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I'm revising an old unfinished article I wrote more than ten years ago, and am appalled at the casual way I was able to write about the violence of settler colonialism and Indigenous death at that time.
I'm really glad I did not publish it then. The first thing I did today was add a content warning under my title.
It's not that I've come to see readers as weaker or more sensitive--it's that I have come to understand how the "neutral" language so often employed by historians actually serves to excuse or normalize the violence and the genocide.
The anti-Indigenous violence of settler colonialism was/is not inevitable, natural, okay. How can we write about it in a tone that suggests it were, even if we are saying it was regrettable?
In her book "The Black Shoals" Tiffany Lethabo King puts it this way: "Because conquest ushered in such a world-altering rupture, it is almost impossible for the human imagination to fully conceive of the reach of its violence...
...Beyond the unfathomability of the scale of conquest’s historical violence, the fact that its violence does not cease makes it even more difficult for the critical imaginaries that produce critical social theories to contain it or find the appropriate level of abstraction...
...or texture to make it legible." The world had never seen anything like this horror. How can it even be put into words? And then we think we can talk about it with a "neutral" tone? Wow, we really need to wake up about this, including me.
