“Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future."

Settlers always wants to know what about them, what about their house their stuff their way of life their status quo. Which when you get down to it is really a selfish, bonkers question. Everything about a settler status quo, in the so-called Americas, Israel, and elsewhere, relies on displacement and dispossession. And I'm guilty of this too, of wanting to rescue settlers, make it sound not so bad and the fact is that it will cost something.

It is pie.

Last night at an event I was asked about the problem of disconnecting people from place and thinking of them only in terms of their race or skin colour and I responded by admitting I'd read Harry's book I commented on their fundamental complaint that the whole toxic mess (the Firm, the press) didn't accept Megan because she is biracial, which is real, and then their own absurd notion that Megan could have been bridge between the monarchy and the people they have colonized.

This is not even a controversial take.

See also: nearby community of Celebration

https://twitter.com/missmayn/status/1614734082797359105

I mean:

fastcompany.com/90681636/no-ca…

Reflecting on two tweets after reading #Spare. I can't recall who said it, but the first is one that said something to the effect of "write your truth and don't worry about making people look bad. If they wanted to be remembered well they should have behaved better" The second is from Chrissy Stroop who reminded us that institutions will protect themselves at the expense of those who inhabit them.

The monarchy is an institution that creates and exacerbates family conflicts.

People think reverse racism is a thing because we've disconnected discussions about race from power. We need to see and talk about the inequities of how power is distributed and the consequences of that.

White people think the consequences of racism is hurt feelings. It is not Racism is, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, group vulnerabilities to premature death.

Death. Not hurt feelings.
Exclusions that lead to death. Not hurt feelings.
Criminalization that leads to death. Not hurt feelings.

We need to change how we talk about racism

When the Portuguese arrived in Africa they took Indigenous people, disconnected them from their land and sold them overseas. Indigenous Africans also experience(d) settler colonialism

I'm not married to categories, they are useful shorthand but people are not so easily contained

https://twitter.com/haploporus/status/1578402501589889029

So when I say that Black people are also Indigenous in their own right I am acknowledging that reality. I am acknowledging that much of what we think of as Black culture is rooted in various west African beliefs and cultures. In those stories that got passed down, oral traditions

Indigenous peoples were displaced to create these parks. Pristine wilderness, except there is no such thing as wilderness, as Patrick Wolfe reminds us, only depopulated spaces.

Parks will have Indigenous content. Perhaps a relationship with the closest band. Imagine that

https://twitter.com/OntarioParks/status/1578365780441415682

Imagine clearing off Indigenous peoples and then having the audacity to pay a handful of us for cultural content and call that reconciliation.

Having the audacity to charge us admission.

White people often get really offended by being called white or settler. They say it's racist because for white people racism is about hurt feelings. Being excluded.

For Black and Indigenous people it is about dying.

Big difference. Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition gives it stark clarity.

"Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death."

Premature death is death at any age that could have been prevented

Although "decrepit conditions" do exist in many communities, including reservations, it is not universal. Many are doing quite well. This is often related to having an adequate land base and control of traditional territories.

Decolonization means restoring land.

https://twitter.com/comradejoma/status/1577447952649437187

That's it. You can be the most anti racist, inclusive society on earth. If the land is not restored to Indigenous peoples, it's still colonization and inequities will inevitably develop.

It's been a lot of new followers lately so let me tell you about a foundation I run along with @Terrilltf @NoLore and a couple of others who aren't on the bird app.

Nii'kinaaganaa.

It started as a cheeky fundraiser on Patreon, Pay Your Rent. Now it's a non-profit foundation.

https://twitter.com/NiiKinaaganaa/status/1567623985285709824

We take money from people living on Indigenous land, a form of rent, and then disperse it to Indigenous people in the form of long and short term projects as well as some individual support for rent and groceries and the like.

The problem is not the early release. That's where it will be defined and the solution will cause more harm and more death, but it will be unnoticed.

The problem is a prison system that creates and exacerbates violence. A reserve system that isolates and defunds communities.

https://twitter.com/CBCNews/status/1567322238688411648

The problem is that we live in a country where the state sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death in distinct yet densely interconnected geographies is treated like a personal failing and not the foundation.

