I wrote this piece the other day as I held the Land, People and Sheep of Black Mesa close to my heart. Im praying in all the ways I know how these days. “Racism does not merely arise in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the biopolitical state, woven into the web of the social body, threaded through its fabric” -Ann Stoler Colonial time is bound to over 500 years of struggle within the legacy of suffering and destruction marked by Columbus’ arrival to the land now known as the Americas. Colonial ideology says conquest is part of the natural progression of humanity since the beginning of time; it says colonization is normal, just, and irreversible. Colonial time has the Kayenta coalmine steadfastly operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ripping the earth apart for over 10 million tons of coal each year. Colonial time impregnates the drivers of modernity with the certainty of progress. Colonial time illuminates the Southwestern cities with lights, calculatingly hiding behind the ideology of meritocracy manipulating the masses to believe in the myth of universally achievable upward class mobility built upon stolen land. Genocide has always been the goal of the settler colonial project—the total destruction of fully self-governing Indigenous polities or people that existed pre-conquest and replacement with an imperial superior sovereignty. The dominant American discourse enables the deliberate obscuration of the legacies of indigenous genocide (and denial) in North America and continues to animate inequitable practices today. It’s all so very depressing and won’t make the nightly news cycle because who wants to the nostalgic façade of the American dream to shatter? If White people don’t interact with the ongoing genocide, then maybe it won’t exist anymore. But it’s there and it’s real and it’s not going away anytime soon.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 19:31:48 +0000
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