Status Updates From The Cliffs

There’s this Australian historian, Patrick Wolfe, who says settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. It’s ongoing, and part of what keeps it that way is the idea that Indigenous people aren’t here anymore. When they’re very much here. If you want to fight colonization, you can start by telling the stories of the people we’ve been taught to believe went extinct long ago.

Reading something from a decade ago could make clear how the culture had evolved, or not. Something from almost a century ago, all the more so. Language conveyed whatever the author was trying to tell but also, unintentionally, the attitudes and prejudices of a person, a time.