Travels plannings

[olivermoss]

* Neskowin is go. It might be better to wait for a winter low tide, but eh, I've got the booking let's go.

* No updates about the possible 'fall thing' in New Orleans yet... I am assuming it's either a Leverage con or just them giving set tours for a bit. Even if nothing happens, I want to go to New Orleans sooner rather than later. The world can change fast. So, if that announcement becomes vaporware, I still want to plan a trip for within the next 16 months.

I know I want to hike outside the city. They have nighttime graveyard tours, and apparently some of those graveyards are closed to the general public and you need to be on a tour to go in. So, access and at night is yes good, I want that. I don't know if I can take many pictures like I'd like to, maybe they move people along and need them to stay close to avoid people being people, etc, but still, do want.

I'd also want to do a ghost and paranormal tour, but with New Orleans specifically I am leery of the content. There is so much exploitative tourist-trap BS about voodoo and I'd want something respectful, but don't know how to vet the possible tours. I don't typically do tours in general, so if I am doing one I want to make sure it's good or I am getting some sort of special access from it.

And also I am running into 'what do I do in a city?' I like travel, but mostly I am... taking a series of busses to hike to a one hour rare low tide window to see a ghost forest or like taking a train to snowshoe into a national park. I am usually after very specific nature things few other people do, and usually in the off-season. I don't like aquariums and and only very rarely into museums. (Going to a city to see art from... other cities? Yeah, I don't really get it. I legit do not understand why tourists to Portland visit our art museum unless it's got a special exhibit they are interested in.)

So, yeah, I am looking into what I might want do in New Orleans... especially since I cannot eat the city's iconic foods. One of the main draws, I cannot do.

Oh, and I want to do the City of New Orleans Amtrak line. Maybe just on the way back? But it looks like to NOLA it's a day trip and back it's night. hrmmm...

Anyway, my current thinking is: If it's a set tour, just get ticket and plan trip around it. If it's a Creation Con, and there has been buzz about a possible Creation Con for Leverage, get the cheapest ticket possible, one day if possible, and plan trip around it. Creation stuff isn't worth it. If Electric Entertainment is going to try to run one in-house again, even though last time was a mess, I'll buy whatever ticket I can manage. If no announcement happens by a point, I'll just plan a trip. Fall isn't that far away. Info has to come soon, right?

* I really, really want to do that Mosier and Hood River trip to the Gorge I've been wanting to do for years. I was supposed to go to Mosier in 2019, but the bus route got sold and I become without a way to get there on the dates I had tickets for. I don't think I can squeeze it in this summer because I don't want to gamble with possible air quality problems so I'd have to go very soon. But, if fall is nice I might go then instead, or maybe winter.

* I also need to start looking at all the trips I want to do and see about getting them done. I can't do Isle Royale this year because by the time I started looking at it, all stay was fully booked for the season. I also want to walk the Oregon Coast Trail, but I'd always planned to do that in chunks and partially in the off-season.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

New Orleans has always sounded like an interesting place to visit... but that's a definitely good point about how some of the tour stuff is VERY much tourist-trap, tell 'em the spooky shit they want to hear, who cares if it's true, stuff. I know I've heard OF some of that type of issue, but it's hard to vet. It's the kind of thing you'd want to find reliable reviews of, and the internet is not good at providing reliable reviews, especially now.

Oh, and while I do love aquariums and natural history museums, I'm with you on art museums. I do not understand the appeal, especially as a *destination*. My mom speaks very fondly of the Chicago art museum (as she grew up near Chicago), but I Don't Understand.

[olivermoss]

For other cities I wouldn't worry so much, but with there being an entire industry around exploiting local cultures and misrepresenting religions... maybe I'll just do two cemetery tours instead?

Specialty museums are interesting. I haven't been since I loved out there, but the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate NY is amazing. That they have what are effectively commemorative mugs from the Roman coliseum days pretty much rewrote my whole concept of time and human culture. But every time I ask about going to a city and people bring up the art museum as one of the first things I am confused. It's like, do they have a focus on the local art?

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah... New Orleans definitely has a stronger/worse history of that. The cemetery tours seem like they'd be really cool, at least! (And I'm sure some of the history ones would be, too. Just hard to pick the right ones.)

I love specialty museums. And yes, I could absolutely be interested in art with some sort of local connection: things by local artists, or that were made in/inspired by the region, or things like that...
I don't want to sound like I don't like art, because I really really do! I also understand the idea of like... making art made by well-known artists or in historically-significant styles accessible to people, no matter where they are. I just... don't "get" art museums as a tourism draw. (My interest in eventually going into museum studies, when I was naive enough to expect I could afford a master's degree someday, meant a LOT of people assumed I must be wanting to also specialize in art history and go on to curate art collections.)

