Treaty responsibilities to Palestine

 

Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets: genocide, desecration, poxed-blankets, rape, humiliation. Settler colonialism… is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence – the snake in the flooded basement. – “A Glossary of Haunting” by Eve Tuck and C. Ree

I often feel haunted. I am haunted by mistakes and regret. I am haunted by past actions and decisions that have changed the course of my life. I often think about intergenerational trauma as a haunting. But I am cognizant of the fact that I am, even with these examples, understanding hauntedness – hauntings, being haunted – as a negative. As if anything bad that is passed down, that shadows our view of the future, that cloaks our understanding of ourselves, is what haunts.

Eve Tuck and C. Ree, Indigenous theorists and artists, ask us to reconsider this understanding of haunting. What if those who haunt are those who have been hurt? What if ghosts are the dispossessed, the murdered, the colonized, the violated and haunting is their agency, action, a ceremony of refusing to be forgotten? “Haunting […] is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation,” according to Tuck and Ree. 

Canada’s very existence as a settler state is threatened by Palestinian resistance, and in many ways, relies on Israel’s existence as a way to assert its own. Both countries would like to ignore these ghosts or, worse, enable their ongoing dispossession, because if Canada were to deny Israel’s right to exist, when it too came into existence through the same violent means, what does that say about its own identity as a nation-state?  (more...)

Treaty responsibilities to Palestine