the idea of co-ed scouting was just balderdash to these folks. Low on the other hand saw an opportunity and so, rather than telling him, "Oh just let the girls scout you asshole!" decided to form her own organization both in Europe and back home. 

And she did just that in 1912. Born out of some of the experiments with a group called the Girl Guides in Britain, Low started her first troop in her home state of Georgia. She wanted to make the scouts a place where the girls could improve their self-esteem, enjoy the bonds of sisterhood, gain a measure of self-sufficiency and be open to girls across social, racial and ethnic lines. This was a far cry from the boyscouts which began as an early paramilitary training concept to teach boys to be prepared to defend their countries and prepare them for military service. 

No wonder one group is open to lesbian and transgendered girls while the other only just recently got around to allowing gay scouts but bans or segregates gay councilors. 
The boys could learn a thing or two

During her time leading the Scouts and developing the organization in the states Low became something of a fairy godmother figure for her first small troop and then other girls over time. Seemingly a strange combination of cool aunt and some fan fiction idea of a female Doctor from Doctor Who she'd stand on her head at meetings, tell spooky stories to the girls around the camp fire and went out of her way to see what it was the girls thought, wanted or believed rather than trying to force it down their throats. A concept some people struggle to grasp to this day. 


Now, it wouldn't be until some time much later that the Girl Scouts would start selling the cookies that they've become famous for but there's a lot more interesting little tidbits to the story. Fights over naming of the organization, the story of the man who was in charge of scouting in the states who wasn't too keen on the Boy Scouts having a sister organization. Presumably because he was a big man child who thought girls had cooties etc. The list goes on. And while it's likely that the Girl Scouts could have done better in terms of inclusion and diversity in their early days (but they began in the 1900's. Trying to be inclusive in that era at all put them ahead of the game), in the modern era they're still actively trying to improve and reach a more inclusive status as an organization. It wouldn't have begun at all however, without Juliette Gordon Low. 








Sunday, March 27, 2016

... On Wilma Mankiller [day 27]

With an ominous name that actually doesn't have much of anything to do with what you'd think it would, Wilma Mankiller proves to be an interesting figure.


Like Maria Tallchief from the last entry Ms. Mankiller here was born and grew up in Oklahoma. Born in 1945 she however was Cherokee rather than Osage ancestry. She was a direct descendent of those who were forced to march on the Trail of tears. Her grandfather had been one of the 16000 forced on that march. One of 11 siblings her and her family would eventually leave Oklahoma for California in the 1950's in hopes a better life but a combination of money troubles and discrimination dogged them still. 

Over time, Mankiller would grow to become more invested in the fight for Native American rights. The 60's kicked up her activistm when she saw Native American activists trying to reclaim Alcatraz island. She'd eventually return to her home state to pursue her desire to help people and give action to her growing dreams. 

She'd even do it through an accident that nearly took her life in 1979. The injuries were extensive but she survived and would soon claim the honor that would be her primary claim to fame. In the 1980's she ran for the position of Deputy Chief of her tribe. She'd go on to be appointed the tribe's principle chief in 1985 before being elected to that positon herself in her own right 1987. 

As the first female chief of the Cherokee nation she oversaw social programs and Tribal business. After her death, President Obama even issued a statement on her that you owe it to yourself to read. 

Her activistm was consistent and determined for more than 2 decades. During that time she fiercely advocated for the rights of women and Native Americans and refused to let multiple illnesses and kidney problems keep her from doing what she could. 


And that's Wilma Mankiller. Admittedly, there's not as much here to play with in terms of humor she's still worth remembering. The story for her is more somber and straightforward but breaking the glass ceiling in any society is worth examining and her contributions as Chief shouldn't be ignored. 


http://womenshistory.about.com/od/nativeamwomen/p/wilma_mankiller.htm

... On Maria Tallchief [day 26]

The first of 2 profiles today I decided to handle these two separately rather than do a pair of rapid fire profiles to catch up. I feel like the women involved here have been overlooked enough and it would be better to give them each their own profile. So, without further ado, let's start off of with Maria Tallchief.

Ballerina and trailblazer of dance


Another in a long list of women I'd never heard of but am glad I got the chance to find out about she was born in 1925 as Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief she would go on to eventually change it Maria Tallchief in an attempt to Europeanize it to further her career aspirations. And those aspirations were incredible. They would lead her to some incredible firsts and she'd grow to be a fixture and powerful force in the ballet world. Her father as a member of the Osage First Nations tribe in Oklahoma and she studied both piano and ballet from an early age. Though her mother desired her children to focus on piano Maria Tallchief and her sister Marjorie were more drawn to dance. Eventually the family moved to California to take advantage of opportunities for Maria. She'd work with numerous notable ballet instructors and even dance in a ballet one of her teachers had choreographed in the Hollywood Bowl. 

After highschool she ended up going to New York and attending the Ballet Ruse. Unsurprisingly racism reared it's ugly head and some folks thought she couldn't cut it when her Native American background was known. She only had one thing to say to that bullshit. 


Yeah, it didn't take long for her skills to shut those fools up and she proceeded to dance away from their negativity. She even caught the attention of George Ballanchine who would eventually become the group's ballet master and her husband. Say what you will about favoritism but he increased her solo roles and even adjusted them to ensure they played to her strengths. 

At one time the two travelled to Paris and she became the first American to dance at the Paris Opera before returning home to become the first American to ever hold the title Prima Ballerina when her and Ballanchine founded the New York City Ballet. 

And she was FABULOUS!

Through the 40s-60s she proved herself an incredibly competent and popular ballerina even performing as a guest dancer with numerous other troupes in Europe. She became a well known and sought after teacher after she retired from the stage around 1965. Settling in Chicago she taught and trained ballerinas at a new school of her own founding for many years. She passed away in 2013 after being inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. 



Alright. One more to do until I'm caught up. Next up we're sticking with Native American women and looking up someone with an... admittedly kind of ominous name. Join me in the next post for a look at Wilma Mankiller.