Words Fail Me

“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