#settler-colonialism

-Deculturation, "Superman, Colonialism, and Decolonization!"

Hear from local groups working to free land and people from the PNW to Palestine! Space is limited so preregister at the link here: tinyurl.com/386zx2z4

From Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. The arts/being an artist/an artist’s place + the settler-colonialism that touches so much of the arts in The West has been on my mind ever since I was looking at what decolonial scholars and educators have been saying about it. Then I came upon this excerpt this morning.

🖤 Indigenizing Israel has nothing to do with indigenous identities, dismantling the class struggles in our shared world, or winning sovereignty to better steward + sustain ancestral lands to combat climate disaster + capitalism . . . Israel weaponizing indigeneity is an attempt to frame its zionist apartheid as inseparable (+ indistinguishable ) from Judaism + the Jewish Diaspora.

The Golan is such an attractive template for Uri Tzafon because it models how even seemingly impossible ideas can be mainstreamed through settler action—proof, in Nir Zvi’s words, that “settlements can change borders.” As the organization’s leaders pointed out in a WhatsApp message, the Golan was the “the most ‘audacious’ occupation the State of Israel has ever carried out” because it was outside the borders of even the British Mandate, and had been populated with hundreds of Syrian villages. But, Nir Zvi said, even in these circumstances, “a few people went up to the Golan Heights and founded [the settlement of] Merom Golan.” Nearly 15 years later, the Israeli government formally annexed the Golan Heights, and about four decades after that, United States President Donald Trump officially recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights (a position recently reaffirmed by the Biden administration). For Nir Zvi, this story highlights that “if you will it, it’s no dream,” quoting the famous maxim of political Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl. “You just need patience.”

That was the sole lesson of their world: how to make waste, how to make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, how to cure people who were sickened by waste so they could be well enough to endure it, how to mobilize waste, legalize waste and how to despise the culture that lived in cloth houses and shit on the ground far away from where they ate. And it would drown them one day, they would all sink into their own waste and the waste they had made of the world and then, finally they would know true peace and the happiness they had been looking for all along. In the meantime this one here would chew a morsel of ham and drink white wine secure in the knowledge that he had defecated on two people who had dared to want some of his apples." -Toni Morrison

As Gazans are desperately trying to survive and cradling dead loved ones in their arms, this lady is envisioning amusement parks and consumerism goods built over homes and centuries of cultural heritage. Even the image of Marie Antoinette telling starving peasants to "eat cake" isnt this outrageous.

This week, we’re featuring @nicholasgalanin’s work Ix̱six̱án ax̱ tʼukanéiyi (2021). Meaning “I love you, my baby,” this video centers Indigenous families and communities through a sampling of Tlingit words of love and care spoken to an Indigenous child. Rejecting the false historical narratives and generational trauma inflicted by settler-colonialism, this video instead focuses on love, safety, and connection.