Financial
From time to time, I might provide a link to something I bought on Amazon. So as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Frankly, Amazon is a problematic company for lots of reasons, which maybe I’ll elaborate on at some point. And maybe saying this will disqualify me from the program, which I guess is fine. But the fact remains that, as a marketplace, it provides a pretty good service for an amoral consumer; and therefore I occasionally buy from them. When I do buy something from them that I like, I may use a referral link to see if I can take some of their money. If you want to support my little scheme, feel free to buy using my link. My use of these links is not intended as an endorsement of Amazon, the company. In most cases, it’s only an endorsement of the specific product, to the extent that I can really endorse anything based on my limited experience with it.
Currently, this is the only way I’m (potentially) making money from this blog. I don’t know if I will ever do much more than this. My preferred route, if I ever get this far, would probably be to ask readers to contribute whatever they think is fair. But whatever route I take, I will try to be very clear and transparent in what the approach is.
Personal
I think it’s important to be clear about the parts of my identity that affect how I interact with the world and my privileges within it. I am white, cis-male, (mostly) heterosexual, educated, first-generation immigrant, able-bodied, and tall.
That’s a lot of privileges stacked in my corner, and I aim to be cognizant of them in my journey, life, and writing. If you have any feedback for me about my blind spots here, please reach out! I would love to hear from you. (I do request that you at-first provide feedback privately, rather than as a public blast – I promise to respond seriously and thoughtfully and will always seek to learn more from you, if you’re open to it.)
Land
The majority of the land comprising modern-day United States of America was ill-gotten through conquest, genocide, rapacious business-dealing, and ongoing dishonesty and dishonor. (In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court described one of many US annexations of Sioux land: “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.”) Much of the world’s modern borders, indeed, have similar histories.
My website is hosted by Bluehost, whose servers exist on ancestral Ute lands. I lived for 8 years in what is now called Queens, NY on Munsee and Canarsie ancestral lands. I went to university in Chicago, IL on ancestral Kickapoo, Peoria, Potawatomi, Myaamia, and Sioux land. I was raised near Albany, NY on Mohican and Haudenosaunee (aka Iroquois Confederacy) ancestral lands.
I am grateful to the land that I have inhabited and the people that stewarded it for generations before I existed, and for generations before European colonized it. I feel great sorrow for the theft of these lands and acknowledge the legitimacy of indigenous rights over these lands.