Settler reality
At the risk of offending readers, many who I deeply respect and care for, I wish to suggest that the conversation around naming a new secondary school in the Hart, at least how it’s been presented up to now, is overwhelmingly selfcentred and harmful. Much of the debate is essentially an exercise in white narcissism.
How else can you explain that a proposal intended to focus attention on Indigenous history and culture has the media, both social and news, putting the spotlight instead on whether a predominantly white community is OK with this idea?
As an immigrant person of colour with Indigenous ancestors from another continent, who is relatively new to Prince George, l must tell you that what has transpired is both bizarre and comically, yet tragically, absurd.
It is an indisputable fact that we live on the territory of the Lheidli T’enneh, a people that, according to archeological evidence, have for thousands of years called this place home. For contrast, let’s recall that Canada didn’t become a nation-state until 1867 and that Prince George didn’t become an official city until 1915.
And despite what many readers may think or want to believe, the forces of European colonization, which, let’s be frank, includes Canada, have never fully conquered Indigenous nations. The Spanish, French, British, etc. and their respective descendants may have succeeded in suppressing such peoples and temporarily establishing hegemony over them, but at no point have Indigenous nations agreed to surrender their natural rights to land or self-determination.
And just as importantly, they never will. While the flags, languages, and customs of dominant settler societies have fluctuated over the centuries, the enduring resilience of Indigenous peoples has remained constant. This is what history teaches us and there’s no reason to believe that will ever change. To expect otherwise requires self-delusion and leads to hubris.
Most of us readers, myself included, are settlers, which is not a disparaging term despite what many would like you to believe. It just means colonization made it possible for us to be here. After all, it is only because of guns, germs, and steel that I, an immigrant of South American origin with Spanish-speaking ancestors, many who originally came from Italy, am today writing this article in English, a West Germanic language that was imported into Britain starting around the fifth century, for a newspaper based in the northwestern part of North America.
Nothing about that last sentence intuitively makes sense when you think about it, but subconsciously most of us accept this as the natural state of things. Why? We’re so immersed in colonial thinking that we’re oblivious to how silly it sounds to an outsider hearing some white people complain about the idea of giving a high school an Indigenous name even though it’s located on Indigenous land. Imagine the mental acrobatics it takes to achieve such a pitiful lack of selfawareness.
Any discussion by someone who is non-Indigenous about matters that relate to Indigenous peoples is from the outset deficient if it fails to consider this context. And sadly, that precisely is what has been missing from much of this debate. Ignacio Albarracin Prince George