Please forgive the messiness of this mind-dump, but my time in Australia and Thanksgiving has got me thinking a lot about indigenity. and “settler colonialism“. I found these quotes from a piece on decolonization illuminating:
“Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place – indeed how we/they came to be a place.”
“The settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as holding dominion over the art and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species. The settler is making a new ‘home’ and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because ‘civilization’ is defined as production in excess of the ‘natural’ world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world).”
“Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epsitemologies.”
“Because pain is the token for oppression, claims to pain then equate to claims of being an innocent non-oppressor.”
–“Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang
I’ve never run across this idea of colonialism (and capitalism) as a kind of madness.
“Columbus was a wétiko. He was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis.”
–“Columbus and Other Cannibals” by Jack D. Forbes
Seems like there’s a chain from “white privilege” to “white fragility” to “settler privilege” to “settler fragility” just as there is from the “Doctrine of Discovery” to the “Monroe Doctrine” to “Manifest Destiny“.
I looked up some of the tribes from places where the Youngs and Williamsons had settled. Per Native-Land…
- New Castle & Elkton are Lenape
- Dry Run & Lurgan are Susquehannock
- New Wilmington is Osage
- Central Junction is Iowa, Sauk and Meskwaki, & Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux)
- Boise is Shoshone-Bannock
- Grand Island is Pawnee & Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux)
- Toluca Lake, Singing Springs, Granada Hills, & Burbank are Tongva & Fernandeño Tataviam
- Stamford is Lenape
(On a side note, TIL James Fenimore Cooper‘s “Mohicans” were based on the “Mahicans” with some cultural aspects from the “Mohegans“.)
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