Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs

by Eli Nixon

Cardboard workshop how-to, karaoke songbook, nature drag theorization, 450-million-year-long love letter, field guide to a different future—Bloodtide proposes exactly what we need in a form we never imagined: a new kind of holiday in homage to the ancient Horseshoe Crab.

Bloodtide is a new holiday to gather us around an homage practice dedicated to 450 million years of horseshoe crab fortitude. It’s a holiday drawn from the author’s own need for new cultural practices and extended as an offering for anybody to use with hopes of contributing to collective liberation.

Bloodtide attempts queer futurity, without mythologies of settler innocence and with sustained recognition that time extends through our ancestors: recent ones and ancient. Bloodtide promotes horizontalist structure building practices through pageantry, crabaoke, naturedrag, cardboard sculpting, feasting and other hands-on, locally oriented, commemorative & survivalist practices. Bloodtide posits that homage and attention to horseshoe crabs might further all repair efforts and other insufficient necessities for our collective and individual healing/transformation.

214 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 2021

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend wrote this wacky and wonderful book about celebrating horseshoe crabs, deep time, and unsettling ourselves. A++++ directions for building cardboard horseshoe crab costumes, pageant choreography shared in comics, and rewritten lyrics to Queen for crabaoke.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly charming, fascinating little volume.

[Sarah Meerkat · Rating 5 out of 5]

utterly delightful and weird and so lovely. gonna make a cardboard horseshoe crab

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is basically about how to create a holiday to save a threatened species. It shows how to celebrate the species, rather than lecture about why this species should be saved. So fun. We used many of the practices in Utah to help save Great Salt Lake and in turn save brine shrimp (a crustacean), brine flies and many birds. Groups made cardboard brine shrimp to wear, and cardboard birds to wave, we also had chants, songs, and dance to go along with our rally/celebration. So fun. This book was the inspiration. I hope to meet the author some day. Way to go Eli!

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastical yet practical manual on how celebrate a new holiday in honor of deep time, horseshoe crabs and ethical relationships with Nature. The celebration can be adapted to other crustaceans.