I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

The woman I am obsessed with is not native to America. Historically she is the immigrant. I watch her talk online about her father’s poetry, his advocacy and his way of living, the only authority she has is rooted in being the perfect embodiment of her alternate upbringing. She espouses the values of stewardship, of taking care of the land, of the importance and necessity of farmers. Her lack of awareness of being a white woman borne of a white man in a country baked in the violence of European colonialism, dictating values that were and are already being practiced by Indigenous people before they were forcibly disinherited, is the way in which liberalism separates itself from the systems of racism and genocide and from the structures that organise the way the world benefits particular groups over others. It is the ripping of the Indigenous people from the land and the land being continually pillaged for neo-colonial profit which has the climate spiralling into catastrophe. The West’s insistence that it is humans who are an antithesis to the Earth is short-sighted and incorrect. It is a certain kind of human built into a particular system whereby solid, physical things like ancestral land, a tree, the rivers, water and rocks become unreal next to the dreamt up, magical apparatus of the stock market and quarterly growth. What is defined as ‘real’ has become abstracted—fuelling a disassociated state where we destroy without considering the consequences. As native people are ...