Tive

It’s International Week of Deaf People! 🤟🌍

This week, we celebrate Deaf identity, culture, community, and the human rights of Deaf people everywhere.

The 2026 theme says it clearly: Declaring Deaf People’s Human Rights.

This week belongs to Deaf people. 💙

Download Tive: https://tiveapp.com/join



[Image description: A young Black man wearing a dark navy shirt stands against a patterned navy background, smiling slightly and pointing upward with both hands. Text reads, “International Week of Deaf People. Identity. Culture. Rights.” Below the Tive logo, additional text reads, “Declaring Deaf People’s Human Rights.” A yellow label displays “September 21–27, 2026.” The footer reads, “The week belongs to Deaf people everywhere.”]

The math that got humans into space was worked out by a deaf schoolteacher who never built a rocket. 🚀

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky lost his hearing to scarlet fever at ten. That ended his formal schooling. His mother, who had encouraged all of it, died three years later. He taught himself in Moscow public libraries, reading from morning to night, and passed a teaching exam at 22.

Then, working alone in Kaluga, he derived the rocket equation — the relationship between a rocket's speed, its exhaust velocity, and how much of it is fuel. He published it in 1903, months before the Wright brothers left the ground at Kitty Hawk. He also described multi-stage rockets, liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellant, airlocks, and space stations.

He never launched anything. It was all theory.

Sputnik went up in October 1957. The Soviets timed it to the hundredth anniversary of his birth.



[Image description: A black-and-white photograph. A bearded older white man in a dark double-breasted coat stands outdoors among several tall metal rocket and airship models, taller than he is, set on grass with trees behind. Small text at the top reads "Deaf Connection" above a white pill reading "WORTH KNOWING." A serif headline reads "He wrote the rocket equation." Centered lower text reads "Konstantin Tsiolkovsky," "Father of modern rocketry • 1857–1935," "Why it mattered: A deaf schoolteacher opened the way to space." The Tive logo sits at the bottom center.]

👋 Spotlight: Christine Sun Kim

At Super Bowl LIV in 2020 she signed both the national anthem and America the Beautiful — the first Deaf Asian American to do it. Then the broadcast cut away from her, repeatedly, toward the athletes. Deaf viewers could not follow either song.

She wrote about it in the New York Times. Then she made art out of it: a work built from the cue sheets her interpreter used on the field that day, made as an homage to interpreters.

That's how she works. Her Degrees of Deaf Rage drawings — pie charts measuring exactly how furious a given airport or museum makes her — were in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Her work has been at MoMA, the Whitney, MIT, Somerset House.

Her Super Bowl appearance started the annual NFL partnership with the NAD. Everyone who has signed that field since followed her.



[Image description: A spotlight graphic with a black-and-white portrait of Christine Sun Kim, an Asian woman with straight bleached-blonde shoulder-length hair, round wire-rimmed glasses and dark lipstick, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression. She wears a dark sleeveless top over a lighter long-sleeved shirt and a fine chain necklace, against a plain pale background. A white-line frame insets around the photo. Lower-left text reads "Christine Sun Kim — Deaf Artist • Whitney Biennial 2019," with an italicized line: "Degrees of Deaf Rage — Sound, Notation, Access." The Tive logo is in the bottom-right.]

👋 Spotlight: Nakia Smith —

Black ASL is a dialect of ASL with its own signs, its own two-handed rhythm, and a larger signing space. It exists for a specific reason: America opened its first school for Deaf children in 1817, and Black Deaf children waited more than fifty years for theirs — then were kept in separate, underfunded schools across the South into the 1960s. Black Deaf communities built their own language in the schools they were sent to instead.

Nakia is fifth-generation Deaf, from Dallas. Her videos often feature her grandfather and great-grandparents, who still use signs from the 1880s.

Her line for all of it: "My hands are loud enough."

Netflix produced a video with her. The New York Times covered her. She's still posting.



[Image description: A spotlight graphic with a photo of Nakia Smith, a young Black woman with long blonde-ombré box braids falling over one shoulder, looking at the camera with a level expression. She wears a pale blue-gray t-shirt and holds her right hand up beside her head with the index and middle fingers extended. The wall behind her is deep magenta-purple. A white-line frame insets around the photo. Lower-left text reads "Nakia Smith — Black ASL Creator + Storyteller," with an italicized line: " — Black ASL, Five Generations Deep." The Tive logo is in the bottom-right.]