One of the reasons why I don't care about statues being torn down, or feel the need to support calls for replacing offensive statues with other statues once the offensive ones have been toppled is that statues, in reality, don't do shit.

Elsa Laula, arguably one of the most important Saami spokes women historically speaking, was honoured with a statue in her home city a while ago. Now the same council is allowing wind farms to be built on her descendants' ancestral homelands against her people's wishes.

These wind farms have a detrimental effect on reindeer herding and will ultimately make people lose a vital part of their cultural identity.

Elsa Laula was a decolonial agitator. "Honouring" her with a statue, when you're simultaenously destroying her legacy, is despicable.

Renaming streets and putting up statues of "better" people is a good thought, especially if the renaming is done in collaboration with the Indigenous people of a place, but the act is pointless, if it's not followed up by substantial, real decolonial changes.

What does it matter if you replace an offensive statue with a statue of someone worthier from an oppressed minority in a visible place, if the oppression is allowed to be on-going?

Decolonisation cannot be reduced to a quick touch-up of a city's visual make-up; it has to go deeper. If we don't see substantial systemic changes, what is the point?

You cannot heal a broken bone with a Hello Kitty band-aid.

Reconciliation will not happen without reparations.