DECOLONIZE YOUR MINE
Decolonize your mine evokes a long history that links the extraction of precious metals from the earth to the internalized sentiments that lock colonizers and the colonized into systems of exploitation. Drawing from Bob Marley’s call to “emancipate yourself from mental slavery”, which itself echoed Frantz Fanon’s insistence that the end of colonialism had to be rooted in a profound shift in the mindsets of both colonizer and colonized, the image harkens back to one of the earliest symbols of colonial rule (the first Spanish mines in the Americas date to the 1530s), and calls not just for a critique of mining, but for a critique of the capitalist modes of production that continue to normalize the destruction of nature. Is nature just there for our use, to be destroyed in the interest of accumulation, part of a cost-benefit analysis in which the very future of the planet hangs in the balance? Or is nature something more sacred, something that needs to be reimagined as we decolonize our mine/mind?