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No one has time to critically engage with all that gets posted here, no, but then also, no one needs to comment on all articles either.

I quoted the passage I did because to me this is an issue, what does it mean to be white? There is much confusion, does white only refer to skin color? And it only gets more muddled the more people you ask. Like Black, white is a designation that has bureaucratic, historical, ontological and epistemological meanings and it is easy to get stuck in one or the other, making communication difficult.

In this article and the zines it is critiquing, my reading is that white is used a signifier of both skin color and a mind-set or a world view. So, in the tale of the white hunters who wanted to stop logging on the land they hunted on, they took umbrage that the Mi'kmaq, who also want to stop logging, were going to offer use of their land for hunting, but for a fee. The whites then engaged in shenanigans, declaring themselves Indigenous in order to stop the fee.

Connection to the land is not enough for one to declare oneself Indigenous, because connection to the land still implies the land and oneself are two, not one. White in the sense of mind-set still has the notion of ownership. The article is making the point that ownership of a piece of land is the least of what gives one connection to that land. Notions of property and ownership are white ideas. Ownership of land does not automatically impart to a person a sense of ancestral belonging to place. I think unlearning this (white) mode of thinking, or really, learning to think/see differently is part of what those of us with this mind-set could be doing.

As you say though, we of white skin and white ideas are here, we also suffer the scourge of capitalism and the aftermath of genocidal and colonial regimes.

I engage with the ideas in this article because I think, okay, what if we overthrow the whole thing tonight? Tomorrow we are free and hungover from a glorious night of celebration. Then what? Do we continue to use the mind frame that got us into this mess? Do we still deal with our conflicts with notions of property and human supremacy? Because you know it is not only the human that is enslaved and genocided by this regime, it is not only the human that needs to get free.

I believe Indigenous and Black people when they say slavery, genocide and colonialism are ongoing, are not over. What that means for me as a descendant of perpetrators is at the very least not forgetting that. And, of course, in the longer view all of us probably have both perpetrator and victim in our ancestral pasts, but I think trying to come to terms with the past 500 years of shit is the bulk of our conundrum.