2:09am June 11, 2014

➸ http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/88421287635/hell-and-highwater-i-think-one-of-the-weird

chordatesrock:

hell-and-highwater:

I think one of the weird things about the internet (I want to say this is tumblr specific, but I think it just happens faster on tumblr) is how people forget history of communities.

There’s a few communities I’m at the fringes of and in ones where I know the history I…

*irrelevantly butts in* Tisoncik founded Autistics.Org, which I have backups of some of the articles from, and Montgomery used to write for Mouth. Montgomery is the author of Critic of the Dawn, isn’t xe? (I don’t know Cal Montgomery’s actual pronouns, oh well.) Before them was Jim Sinclair, who still runs Autreat, and who wrote Don’t Mourn For Us.

Before everything started happening online, there were autobiographies, of course. (Why is it always autobiographies? Why not just books? “You stick to the facts and leave the theorising to us”? Or maybe it’s just the same impulse that drives blogging?) Thinking in Pictures, Nobody Nowhere, and whatever else exists that’s been published. The Mind Tree? Definitely The Mind Tree, because you were complaining about a decade ago that people were convinced that The Mind Tree was the very first autobiography by a nonspeaking autistic person even though David Eastham had already published a book. And of course now it’s Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump.

Maybe you or someone else should put together a timeline of major things in whatever movements tumblr is forgetting the history of and circulate that.

Okay so Cal Montgomery was actually around for the founding of Autreat, and was heavily involved socially with ANI in its early years in the nineties.  So she (or maybe he, these days, I don’t know their pronouns either, but they used to go by either she or he in different circumstances) was around long before Laura Tisoncik.  You can find their old presentations and stuff listed on ANI’s old Autreat websites, if those are still up anywhere.  They gave a lot of presentations at Autreat.  And they gave me a lot of insight into how ANI formed, from the perspective of someone who was actually there, which was invaluable because not a lot of people were talking about that stuff.

There was also autistic presence in autism conventions at the same time as the autiebiographies were coming out, that’s where people met and started founding things like ANI.  There was MAAP, More Advanced Autistic People, which was run by parents and professionals but had lots of autistic people at it and ANI had a big spat with them at one point over the idea that only high functioning people ought to be there.  (The spat was over other things as well.)  There was bit.listserv.autism – the St. John’s autism mailing list going back to maybe 1990 or thereabouts, and autistic people met on there, and from there started forming their own mailing lists.  And all of these things were happening at the same time as the autiebiographies were getting published.

So there were a lot of things happening at once in the early years and I only wish I had the time and energy to track everyone down and interview anyone willing to be interviewed.  I fear so much history dropping away as we speak.  Lorna Wing just died Friday, someone else could die tomorrow.  Any of us could die, and with us die our memories, and those memories make up a huge part of this tapestry.