Honestly our prices aren't even high considering the huge amount of work that goes into what we do. What we deserve is to actually be well paid and then get some reparations on top of that lmao

Every time I see a bead artist break down their pricing, they always give themselves "minimum wage", which as we know is less than half of an actual living wage. We deserve a living wage for our art, but I know none of us actually gets that
Beadwork is my full time job, I've charged up to 200$ for a single piece because I need to make rent and pay bills and some of these large pieces take me days or even a week to complete.
I give myself minimum wage for my labour, I don't charge for the hours I spend packing and shipping orders, Etsy takes a cut, and I still have to charge upwards of 100$ for many pieces because beadwork is hard fucking work. It's a slow process, literally one bead at a time.
I constantly struggle with balancing paying myself a fair wage, keeping my work accessible, not giving people a lowball idea of what beadwork actually costs therefore undercutting other artists... its not easy.
We ALL deserve a living wage for our labour, we deserve to not be paying costs like that out of pocket, but peoples' image of what these things "should" cost is totally skewed by a bunch of factors.
People devalue our work because it's feminized labour. They devalue our work because it's done by Indigenous people. And they devalue our work because corporations have egregiously underpaid workers making shoddy products then passing those stolen "savings" onto the customer.
Our work can and often does last lifetimes. There's beadwork in families including my own family that is half a century old or more and still in pristine condition. We as Indigenous people know how to make things to last.
And allllll of these factors, including basic fucking decency, is why you should never criticize an Indigenous bead artist's prices, because I can all but promise you they are still undercharging no matter what the listed price. Tip your local bead worker today.
This thread is inspired by: https://t.co/cX42wOpDwT

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x