The Wandering Wonderer

Welcome friends! A few weeks ago in one of my classes discussing Australian Aboriginal history, I learned that Turtle Island was the original name for North America- how the conversation got to that discussion, I have no clue, but I was immediately intrigued. Being American in a class with mostly other Australians, I was obviously surprised that I was not aware of this, nor did I have any idea about the Native American creation story behind this name. So here's the story so you can learn as well! In order to approach this topic properly, we need to acknowledge that Native Americans lived across the continent long before European settlers arrived and we should imagine their history from the vantage point before the times of colonisation. The Native Americans (also termed Indigenous people) that lived across the continent are estimated to have first reached this land sometime around 12,000 BC when their Asian descendants crossed into Alaska from the Bering land bridge. By the time Eu

Howdy! If anyone really knows me, they'll know I'm always terrible at picking favourites. However, when I held a 9-month-old baby spider monkey at a county fair in high school, I officially (finally) chose monkeys as my favourite animal. Of course, I thought the spider monkey was the cutest monkey ever and I was immediately in love (I mean, look at that outfit!) However, a few weeks ago, I watched the Primates episode of David Attenborough's Life series (which can be found on Netflix!) and realised there are so many different types of monkey species that I wasn't even aware of- some of which definitely competed for the 'most adorable' monkey award. Since I didn't think it was fair to call the 'monkey' my favourite animal without fairly knowing about all the different species, I decided to do some research. For any zodiac lovers out there, the monkey is the 9th animal of the Chinese zodiac. People born in a year of the monkey are supposedly intellig