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'He stands slack-jawed, his four front teeth protruding from his open mouth like uneven stalactites. His head is topped by a mess of curls, which look more like sheets of parchment than strands of hair, and his jug ears stick so far out from his cylindrical face that they’re almost flush with his jiggly eyes. His dainty chicken feet, joined to spindly legs, are complemented by large, grand wings – spread open, but tangled and ungainly. Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a 1920 oil transfer drawing with watercolour, is a fearsome but fragile seraph: afloat, aghast, going who knows where. “This,” wrote Walter Benjamin, the philosopher who first owned the monoprint, “is how one pictures the Angel of History.”

‘Extraction and assimilation go together. Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource and my children are a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction-assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. Extracting is taking. Actually, extracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous—extraction of indigenous knowledge, indigenous women, indigenous peoples … Children from parents. Children from families. Children from the land. Children from our political system and our system of governance. Children—our most precious gift. In this kind of thinking, every part of our culture that is seemingly useful to the extractivist mindset gets extracted. The canoe, the kayak, any technology that we had that was useful was extracted and assimilated into the culture of the settlers without regard for the people and the knowledge that created it.’