Custom Combustion

JURASSIC PARK 1993 — dir. by Steven Spielberg

🏰 Norvrandt Inktober Collection 🏰

I had someone ask if they could use one of these as a phone background or lock screen - to which the answer is yes! I very much appreciate the interest and the polite request!

If you’d like to buy one as a print, or on a variety of other products, you can find them on my Redbubble:

Crystarium | Amaurot | Il Mheg Eulmore | Amh Araeng | Rak’tika

lighting can sure change things.

and so can a lot of fire tbh

emperor

I have a type.

good morning kings let’s push this boulder

bad news about the boulder everyone

Good morning kings let’s push this boulder

Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine. Photo: Bill Roorbach

Except America wasn’t an endless expanse of forest with no certain borders. At least not while human beings inhabited it. The idea that native peoples did not cultivate or shape our land and that we had no borders is white propaganda meant to dehumanize and de-legitimize native peoples.

This illustration here show Apalachee people using slash and burn methods for agriculture. Fires were set regularly to intention burn down forests and plains. Why would we do this? Well because an unregulated forest isn’t that great for people, actually. We set fires to destroy new forest growth and undergrowth, and to remove trees, allowing for easier game hunting, nutrient enriched soil, and better growth rates for crops and herbs we used in food and medicine.

Pre-Colonial New England, where my tribe the Abenaki are from, looked more like an extensive meadow or savannah with trees growing in pockets and groves. Enough woodland to support birds, deer, and moose, but not too much to make hunting difficult. We carefully shaped the land around us to suit our needs as a thriving and successful people. Slash and burn agriculture was practiced virtually everywhere in the new world, from the pacific coast to chesapeake bay, from panama to quebec. It was a highly successful way of revitalizing the land and promoting crop growth, as well as preventing massive forest fires that thrive in unregulated forests. Berries were the major source of fruit for my tribe, and we needed to burn the undergrowth so they could grow.

That changed when white people invaded, and brought with them disease. In my tribe, up to 9 in 10 people died. 90% of our people perished not from violence starvation, but from disease. Entire villages would be decimated, struck down by small pox. Suddenly, we couldn’t care for the land anymore. There weren’t enough of us to maintain a vast, carefully structured ecological system like we had for thousands of years. We didn’t have the numbers, or strength. So the trees grew back and unregulated. We couldn’t set fires anymore, and we couldn’t cultivate the land. And white people would make certain we never could again. Timber, after all, was the most important export from New England. 

Endless trees and untamed wilderness is a nice fantasy. But it’s a very white fantasy, one that erases the history of my people and of my land. One that paints native peoples are merely parasites leeching off the land, not masters of the earth who new the right balance of hunting and agriculture. It robs us of our agency as people, and takes our accomplishments from us. Moreover, it implies that only white people ever discovered the power to shape the world around them, and that mere brown people can’t possibly have had anything to do with changing our environment.

Don’t bring back untamed wilderness. Bring back my fire setters, my tree sappers, my farmers and my fishers. Bring back my people who were here first. 

Sources:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire#Role_of_fire_by_natives

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev3_000385.pdf

http://www.sidalc.net/repdoc/A11604i/A11604i.pdf

For those curious I recommend reading Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. https://books.google.com/books/about/Changes_in_the_Land.html?id=AHclmuykdBQC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false

O’ho. Our tribe used to do regular controlled burns in the brush in CA to prevent- guess what? Uncontrollable wildfires. (also it keeps the poison oak down and helps some plants propagate) And before yall panic these methods worked because they were sustainable. You can’t survive if you destroy your resources; tribes knew how to make sure they could come back to a harvest ground next year and harvest again. There was still plenty of wilderness and it was often healthier for a touch of human help here and there.  people used to be all over this continent. 

2020 with every new month

i don’t think we can romanticize our way out of this one boys

sorry for having a huge cock and correct opinions on everything. as if it’s my fault.

[Image ID: A person labeled “the GM” sitting behind a glass partition labeled “the GM screen,” ignoring a long line of people as they play solitaire on a computer labeled “notes that rank NPCs in order of hotness.” End ID.]

DMs be like “i know a spot” and then lead you directly into the consequences of your actions 

Love seeing little pawprints. So fucking magical. There was a little guy here.

Y’shtola: I want to hear those three little words

Thancred: I love you

Y’shtola: Cute, but try again.

Thancred: Fine, I will behave

May 2020 Illustrations ヽ(• ‿ •)ノ