PALOMA

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DEVASTATING the lyric you've been mishearing is better than the real one

Has anyone written about the Missing 411 phenomenon in relation to North American settler-colonial anxieties about the "untamed wilderness" being a place of death and unknowability because I think that would be a potent line of inquiry

Honestly it's insane how many settler North American urban legends and conspiracy theories and horror stories boil down to "don't go into The Wilderness because Something will get you" - the same wilderness that was violently dispossessed from indigenous people and that is constantly being reimagined as a place fundamentally hostile to human existence despite the thousands of years of human existence on those very lands. The fact that the Missing 411 thing singles national parks - emptied monuments to ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of indigenous people, held captive by the settler state as Untouched Nature - as being the locus of spooky unexplained disappearances is all too on the nose tbh.

The basic takeaway is settlers will always be fundamentally anxious about the land they stole no matter how advanced or "complete" their conquest over it has become. It will never feel like home but a possession that constantly needs to be guarded and controlled. When settlers inevitably go missing and die because of their unfamiliarity with the land and inability to survive in it (which is what basically all of those Missing 411 cases boil down to) it has to be imagined as spooky and unexplainable. The land will always be a threat.