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The things tabletop considers progressive on the fronts of addressing anti-indigeneity makes me tired because it's often this VERY surface level thing that doesn't directly use nasty racial caricatures (if that) but doesn't do any work towards the relations and thought patterns
We didn't call you a slur on the box or use red meeples with a feather outline, aren't you happy?
No? That's not even the bare minimum?
No? That's not even the bare minimum?
Games often lean into this...exploitation of resources, some times even using people, both of which come with this very real and continuing history of violence. See conflicts over things like oil, uranium, and lithium
Then there is that whole bizarre reverence for "the age of exploration" and claiming it as your own even if you have no right and again exploiting. Be it some city of gold deal, a new planet, "historical"
There is rarely an interrogation of the language used. The amount of games I put down seeing the word "savage", "Tribal", or "privative"...
Especially when I see them attached to indigenous-coded if not not straight up real and continuing peoples.
Especially when I see them attached to indigenous-coded if not not straight up real and continuing peoples.
This is often highly inaccurate and heavily moralized language used to justify violence and colonialist apologia.
It's not accurate to our history and culture.
It's not accurate to our history and culture.
It's not even anthropologically accurate because it relies on long discarded ideas of cultural hierarchies that frame eurocentric culture as the inevitable and desirable result. Instead of...culture and technology used being a response to things around it.
The amount of people who think we didn't even have the wheel...
I could go on about indigenous sciences, engineering, and tech but that's a whole-ass other thread.
I could go on about indigenous sciences, engineering, and tech but that's a whole-ass other thread.
P.S. Making up a pretend nation doesn't absolve you of doing your due diligence and research. I see you and how you use it to indulge in the construct of the nonsense hollywood indian.
What it communicates is that you want to use us as set dressing and literary shorthand.
What it communicates is that you want to use us as set dressing and literary shorthand.
P.S.S.
I also note how you trivialize, exotify, and villainize indigenous spiritual and cultural practices.
Curses, blood sacrifices, use of taboo or private and personal figures, ect. Obnoxious, tiring, and boring.
I also note how you trivialize, exotify, and villainize indigenous spiritual and cultural practices.
Curses, blood sacrifices, use of taboo or private and personal figures, ect. Obnoxious, tiring, and boring.
Games as a whole don't consider the power dynamics of colonialism and the violence it is still causing. It doesn't think of us as real and existent people with hundreds of distinct cultures, histories, and struggles.
It doesn't think about the things it's been told by a violent outsider trying to reconcile or bury it's past and how that might JUST be a lie. It doesn't think we might see those games.
We're more useful as a set dressing and symbol than a continuing truth. Another tool.
We're more useful as a set dressing and symbol than a continuing truth. Another tool.
And THAT is what should be interrogated.