[olivermoss]

Ooh, museum studies. I did a whole one (1) class on that in college. I love art, but I find standard art museums very dated. Exposure to art is good, but museums are also often beholden to large donors/lenders... or in the case of the Getty Museum, inheritance tax dodging!

There are a few general art museums I'd want to see. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is one I'd put aside a whole day for, but really that's specialized in it's own way.

But yeah, as I've said, there is more local art in the Portland Mausoleum than in the Portland Museum. Who cares what European masterpieces our mid sized west coast city can get? It's good for the local schoolkids, but as a tourist destination I am confused.

[mistressofmuses]

I really wanted to go either into museum studies (for archeology) or library sciences. But master's degrees are expensive and both fields are ones that are very whim to things like budget cuts and such, which makes them hard to get into with any guarantee of stability.

And yeah. I like galleries with local connections - there was a really neat art museum we went to outside of Roswell when I was a teenager that was all local artists, and I remember really being impressed with it. Others that are curated to a more specialized theme could also be appealing.

I've been to the Denver Art Museum, and it's... fine? It IS good to have broad art collections so that people have the chance to see wide ranges of famous (or less famous) art and artists and styles and all in a way that's accessible. Whether it's for students or adults who are into that. But like... yeah, I wouldn't bring someone from out of town there as an "omg must see." Curation is a whole *thing*, but "what works someone may have heard of that MY local museum got" feels kind of... meh.

And lol, yes. So much hinky shit going on with donors/lenders, in terms of what gets displayed and what molders in storage. And the tax dodging! And theft! And refusals to repatriate artifacts that were stolen and are now displayed as "folk art - unknown artist" even when their families are alive and well.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, sounds like a tricky field to stay employed in even if you can manage it.

I've been to the Portland Art Museum, but only because other people really wanted to go. I was actually more interested in the building than the collection. It's weird because people read my lack of interest in most museums as me being an incurious person... me! With the length I go to just to see stuff?

And yes, so much hinky shit. First time I went to the Smithsonian, Native American stuff was still in the Natural History museum and it made me sick to my stomach for reasons I couldn't articulate. I was probably like 9, but certain humans being classified like animals creeeeped the fuck out of me.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, that's one of the hardest things about either field. So much entry-level stuff is replaced completely by volunteers, because "if you love it, you'll do it for free!" Once you get to the higher-level stuff, you're competing against people who've done it for decades. (I was second or third choice for a lot of jobs I applied to, but "well, the applicant who got the job just moved here from out of state, and did this exact job for thirty years...") And then, yeah: budget cuts. Lots of positions made redundant.

Haha, seriously! I think a lot of people can only imagine one kind of curiosity, or only see one way to sate that curiosity. I've been told that my lack of interest in art museums means I just don't care about art, too.

Yeah, there's a LOT of weirdness about what cultures get put as "Natural History" and which get called "Human History." It's... really not great!
I enjoy looking at history of global cultures as it relates to other aspects of natural history... not so much when it's just specific cultures that get treated that way.
(The Smithsonian now has their separate American Indian museum, which in theory I'm really glad of, but at least when Alex and I went there a decade or so ago, I really didn't like the design of it. But at least it's been separated out!)

[olivermoss]

"I've been told that my lack of interest in art museums means I just don't care about art, too."

People are so weird about museums, like it's a given that nerds or people into art and humanities would be into them. I mean, I am into some of them and could discuss the concept of them for ages, but that doesn't meant I want to go to my local one. I wonder if it's partially because liking museums is used as characterization shorthand in genre shows.

'Human History' is also not great, especially since getting people to realize they still exist is one of the things a lot of native tribes deal with.

I haven't been to the Smithsonian in ages, not since moving west. I hope it's better these days.

[mistressofmuses]

Right? I DO love museums, but it's also weird when it's treated as the be-all end-all THING that people should be into. There are some people who make "I like going to museums" into their personality the same way there are people who make "I only read *real* books" into theirs. (And I love both museums and books! But there are at least some people who only seem to like them because it gives them a sense of superiority. Very "Not Like The Other Girls" vibes.) I wonder if that IS because it's genre shorthand?

Yeah... that's true as well. Particularly with Native American cultures, there's a lot of "ah yes, back when there were Indians..." attitudes, when like... they're RIGHT HERE! Some of them know exactly which family member, or what other family they grew up with, etc. made those artifacts being held behind glass!
If we could treat human history as an ongoing thing it wouldn't be so bad... but when we decide that some groups ARE history, and ignore the fact that they are still very much present and a part of society and culture NOW...

