“The more we study [at institutions of learning] the more eurocentric we become.”

Prof. Marandi

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Just a little tip from a white American living on stolen land to other white people trying to decolonize:

Use your powers of commerce for good. Track down your local tribal businesses and shift your purchases over to them. (I know you have some – even living up north of Seattle I couldn't help but notice some, so I'm sure you'll find them if you actually go looking, and if not (say if you live on the side of the Mississippi where indigenous people were OUTLAWED), find some online.)

Money is power, so give some of your power to people who will use it for better things than Starbucks investors do.

#IDPol
#decolonize
#decolonization
#antifa #LandBack #rewilding #Solarpunk

Oh!! And the huge convenience store which was where we stopped on the way home after our emergency visit up here last fall while making the decision to escape mom to up here, the one where I posted (or intended to post) a pic of the Bear Spray Recycling Bin, is owned by the tribe! I will be shopping there on purpose now. It's closer to where I live than down in Bonner's Ferry proper. Maybe I'll make that my main gas station.

I remember it was a REALLY nice convenience store. Rather huge, lots of lunch type foods, like real sandwiches. I was super in trauma-brain, so I can't describe my fragmented memories well, but I remember being quite impressed.

#IDPol
#decolonize
#decolonization
#antifa #LandBack

I've been trying to get an accurate bead on the policing up here. Word from the human rights taskforce is that the three police forces, including Kootenai Tribal Police, cooperate, that they're aware of hate groups and keep an eye on them, and that they're not aggressive towards the left.

I'm trying to connect the dots here (I'm sure I'll learn more), but these dots seem to go: Kootenai refused to sign the treaty with the US that would have stripped their rights, held a peaceful war (civil disobedience and blocking traffic) to get rights without giving any up, and because of that got a significant amount of policing power, which has influenced settler policing.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that THESE particular cops are not bastards. Until I hear otherwise.

"The Kootenai Tribe of Idaho Police Department is a Community-Based Policing agency which prioritizes interaction and input from the Tribal Community to address issues which affect the lives of its members."

I see their cars out around town, btw. They were patrolling around the protest along with the sheriff.

https://www.kootenai.org/pages_Government/lawEnforcement.html

Finally finding some info on the local Kootenai tribe. (I'd searched before but only found Wikipedia, and some info on the Canadian groups.)

Check this out. This happened just days after I was born!

Context:

https://www.kootenai.org/pages_AboutUs/tribalHistory.html

And what they did to take (some of) it back:

https://www.kootenai.org/pages_AboutUs/kootenaiWar.html

I wish I could show you inside my head, the maps of cultures, societies, timelines, history, organizations, themes and metaphors, collective symbols, worldviews, human psychology, all of it intersecting across each other like multidimensional cells in a Petri dish.

I *can* put this stuff into words, like in this thread, but there's so much I just don't have energy to go into. Or, sometimes that particular view that I'm looking at it isn't quite yet formed.

Stuff enough useless knowledge in there for 50 years and some patterns do start to emerge.

A lot of typos and errors in this thread. I was fighting with my phone's autocarrot for just about every word the entire thread.

It's readable though.

I'm also recalling that I explore these themes, in my novel Emerald City Dreamer and its unpublished sequels, before I had much of this language or these models to describe it.

It's about faeries and faerie hunters, based on Celtic and Scandinavian faerie lore. Fae lore is one remaining piece of pre-Christian animistic religion that managed to "survive", though barely intact.

I explore those themes via the hunters' perspective and the fae, trying to capture the spirit of actual lore rather than a rationalized version of fairies. These are capricious beings with alternative kinds of reason and morality than humans can understand. Just like nature, the Fae are neither "good" or "bad," they just are. I also explore themes of fae eradication by the advent of iron, Christianity, and later science.

In later books, I explore how colonization affected indigenous spirits in the Seattle region, in that the presence of European humans changed them against their will. And that's why all the fae in Seattle are somehow Celtic and Scandinavian.

I guess I've been thinking about this stuff for long time. And I've been pissed about the loss of Celtic culture for a long time. Because I've gone looking and it's more question marks than periods.

Regarding folk horror, which is absolutely dealing with these themes in really interesting ways (paganism vs Christianity, Christianity vs science, science vs paganism), there's a great documentary about folk horror on Shudder that should make sense. My lost contribution was just further exploration of what it had to say, via movies I was watching at the time.

It's called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. A must if you're a horror fan.

There's also the side quest into folk horror tropes, which ties nicely into this, but I've already written most of that thesis someplace else. Probably on here. Somewhere.

[I tried to find it but alas. Perhaps I wrote that on my first instance, .lol, which is all but dead... the archive is really hard to read and search, and then I'd have to repost it. A whole project.]

It's actually two games set at different times in the same fantasy world that is loosely based on Europe. Only, instead of being set in the Iron Age, they are set in the Bronze Age.

