Kersplebedeb, October 28, 2000 EC: Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat is a book which had a major impact on many North American anti-imperialists. How did this book come about, and what was so new about its way of looking at things? JS: Settlers completely came about by accident, not design. And what was so…
Category: Decolonizing the Colonizer
Franz Fanon: The Psychopathology of Colonization
Frantz Fanon’s relatively short life yielded two potent and influential statements of anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies. Fanon was born in 1925, to a middle-class family in the French colony of Martinique. He left…
Fundamental Black and Native Opposition to White Settler State
Blacks and Native Americans continue to pose a threat to the “conquistador white settler nation,” agues Tiffany King, author of “The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies.” King is a professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Georgia. “There are impulses within both Black abolition and Native decolonization…
Coalition & Dependency: On the Devaluation of the Capacity to Act
Time and again we hear this as a truism, so supposedly obvious that it needs no explanation. When we examine it, however, it blows away into dust. – E. Tani & Kae Sera (1985, 202) Ena͞emaehkiw Kesīqnaeh The truism that is being discussed in this opening epigraph by E. Tani and Kae Sera, authors of the…
Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege is So Hard to Talk About
Dina Gilio-Whitaker Robin DiAngelo’s brilliant 2018 manifesto on white fragility was a much-needed truth bomb at a time when it’s more clear than ever that we are light years away from the “post-racial state.” Perhaps most important about the book was its clarity that racism is systemic and structural, that no white people are immune…
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Settler Privilege
Dina Gilio-Whitaker November is Native American Heritage Month, when we as American Indian people get to have the mic for a little while. So, I’d like to take my turn at the virtual mic to talk about settler privilege, something you likely have never thought of, or have never even heard of. What you have…
Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex
Indigenous Action The ally industrial complex has been established by activists whose careers depend on the “issues” they work to address. These nonprofit capitalists advance their careers off the struggles they ostensibly support. They often work in the guise of “grassroots” or “community-based” and are not necessarily tied to any organization. They build organizational or…
Warrior Societies and Land Defence
Sakej Ward (Mi’kmaw) My name is Sakej. I am Mi’kmaw and a Sma’knis, a traditional Indigenous warrior of the Mi’kmaq Nation. I want to speak from the most ancient system of knowledge in the world, the Indigenous worldview. I will speak a few words about the secret societies known as warrior societies. Since time immemorial,…
Sakej Ward: Decolonizing the Colonizer
Real Peoples Media In this speech, Sakej Ward talks about decolonization in relationship to the original people of the land you are living in. He argues that a central aspect of any process of change requires the correct identification of the terms we use to describe ourselves. Ward seeks to dispel the illusions and resulting…