Talking about this book, how it came about and how it connected so well with things said at #socialism2022 was amazing. The really good questions and comments from the audience, the conversations afterwards. And it sold out there y'all. Even before my talk. I signed sticky notes.

https://twitter.com/broadleaf_books/status/1567269914674610178

Every speaker I heard talked about world building. The right can call us destructive and violent, and there is room for creative violence [tm RWG] but the focus was very much on world building and what kind of world do we want built and that, my friends, means examining history

I acknowledge this in my book, that being called a settler may feel aggressive, like you don't belong. But Anishinaabeg language is verb based, which means in our understanding these things are something you do, not something you are. And you can do something different.

https://twitter.com/DeondreSmiles/status/1567198751034580994

This is a great thread btw, I disagree with nothing Deondre is saying here and it is important to talk about what this settler/Indigenous binary means when we are talking about a world of often forced and involuntary movement and how we live together.

I'll be processing #socialism2022 for a while. The people I met and listened to and learned from, in and out of sessions. The way that the things they said combined in such interesting ways. God I've missed conferences, please keep inviting me to speak at them because I loved it But it was the final moment that really crystalized something for me. They sang The Internationale which, bad socialist that I am I have heard of but don't know. It's a difficult melody, so it was discordant and out of sync. All those voices.

And it was perfect.

In the Q&A after my remarks a Métis woman got up and commented on feeling disjointed at these conferences. Not really socialist. Not anarchist. What stories can we tell about our movements to help us move beyond these silos.

@MsKellyMHayes knows how I responded. Another woman responded in her comments that the Zapatistas rejected the label of anarchists and said that they are Zapatista.

I think it's ok to be, in Kelly's words, intellectually promiscuous. To recognize that these containers are helpful shorthand but not identity.

In Ojibwe our nouns are not gendered. Aki, land, is animate but does not have gender. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson cites Cree scholar Alex Wilson who says that in Cree land is not gendered, not mother. It is fluid. It is itself. Simpson says the same of Ojibwe, that this gendering is not ours. In Dadibaajim the elders interviewed say this as well. That the idea of mother earth was not something we thought of before the missionaries.

Thoughts?

I'm thinking about queer and trans people being welcome in our spaces. And I'm thinking about that along with a church I'm connected to about Indigenous relationship in the context of building grassroots or individual action. And it's really meaningless. Unless it comes from the people in authority what good does it do? We can be friendly, build relationships etc but policies and practices remain in place that exclude, sermons ignore the church's role in creating and maintaining inequity.

Elite capture and critical consciousness both address the divide between elites and others, EC expands that divide by exploiting others in their service and CC pursues a mutually liberatory project to eliminate it.

What Xians could have been, but aren't Táíwò writes about this in a Black context, but it is so broadly applicable to other groups and this morning it occurred to me that this describes the early church and the consequences of its acceptance by Rome.

It chose the route of elite capture, taking power for itself

I think we could apply this to Indigenous fundamentalism as well. The idea that our traditions, ceremonies etc will transform us without doing any of the actual work of changing and repairing harm. That's how we find ourselves protecting predators.

https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1535683307362344962

It is always justified because of what they know. That desperation rooted in lack that only makes our spaces unsafe and actually perpetuates scarcity. People who would have learned or participated don't.

We really need to move past the idea that freedoms and rights are created and applied equally. They aren't. Power is a big part of the conversation and yet it is always missing.

Black and Indigenous dissent is not the same as white dissent. One is is a demand for those in power to cede that power, the other is a refusal and an insistence on increasing that power. A power, I might add, that has serious consequences for anyone who opposes it, and yet these things are framed as the same.

I'm about halfway through Origins by @JenniferRaff and these different creation stories, ways of reading the archaic past, are fascinating. I particularly love the care she shows to Indigenous people, past and present. And the willingness to leave some things unreconciled. I touch on this in my book, the tension between our own creation stories that situate us in this place and the stories of migration that archeology, linguistics, and DNA tell us. I am one of those who don't see these creation stories as a recounting of a narrowly defined history