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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THIS.

Russia hasn't been a willing partner in this treaty for almost 3 decades. We should have ended the pretense long ago.

Naturally, Rand Paul is telling anyone who will listen to him that Trump is making a HUGE MISTAKE here.


Rand is just like his dad, Ron. 100% isolationist.

They've never grasped that 100% isolationist is not 'America First' when you examine it. It really means 'America Alone'.

The consistent grousing of pursuing military alliances with allies - like Trump is doing now with Saudi Arabia.

So of course Rand has also spent the last 2 days loudly calling for Trump to kill the arms deal with Saudi Arabia and end our alliance with them.

What Obama was engineering with his foreign policy was de facto isolationism: pull all the troops out of the ME, abandon the region to Iranian control as a client state of Russia.

Obama wasn't building an alliance with Iran; he was facilitating abandoning the ME to Iran.

Obama wouldn't even leave behind a token security force, so of course what happened was the rise of ISIS. He also pumped billions of dollars into the Iranian coffers, which the Mullah's used to fund destabilizing activity [wars/terrorism] & criminal enterprises all over the globe