[olivermoss]

Yeah, and there's a whole aesthetic around 'girl who likes museums'. Aesthetic stuff is great. I'd 100% go places and do things for aesthetic reasons. But like, is being aesthetic what we are doing? Can we enjoy the vibe without spending a few minutes at each painting?

I'm surprised that museums are still such shit about Native Americans, at least in terms of classification and how they are talked about.

[mistressofmuses]

I absolutely dig aesthetic stuff! I am weak for the aesthetic stuff that is my vibe! I just like there to be something underpinning that aesthetic, too.

It's really upsetting how shit they still are, honestly. It is also upsetting to realize that it was more than a decade ago that I was a student, but at that time it was something that archeology as a field was reckoning with, and trying to fix problems within the field. (And like, the field school I went to was a pre-Ute site, so we had a day where Ute elders came to the site and talked to us about what we were doing and offered at least one perspective on how to be respectful with the research that we were doing.) It's almost worse to me to realize that this wasn't a new conversation then, and it STILL feels like so little progress has been made.

[olivermoss]

Archeology has deep problems with so much of the early and even somewhat recent work ranges from 'racist as fuck' to 'outright BS to shape our concept of human evolution/history'.

When I was a teenage I did some environmental volunteering on a reservation for a summer. This was when the big trend in sexuality was to look at native cultures as 'pure' examples of what human sexuality is like. The problems with this are like... scrollgag.gif Like native people's sexuality isn't shaped by their culture? They have no culture, blank slates? Anyway, I talked with some native Hopi who were actively stressed by white people wanting to know about their sex lives, in detail. What the actual fuck people? Also, do people not know why the missionary position is called the missionary position?

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah. Archeology can be a fantastic field - that's why I studied it! - but there's a looooot of pseudoscience as well as straight up racist bullshit that goes into it. Lots of people who want to sell books or get interviewed for pop-sci shows, actual science be damned.

(I was grateful that one of my professors, who was also my advisor, had absolutely ZERO patience for things like the "ancient alien" theories, and he was not shy in the slightest about telling us that they were racist garbage. At the time the show Ancient Aliens had just started, and there were way too many people who thought it was legit science.)

Oh jeez. Yeah, lots of people got SO WEIRD (and still are!) about Native ideas of gender and sexuality, and ideas of purity and innocence and "untouched" humanity. It's always been a thing with hippie shit about Natives having some magical spiritual connection to capital-N-Nature, but it expanding into sexuality stuff got real bad real fast.
One of the most interesting classes I remember taking was about conceptions of gender and sexuality across global cultures... but it was very much about how those ideas ARE culturally bound, and how you can't just transpose them into a different setting.
People being prying creeps *toward actual people* will never NOT be terrible. What the fuck indeed.

[olivermoss]

Native people have no culture! And definitely not like a lot of them! Just one people, no culture, only nature vibes.

One thing that drives me nuts about the 'native people don't even have binaries and Native Americans treasured trans people because that's what life is like without white people... also when you think about it being trans really cultural appropriation of native...' BS is that some of the tribes from this area are incredibly strictly binary and nothing two spirit or third gender is allowed at all. Natives in the local trans community who are from the area are in a very weird limbo where white people are weird about them, but their birth culture oppresses them so much they have to go into white-dominant society to have acceptance for that part of themselves.

People just love this fake history about Native Americans to validate everything from gender to sexuality to anarchy. If one more person tells me to read The Zuni Man Woman so I become enlightened I will scream. I bought that book new and have had it so long the spine is faded. I also read about *more than one culture* and have talked to some. I am by no means an expert, but at least I am not high on that BS

[mistressofmuses]

There was some garbage conspiracy manifesto thing that I did dramatic readings of to Alex when I was in college, and there was some section where the author talks about how sad it is that the indians all died out, "because they had no tools. :( " (This was news to Alex, who is half Navajo.) This was one of those conspiracies that included the hollow inner earth, which is full of greek-style buildings, and populated by the "real" Hopi, who are blond and blue-eyed...

But ugh, yes! There's so much flattening of native culture! People try to pretend it's all the same, and it's all about dreamcatchers and feather headdresses and no hierarchy and just like... peace love nature vibes.

People just get so WEIRD about it. Because it's true: different flavors of it, but the exact same pattern of mostly white people using Native American cultures as support and validation for their own beliefs... whether or not that support is actually there. New Age subcultures are super rife with it, as are other flavors of hippie, as are some of the more frustrating queer groups that fail to understand intersectionality...

