Am in Columbus... and it's Columbus Day here in the US on Monday.
After a long drive, good laughs, great chats, buffalo wings at Buffalo, dinner with Des Brown (Beh) & her whanau, Nadine and I have arrived. We're very excited about the SAI symposium and dreaming of possible Indigenous intellectual futures.
I've checked my emails and I feel slightly assaulted: emails from home, carrying with them the impact and burden and deep pain of 200 years of colonialism.
Columbus Day is often berrated for celebrating the wrong thing; for placing Columbus at the centre of an over-edited national story. I agree with these critiques and advance them where I can.
At the same time, how can we find ways of thinking about Indigenous futures which simultaneously sideline Columbus (and colonialism of which he is an iconic representative) and recognise the longstanding and devastating impact Columbus/ colonialism continues to have on the ways we interact, think and dream?
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