In which I find something useful via Helen Dale

As I have long said, I am no fan at all of Helen Dale and her writings, but occasionally, very occasionally, I will drop into Twitter X and see what she is commenting on.

This time, she linked to an article she wrote about another writer's book about the indigenous academia world of "settler-colonialism", a phrase of no obvious meaning (much like a mantra simply made to repeat in front of other academics)  which I have seen used endlessly on the Twitter accounts of the likes of Professor Sandy O'Sullivan - the indigenous/Irish academic who is, for my money, a hot favourite for any award there may be for the worst waste of money on academic research funding in Australia (see the list at the end of the article linked).      

I'm still not sure who claims credit for the term - Dale claims a lot of Australian academia helped it spread, but she's light on details.  Nonetheless, this part of Dale's article about it seems to me to explain it well:

This replacement of history with myth leads Kirsch to argue the ideology is a “political theology,” that is, a secularised religious concept expressed civically. A form of original sin where the everlasting process of colonisation means never-ending exploitation, racism, misogyny, and genocide, it suggests only the Noble Savage that is the Native can redeem us.

In one of the field’s most influential papers, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck of SUNY New Paltz and K. Wayne Yang of UC San Diego write that “relinquishing settler futurity” is necessary if we are to imagine “the Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone.”

And here’s me thinking futurity referred to a competitive equestrian event for younger horses.

As Kirsch says, “The goal is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist.”...

Much of On Settler-Colonialism turns on Kirsch’s argument that because it requires policies that can never be implemented (“deport 97 per cent of the US population!”), it’s merely depressing and stupid. “America should not exist” is never analysed with a view to doing anything apart from making the place miserable with itself. 

Yes:  this is exactly what it has been like to watch indigenous rights street protest in Australia for the last couple of decades - as silly as watching 1960's communists trying to muster support for abolishing capitalism, and simply designed, so it seems, to perpetuate grievance without any sensible work as to how to actually improve things.

I will add to this later...