[olivermoss]

Just the baseline fact that it wasn't all one nation/culture here is just baffling to some people. It is really so weird that I learned at least that much in school? The Seneca definitely had laws, yo, same system as the Onondaga and the... other 4 in that group. It's been a while since middle school.

Everything is bad enough without people twisting history into things that suit their own ideology. It is great that some had different systems for sex and gender and it's not all an innate as we're taught, but like, Malaysia and Ancient Greece and also tons of other stuff. Just because we've repressed our own histories doesn't mean we should go eat other people's histories.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh, very much so. A lot of people have some vague idea of a peaceful society full of teepees and corn and maybe some bow hunting... and that's it, that's the whole country! Or they sort of recognize that yeah, there may have been some Native tribes here at one point, but *also* completely believe that North America was ~untouched wilderness~ when the settlers got here...
I know we did learn some in elementary school, though on the whole it was still a bit more of a "and the indians and the pilgrims held hands and were best friends!" telling of the history. In middle school I think we covered more broad regional differences in art and culture... but I kind of forget what I learned formally vs. studied on my own. Going to New Mexico every year and spending time near Santa Fe and down in the Mimbres valley left some (admittedly very over-romanticized) impressions on small-child me.

That's a really common problem, and I feel like Native American cultures are one of the most obvious and frequent examples/targets. There are an awful lot of new age gurus that want to quote "Native American Prophecy" that's frequently made up whole-cloth, or just repackaged from previous new age nonsense.
It is a really gross form of entitlement: people feel disconnected from their own cultures - which sucks! it does! - and therefore feel like it's okay for them to just collect peacemeal bits from anything they like, removed entirely from context or understanding.

I think a lot of people have swung too far on what they think cultural appropriation is - you aren't allowed to eat tacos, you shouldn't use chopsticks, you shouldn't wear Native-made jewelry even if they're the ones selling it, *learning a language* is appropriating from native speakers, and other such nonsense - but trying to take and claim culture and history, while often repackaging it in a way that makes it more palatable and free of rough edges... that IS what it is.

And yes, it's fascinating to learn about how many different cultures had (and have!) wildly different views of gender and sexuality and how they intersect or don't, because it is great to have examples of how it's not just one innate "natural" thing that happens to sync up with modern Christian American ideals... but there's still context for those things, and there's a difference between studying something and laying weird, proprietary claim to it.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, there is this weird treatment of the Noble Savage, closer to what it means to be human... The rhetoric acts like it's revering them and if you criticize it people act like you are being bigoted to Native Americans, but it's very othering. It also buys into myths about our own cultures that perpetuate white supremacist ideas and patriarchal ideas.

Where I grew learning the Seneca / 6 Tribes legal system was part of basic curriculums and maybe that is why I haven't fallen for some bullshit. Though, doing some of the hands on stuff learning about acorn flour and maple syrup was likely just my school being really good with certain things. I got into learning about Hopi and Navajo later on, and sadly that's probably due to their cultures being among the better preserved and also Navajo stuff having been trendy at a point.

The weird use of Native American culture to be whatever people want is one of the reasons I hated Lovecraft Country. I wrote a whole bunch of rants about it when it aired, but the topic was so touchy I left them as privated. The Native culture involved is one we know nothing about due to how completely wiped out they where. They just took that blank and stuffed it with whatever they wanted to make their moralistic points. And yeah, so much new age and weird guru BS just uses it however they want. That on non-binary writer who was in every podcast in 2021 and 'opened so many eyes' was also on the whole weird racist, ahistorical 'tribal cultures are inherently non-binary, white people invented the binary' train.

Remember, eating out on Cinco De Mayo is white people invading POC spaces on their holiday! Meanwhile, in most areas almost none of them celebrate it as anything outside of 'we get to make good sales and reach new customers day'. Yeah, what people call cultural appropriation just gets silly at times. I got rid of my shirts from Norway of art from near where my family lived for a thousand years because people think I'm wearing African art as a white person. People need to chill and trust a little bit, and listen rather than just enjoying thinking they are being morally superior.

Yeah, our own history being cleansed and mis-taught for religious or poltical agendas is the problem. We need to reclaim that, not use stories we create about Native Americans as a cope.

[mistressofmuses]

It's very much the newest incarnation of the "Noble Savage" trope. It's "benevolent racism," but it's still racist and othering as hell.

I'm glad you at least got some better info in the curriculum where you were, because I know that's not the case everywhere, even if it should be! Navajo stuff definitely got trendy, though it's also relatively local to us, so it made sense for it to be a focal point here. Though I feel like it was a pretty long time before we really got anything that differentiated the various cultures, even regionally, much less individual tribes.

