I was gonna ask “Are Mestizos settlers?” but I quickly realized that the answer to this question probably isn’t black and white. If the answer to this isn’t just “Yes” or “No” then what determines whether or not a Mestizo person is a settler?
I was gonna ask “Are Mestizos settlers?” but I quickly realized that the answer to this question probably isn’t black and white. If the answer to this isn’t just “Yes” or “No” then what determines whether or not a Mestizo person is a settler?
The Filipino population in Hawai’i are a great example of this. Yes, technically they are settlers if we’re painting them with a broad brush. But they were indentured in near slave-trade like conditions to work on plantations and since then the Filipino community in general has been in fierce solidarity with the Native Hawaiian population when it comes to fighting for native sovereignty and defending the land. It obviously helps that there is shared ancestry and culture, but the point still stands.
But even in other settler states, people can decolonize their consciousness and resist settler ideology. There are jews in occupied Palestine resisting the state and advocating for Palestinian land back. We can speak in general about settler class tendencies, but condemning people just because they are from a settler family background like some ultraleftists tend to do only pushes people to the right.
Im afraid this is not true. Decolonization is simply about returning land. Ideology doesn’t make you a settler. There is no “deprograming” that leads to decolonization and there can be no function for such a deprograming, outside of settler justification, without return of land.
Totally agreed. There’s so many frustrating “decolonize your mind” takes on twitter and elsewhere, as if having the correct ideas can undo the harms of colonialism.
It’s so much simpler: return stolen lands to indigenous sovereignty, period.