"I am a White Settler Colonialist" writes Corey Snelgrove of Canada in an academic paper. She felt better after confessing her inborn, hereditary culpability.
Jeff Corntassel, a self-declared member of a First Nation, writes in the same essay his feelings about being a dispossessed Indian. He tries to inject into the paper some tribal wisdom, but there is none available. The wise men of the inexistent Indian band he imagines to belong were not literate and anyway, their wisdom - if any - died off with them, a hundred and twenty years ago.
Lastly, Rita Dhamoon, a recent immigrant from India, is traying hard to write something relevant to the subject of settler colonialism. What are/were Canada's First Nations and what they have to do with her? She finds that as a brown skinned female, she too is 100% colonized and dispossessed, with terrible traumas caused by White colonials.
Is this the curricula of Canadian universities?
What is this craziness about settlers? The only bone-and-flesh settlers the papers talk incessantly about are Israelis in the West Bank. I may be paranoid, but this is old Christianity: they are learning that they were born in sin and have to confess and repent to be pardoned, and of course the worst, unrepentant sinners are the Jews. They do not believe in God and all that, but it is the same thing.
What is this craziness about settlers? The only bone-and-flesh settlers the papers talk incessantly about are Israelis in the West Bank. I may be paranoid, but this is old Christianity: they are learning that they were born in sin and have to confess and repent to be pardoned, and of course the worst, unrepentant sinners are the Jews. They do not believe in God and all that, but it is the same thing.
Have you read your countryman's bestseller Sapiens? (I'm not sure what the Hebrew version was titled.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, he has an interesting framework for understanding this sort of thing. The myths which supported Western civilization as a European phenomenon, are adapting to become global. The West has to shed every semblance of being a European phenomenon, if non-Europeans are going to truly embrace it as their own.
I'm not sure exactly how that filters down to English Canadians flagellating themselves, but here we are.
I have even bought Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I have not seen the Hebrew version, but I presume it was written originally in English. There is a very small Hebrew reading public for those books.
ReplyDeleteFlagellating! You are right! That is the word I was looking for! Like Medieval villagers and penitents during the Black Death epidemy, they walk in circles punishing oneself and beating the other. This sick behavior can be seen even today in Lebanon, the Shi'ites parade with long knives and chains drawing blood from themselves. This craziness is happening now and here. So Canadians begging forgiveness is not the most extreme example. They stopped believing in God and have no one to beg forgiveness for their imagined sins, so they invent noble Indians whose spirits are - in their nightmares - demanding revenge.
I don't think the Third World is imposing its ideas on White Canadians, this self-flagellation has nothing to do with the long defeated and dead Indians.