This is a point that a lot of people who are rightly critical of Israel still don't get.

Settler colonies weaponize the distinction between civilians and combatants as an occupation strategy and it almost always works out to the settler state's advantage.

https://twitter.com/DanDanTransient/status/1775892110065217942

The concept of the settler cuts across civilian and combatant. They will call themselves civilians but they act like combatants in plain clothes towards Natives. It's not a coincidence that a shitload of settlers throughout history were actually soldiers. They're gaming the idea.

A couple "free land" posters trying to give away land on the prairies here in so-called "Canada." They are quite colorful and propagandistic so it's perhaps worth contextualizing them with a few points.

(I'm from out east so apologies if I get anything too wrong.)

https://twitter.com/SpiritofLenin/status/1765072409345032579

Canada's first Prime Minister, John A MacDonald wanted Canada to be an "Aryan homeland." Few people adopted his language in parliament at the time, but his policies left a mark.

activehistory.ca/blog/2015/01/0…

I've never met a liberal who wasn't 100% about upholding the colonial order. You can get other things from them, rights for this or that, a nice budget every now and again, but they will always go to bat to defend foundational exclusions baked into the social and economic order.

https://twitter.com/queerBengali/status/1759111297600561200

Trudeau came into office talking about renewing "nation to nation" relations with First Nations. Did this mean he was going to actually recognize our nationhood? Fuck no. He kept that foundational exclusion intact and gave FNs an "historic" budget - with our own money of course.

Still processing the fact that Israel just admitted to using artificial intelligence to target and kill tens of thousands of people in their homes. The fact that this article talks about a "factory" and a "production line" but the only thing this "factory" "production line" produces is dead bodies should make most people take a step back and ask what the fuck we are doing here, species-wise.

theguardian.com/world/2023/dec…

One of the biggest problems with the concept of genocide is that it remains poorly under-theorized in relation to Indigeneity. It's bad enough that most people think it simply means mass murder but so many of the terms prefigure its application to Indigenous contexts in a bad way Settler societies generally do not have a good handle on how culture and nature are interconnected. They brought their culture with them from another land. It's an expression of that other land. They hollowed out the meaning of their cultures in order to transplant them.

One of the greatest quotes in all of Mi'gmaw history comes from an Lnu fisherman telling off some French fishermen in Gespeg (Gaspé) in the 1600s. The French were basically asking him how come he followed Mi'gmaw ways instead of being assimilated to French ways. Here's the reply: "I am greatly astonished that the French have so little cleverness, as they seem to exhibit in the matter of which thou hast just told me on their behalf, in the effort to persuade us to convert our poles, our barks, and our wigwams into those houses of stone and of wood