Occupied Land

A Critique of New Age Settler Colonialism

No, we definitely are NOT!

I don’t claim to understand the Indigenous experience in the United States. I can—and do—empathize, but I cannot understand.

indigenous

are the first nations/

my ancestors colonized/

pox blankets in hand

I have zero reference for what it feels like to be discriminated against for the color of my skin. I don’t know what the heavy, suffocating weight of generational trauma feels like. I am a white man occupying Timucua land, currently known on the maps as Central Florida. I walk on soil where a complex, vibrant society was not just conquered, but effectively erased from existence by the twin plagues of European disease and European swords.

Timucua

strip malls hide the bones/

timucua gone to dust/

crime scene paved in tar/

​”White” Europeans created whiteness as a way to feel superior to other human beings, elevating the lack of melanin in their skin to a moral imperative, ignoring that the only real differences in humanity are regional and cultural. This hierarchy seems to be uniquely an English, French, Roman, and Spanish view of humanity—a tool of empire building. Before “white” was a thing, the Scots, Irish, Norse, Italians, and Eastern Europeans were “less than”, “savages”, all of whom are undoubtedly Caucasian. They were colonized, subjugated, and displaced before “White” people ever “discovered” the Americas. Incidentally, the first “white” people that visited were Norse vikings (which was an occupation, by the way, not a culture). In fact, it’s still called Newfoundland. The Norse people were nomadic as well, simply looking for places to migrate to, driven by the same fundamental needs as the people they met here.

​It is a strange and haunting thing to realize that the very ground beneath my feet is a crime scene that has been paved over with strip malls and gated communities. White folks in this country love to appropriate the peoples we have subjugated and displaced. Perhaps it’s uniquely a white American pathology, born of a deep, subconscious jealousy. The truth is, there is no such thing as “white culture.” Whiteness is not a culture; it is a sociopolitical power structure designed to exclude. To become “white,” my ancestors had to be themselves stripped of their origins and culture. We could have been Irish, Scottish, or Norse—people with vibrant histories, distinct arts, and ancient folklore that we could easily revive for ourselves. We could be diving into the runic history of the North or the anti-imperialist struggles of the Celts.

void

whiteness has no roots /

burning sage to fill the void /

honor built on theft

​Instead, we were stripped of that distinct heritage, replaced by the bland, violent homogeny of the Empire, and now, forgetting our histories, we are complicit. We are benefiting from more than two hundred fifty years of oppression and systemic racism, without acknowledging that fact. Now, staring into the void of that empty identity, we panic. We try to fill the hole by stealing. We make “The Blues,” Jazz, and dreadlocks ours. We get tattoos of dream catchers we don’t understand and hang them in condos built on stolen land. We burn sage we have no right to harvest, buying it in plastic packages from corporate retailers. You see these crackers out here claiming to be “1/10th Indigenous” for some weird psychopathic reason. It’s a salve for the conscience; perhaps white people need to feel better about being colonizers. If they can claim a drop of the oppressed’s blood, maybe they don’t have to feel the guilt of the oppressor.

Dear reader, I’m not sitting on some high horse here, preaching down to the masses. I am a product of this system too. Before I understood the weight of cultural appropriation—operating under a haze of what was most likely unintentional intentional ignorance—I even tattooed Chinese characters into my own skin. I grabbed pieces of a language I do not speak and forced them to fit my narrative. I certainly hope those symbols mean what I think they mean, at least until I can scrape the cash together to get them covered. I acknowledge that theft. I carry the proof of my own colonization of culture right on my body. And will only cover them, not remove them as a reminder of how easy it is to be “white” in this country.

To quote Dead Pioneers, a punk band that captures this rage perfectly:

​”Woo, you know who you are.

You culture vulture fake-ass Indians.

Trying to take and benefit off our culture, Our ceremonies.

Burning sage, Benevolent cultural appropriation.

Honor by stealing?

Some New Age Settler Colonial thievery...

Get your own culture.”

​Just like the empires of the past, the United States Empire took over half a continent. We followed the playbook our UK ancestors wrote in Europe, Africa, India, and North America. But then, as if we needed to “one-up” them, we committed nothing less than genocide. We signed treaties with invisible ink. We called massacres “battles” (I’m looking at you, Wounded Knee). We carved the faces of our “heroes” into their sacred mountains like Mount Rushmore—a permanent act of vandalism on a holy site.

​And we stole their children. This wasn’t just a byproduct of war; it was a calculated, industrialized attempt to destroy a people by destroying their future. We built the “Indian Residential Schools,” institutions of horror disguised as education. The motto was explicit: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Federal agents would descend on reservations, forcibly removing children from the arms of their parents, loading them onto wagons and trains to be shipped hundreds of miles away to places like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

​Inside those walls, they were stripped of their names and given Christian ones. Their long hair—a source of cultural pride and spiritual significance—was shorn off. They were beaten for speaking their native tongues. They were subjected to rampant physical and sexual abuse, forced into manual labor, and malnourished. These weren’t schools; they were indoctrination camps designed to shatter the family unit and sever the transmission of culture.

graves

cut the childrens hair/

kill the indian save the man/

graves without a name

Thousands of children never came home (sound familiar?), buried in unmarked graves behind the schoolhouses, victims of disease, neglect, and abuse. We are only now, in the 21st century, beginning to unearth the physical proof of what Indigenous communities have known for generations: we didn’t just take their land; we tried to take their souls.

​The Indigenous people of North and South America have been nomadic for thousands of years. Migration is the natural state of humanity; it is how we survive. We follow the seasons, the herds, and the water. But this natural flow is incompatible with the industry of exploitation that European whites brought to this continent. We created borders—imaginary lines on the land enforced by men with guns—and effectively destroyed the conservation of the earth and the migration of its people.

​The Americas had no borders until white Europeans showed up; the Spanish and Portuguese in the South, the English in the North. We are still witnessing this migratory drive in 2025. It is the same human movement that has happened for millennia, but now the Empire calls it a “border crisis.” It isn’t a crisis of movement; it is a crisis of stagnation. It is the friction caused by an ancient, fluid humanity crashing against the rigid, imaginary walls of a colonial state. We demand labor but refuse humanity. We demand resources but refuse to share the land.

wind

lines drawn on the earth/

empire tries to cage the wind/

nomads know the way

As I sit here in the humidity of the South, looking at land that was stolen before it was sold, trying to navigate the collapse of late-stage capitalism, I know I can’t fix the past. But I can at least refuse to participate in the “honor by stealing.” I can leave the sage alone. I can support and amplify Indigenous artists and creators. And I can look at the “border crisis” on the news and see it for what it really is: the desperate gasp of an Empire trying to cage the wind and prevent the well overdue collapse we are currently living through. All empires fail; they are not sustainable.

To quote Gregg Deal (front man for the Dead Pioneers), “land back, and you pay rent”.

This empire deserves to fall; we have debts to pay that can never be paid, at least not in this toxic stew of capitalism, oligarchy, and authoritarianism we find ourselves in is collectively rejected. This is not a culture war, comrades, this is a class war we will absolutely win. People are starting to wake up