I didn't end up seeing Lovecraft Country (and also haven't read the book), but fucking yikes. I get the appeal of using "lost history" as a jumping off point for speculative fiction, whether that's a fantasy, sci-fi, or horror direction. It's fun in that meta-narrative/unfiction sense to suspend disbelief that "hey, who's to say this DIDN'T happen?"
But it is wildly tasteless to do so about a specific real culture that was utterly destroyed. Like, it's shitty how common it is in horror media in general to have some unnamed Native American tribe supposedly as a source of lore, but picking a real one that was wiped out so totally "for flavor" is deeply yikes.
And it feels worse in a series that I mostly saw being marketed and praised as very anti-racist/an examination of racism within genre fiction.

I kind of remember people mentioning that whole "Native Americans had zero concept of a binary, and any concept of gender was entirely the product of colonization" thing. Again, ahistorical yikes. (No, ideas of gender in Native tribes very much were not perfect 1:1 with ideas of gender that colonists, whether Spanish, English, or other, had. That does not mean they did not have culturally marked and reinforced genders and gender roles.)

Yup! You should absolutely never spend money going to local Mexican or Indian or Japanese or Ethiopian restaurants! That's appropriation, and it's racist to expect non-whites to serve food to white customers!

It sucks that people were weird about something that very much was your own culture! People get so horribly performative about that moral superiority... even when (maybe especially when) they don't actually know what they're talking about.

I'd really like people to find ways to connect with their own history, both the good and bad aspects of it. Making up fake shit, claiming it's some "Ancient Native American wisdom/legend/story/history" to give it cred, then acting like those Native groups are just gone now, so it "belongs to all of us" is gross.

[olivermoss]

My school was good, but also most schools in the northeast used to have The Great Law of Peace / Six Tribes stuff as part of middle school social studies. They're considered an example of a constitutional government. It's almost like technology and tribal living isn't intrinsically linked to, uh, much.

Yeah, the intensity around Lovecraft Country and how when it dropped it was above critique for finally being a horror show for BIPOC people was a giant mess. It had serious colorism and anti-LGBTQ themes issues in addition to it's weird misuse of Native Culture.

It's like, I know where my father's side of the family lived for the past 900 years, this is art from that region/time period. Also, my family is probably not part Sami but we lived decently close to their chunk of Norway and I also don't wear Sami stuff anymore either.

[mistressofmuses]

I'm glad that most of the schools up there are pretty good about that sort of thing! I tend to think pretty well of the middle and high schools that I went to, and we did cover a lot of important things... though I don't know how it compares now. I think they could have done better about Native American stuff in general, but it also wasn't the nothing that some people seem to have gotten.

Yeah... I don't know enough about the book vs. the show to know if the book had the same issues as the show, but it sounds like the show at least had a lot of pretty glaringly bad problems with how it treated things. I do remember some mentions of the not-great anti-queer stuff, too. That's unfortunate, because horror SHOULD have more room for diverse characters/audiences/storytellers. (And it largely DOES, but not as much that finds more mainstream success.)

I remember how weird people got about Sami culture, I think mostly right after Frozen came out and people were suddenly hearing about them. Mostly I remember the stunningly bad takes about Sami being "whitewashed", because a lot of people who didn't know anything about them assumed they "should" look like Native Americans. It was a mess.
It sucks that you can't wear stuff that's so very much part of where your heritage is from, just because people who know far less about it make uninformed judgements.

[olivermoss]

For me it was before Frozen come out and people weren't aware Sami was a thing. I also came across people who identified with Sami just because they felt it was okay thing to do as a white person, since other tribal cultures were off-limits. I was never sure how to react to that.

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh, I'm sorry people were being asses about it even before that! It isn't surprising, because... well, people are asses. And yeah... "this is an acceptable target for appropriation" is definitely a weird attitude to try and deal with.

[olivermoss]

It makes sense to be into Sami stuff and also find their existence a good way to break down a lot of our thinking on cultures and race, but like... why can't people be normal about it?

Part of me wants to be all 'These people aren't even of Scandi descent!', but being of that doesn't give me any special claim either. It's just doubly baffling to me when it's like people of UK descent

[mistressofmuses]

I think that SO much of this sort of stuff can be boiled down to "Why can't people be normal about it?" I wish people were more capable of being normal about almost everything!

But yeah... definitely weird when it's people of UK or just vague pan-European descent without any particular connection to the region or culture. It's all weird.