(my exam is over so i’m here to unload some angsty thoughts on the dash)
The one thing that’s been haunting me more than anything else is Bucky. Like, we all know that Bucky’s life has been severely lacking in peace and happiness since like 1943 –– but it didn’t quite hit me how badly until after Infinity War.
In every movie Bucky’s ever been in, we lose him by the end of the movie.
First Avenger is pretty obvious –– that Train Scene™. Civil War, not only is he an internationally wanted fugitive but he’s also going under yet again, because he feels like he doesn’t have a choice. Infinity War, he gets dusted or disintegrated or whatever-the-fuck that was.
The happiest ending he gets––and by extension, the happiest ending Steve/Bucky gets––is the end of Winter Soldier, where Bucky disappears yet again, but at least there’s the implied sense that he’s coming back to himself and rehabilitating. At least there’s hope.
In Civil War, Bucky said “It always ends in a fight.” And it breaks my heart how he’s proven right, again and again.
Every time he manages to build some peace and a slice of home for himself, the fight shows up at his doorstep and forces him back into it.
He’s buying plums and smiling and relearning himself in Bucharest when Zemo frames him for blowing up the damn UN and the entire world is looking to kill him again. He’s finally free of his trigger words (presumably) and living quietly in a little hut in Wakanda and learning to be comfortable without an arm when Thanos tries to kill half the universe and he has to get back out there again.
He might be tired of fighting, T’challa says, right before offering Bucky his new arm.
And he’s right. Bucky’s been tired of the fight since 1943, since he got off of Zola’s table. But Steve needed him, and then Hydra had him, and then the entire world was trying to arrest him, and then there was the possibility of rogue Winter Soldiers, and then there was Thanos and the end of half the damn universe.
He doesn’t ask if there’s a fight, if they need him, if the world’s ending again. He already knows. He doesn’t say that he doesn’t want to fight, because for all that he might be so goddamn tired of fighting for 70 years, he can’t walk away when someone needs him, even if that someone a world that’s tried to destroy him ten times over and never thanked him for saving it.
Where’s the fight, he says, because what else can he say? He can’t run away from the fight, because it always finds him again, no matter how much he doesn’t want it to. He gives up, because he’s never going to be free, and he’ll be fighting until the day he dies.
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.
i fucking love steve rogers and nothing any of you say will change that. i love him w/ my entire being and i’ll protect him at all costs bc he’s a genuinely good person who looks out for people and doesn’t just cater to governments who he knows are 99% of the time never looking out for the people. he hates bullies and he literally has the super soldier serum bc he’s a genuinely nice, kindhearted person who watches out for others no matter the risk to himself. mcu steve rogers is a kind man with a heart of gold who’s fiercely protective of his friends when they’re threatened. idc what any of you have to say!!!!!! talk all the shit you want about him but that doesn’t change anything about who he is and i love him
this makes me so happy. apparently the part where they step over the demarcation line was unscripted, so alot of journalists and spectators on site gasped with shocked
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