Entry tags:
Spirituality for the post colonial
Today's meditation. What is it to be a colonist, spiritually?
My family brought no elves or small gods with them,
They had long been lost to Christianity.
The spirits and stories of the land I inhabit form me far more than the spirits of my own iwi. I draw my mana, such as it is, from the land I live on.
But I am not of the people, the heritage I feel pulled to is a heritage we brutally suppressed, and the land I call home is land my iwi stole and murdered for.
Can I call these my stories? Every person I've known has said yes, that I live here is enough.
But I don't want to steal their stories, as I wish my ancestors hadn't been part of the genocidal theft of their land
But still, to have been a colonist is mostly to have been the poor, fleeing your homeland out of economic desperation.
The rich colonized Europe first.
The Roman's brought christianity on the other of the sword, a sword weilded by soldiers hoping to be rewarded with farm land.
The rich brought capitalism,
Capitalism brought enclosure.
The brutality was less, but it was still violence. Europe would not in truth take me back if I wanted to return, but it would be an exile to me, not a returning.
The rich still rule, the old eat the young.
They enclosed the field of Europe, burned the forests to make pastures, or to make ruinous war on one another.
Always it's the rabble that suffer.
How can I ever forgive the boomers, who perpetuate a system that makes me landless unless I am to be landlord.
The barest wish of the colonist was land, a home.
We murdered, raped, stole our way to having places of our own, even when we could easily have shared, may even have been invited to share if we had asked or bargained fairly.
Yet here we are, replicating the old structure.
No manored gentry, instead every slum it's own decaying prison, the people unenobled and ruled in general by the most petty Rentier.
We are as a whole brought low and told it's their own fault, while our parents burn the last vestiges of hope so they can keep driving places they don't need to go.
Keep paving paradise,
Keep owning other people's houses,
Keep us landless,
Keep us precarious,
Keep us starving and poor.
My family brought no elves or small gods with them,
They had long been lost to Christianity.
The spirits and stories of the land I inhabit form me far more than the spirits of my own iwi. I draw my mana, such as it is, from the land I live on.
But I am not of the people, the heritage I feel pulled to is a heritage we brutally suppressed, and the land I call home is land my iwi stole and murdered for.
Can I call these my stories? Every person I've known has said yes, that I live here is enough.
But I don't want to steal their stories, as I wish my ancestors hadn't been part of the genocidal theft of their land
But still, to have been a colonist is mostly to have been the poor, fleeing your homeland out of economic desperation.
The rich colonized Europe first.
The Roman's brought christianity on the other of the sword, a sword weilded by soldiers hoping to be rewarded with farm land.
The rich brought capitalism,
Capitalism brought enclosure.
The brutality was less, but it was still violence. Europe would not in truth take me back if I wanted to return, but it would be an exile to me, not a returning.
The rich still rule, the old eat the young.
They enclosed the field of Europe, burned the forests to make pastures, or to make ruinous war on one another.
Always it's the rabble that suffer.
How can I ever forgive the boomers, who perpetuate a system that makes me landless unless I am to be landlord.
The barest wish of the colonist was land, a home.
We murdered, raped, stole our way to having places of our own, even when we could easily have shared, may even have been invited to share if we had asked or bargained fairly.
Yet here we are, replicating the old structure.
No manored gentry, instead every slum it's own decaying prison, the people unenobled and ruled in general by the most petty Rentier.
We are as a whole brought low and told it's their own fault, while our parents burn the last vestiges of hope so they can keep driving places they don't need to go.
Keep paving paradise,
Keep owning other people's houses,
Keep us landless,
Keep us precarious,
Keep us starving and poor.