So much happening out there, including friends and acquaintances upset over decisions that impact their childhood memories. Dr. Suess, Looney Tunes, Disney -- these and other companies making decisions about images, storylines, characters that continue to cause harm. Stereotypical words and images about Indigenous, Black and Asian people in comic forms that are blind to the violent histories of slavery, colonialism and white privilege.
What does this have to do with settlers?
I've been meaning to post a short video lecture by a professor that I admire. Keith Thor Carlson has worked with the Stó:lō communities, whose land I now live on, for almost 30 years and speaks so calmly and eloquently about settler colonialism and white privilege. This form of colonialism (he explains another form in the talk) is designed as a structure that not only takes land from Indigenous people, but is perpetuated through tropes and stories (think cowboy movies and cartoons) and its privileges are invisible to those who benefit from them.
I've also attempted to write about my struggle with the idea of settler colonialism and learning the true history of this country.
“Settlers? They lived in sod huts. They wore bonnets and overalls and their horses pulled the plow. All of that seemed like time before time. Even though I had a vague notion that my Grandma had once lived on the cousin’s farm where I’d hopped onto muddied ground, I had never thought deeply about the meaning of those fences.”
My grandma (the other one, not the poet) is on the lower left in the photo. If you are interested, the story comes up first on my website.
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