The games are King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages. These are old games but have been ported to modem systems including mobile. They really hold up. (I played them on iPad.)

These are story-based games in which you run a tribe. Each year is broken into four seasonal turns. Magic is real, but it's not a "rational" system like most games set in the Christianized fantasy worlds. There's no mana and no assured outcomes. Because it is a system based upon appealing to the gods. Each of which has a certain personality, realm of influence, relationship with the other gods, and backstory.

Each season you are presented with various events that require you to make choices. Maybe the neighboring tribe brings a territory dispute, or an earthquake destroys your huts, or an emissary from a further tribe brings you a lavish gift. Your decision will have impacts later in the game. You can also allocate resources, explore, raid, build, etc. and there's a system for holding rituals with huge benefits — but it's a story-driven ritual, and if you haven't learned the pantheon lore, you WILL fail.

It's a hard game. But super interesting. And educational. It puts you in a pre-colonized mindset. You ARE at the mercy of the elements, and the morality in these situations has no relation to modern moral luxuries (like you might have to marry someone off to prevent a war).

So along with Heilung, I recommend these two games for white folks trying to decolonize in a way that actually connects us to our past.

Did I mention this could be a thesis?

Have you ever noticed that most fantasy settings are medieval? What's with that?

They happen to be set in a time just after the Christian conquest had been completed.

It doesn't matter if the worldbuilding includes *specifically* Christian elements or not. The majority seem to begin just after the time our ancestors were actively "civilized." Subdued.

There seems to be a yearning within our creative subconscious towards a more natural, sustainable, or even pre-Christian life, but alongside it is a barrier that says GO NO FURTHER THAN THIS.

As the tropes go, any "tribal" elements in western fantasy settings are racially-coded and off-limits. The only folk practicing the old ways are the ugly barbaric evil trolls/goblins (POC) or the beautiful elusive incomprehensible elves — neither of which is for you, (white, civilized) human.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, but these are the central tropes going back to Tolkien. And these are the deep intergenerational conditioning and traumas that the white collective subconscious has been chewing on for the last century.

But there IS a game that I think passed this barrier in a way similar to Heilung...

If you're white, your ancestors lived in a tribe. There's no good in remaining divorced from that.

Now look, I love literacy and science as much as the next guy. I'd be pretty upset to lose my internet

But we do need to live more sustainably. And we do need to connect with nature and our own feelings and instincts. And we do need to stop oppressing people who don't conform to the "whiteness" construct. And a lot of other things.

I have NO IDEA where this line of personal growth is headed, nor where it could head if all of us figure these things out. But having a plan? That's very.... colonized. That's very controlling, dominating reality, and trying to be the boss of everything.

I'm hearing this call and I'm fearlessly following it where it goes. Like Cedric says in The Last Unicorn: Magic, magic do as you will!

And I'm sharing what I learn on the way.

They tried to destroy it, but they didn't quite succeed. There *is* an ethnic identity waiting for us on the other side of this bland, soulless, plastic, vampiric, artificial whiteness.

Because the secular post-Christian stance is still couched in the worldview of colonization, right? Our whole story is still that pre-Christian western Europeans were "uncivilized" "barbaric" "savages." Their beliefs were superstitious and backward. Their lives were nasty, brutish, and short. We have better tools and understandings now. We don't have anything to learn from them!

So when do we get to uncover what was ours?

That's what Heilung offers.

My fellow whites: Do you see how much there is to gain by decolonizing? By unpacking our superior attitudes not only towards BIPOC but also towards our own deep, unrecorded, and sullied history? Do you see how deeply biased we are against OUR OWN grandmothers 25 generations back? They who had lived their traditions for thousands of years?

And I know neopaganism is a thing, and I've practiced it both solo and with others, but Heilung really puts in the work, the research, the energy, the spectacle, to make it feel real what it might have been like to sit around a fire where the elders were preparing for a raid, acting out a divine scene, or appealing to the harvest spirits, knowing you're at the mercy of inhuman powers far beyond your control and understanding.

There are many paths out of authoritarian Christianity. And those paths have shifted over the centuries. Time was, your only other option wasn't atheism, it was deism, an enlightenment version of god as a scientist-creator who abandoned the universe after creating it. Now it's atheism, and from there you may end up at suburban paganism-lite, or a secular philosophy. Or you can look to various world religions.

Every one of these routes is some form of colonized or colonizing.

But Heilung is *decolonized*.

There is nothing about the culture Heilung displays on screen that is stolen from some entirely different People. (Obviously they had trade with and raided one another and nearby regions, but they didn't systemically *colonize* the way The Roman Empire and later Roman Christianity did.) Heilung gives us something that is 100% ours.

Their name means "Healing," and I could write a thesis on why that is true for me.

It takes me beyond deconstructing, into reconstructing, a space I'm less comfortable with.