called an "it" for being trans and queer, called an "it" for being disabled. no matter what we do, we'll always be creepy and scary and gross to people who lack any form of decency or kindness.
and you know what? good. they SHOULD be afraid. part of my intent behind using it/its for myself IS reclamation. people who would call us "it" out of anger or fear deserve to have that (and all) power over us stripped away.
its not just the pronouns for me either, it's the imagery. they want to think of me as something to be feared? ok, i'll fuckin be one! whatever i like halloween bullshit anyway. this just gives me an excuse to indulge in a creepy aesthetic more.
additionally, YOUR comfort does not dictate what pronouns OTHER PEOPLE can use. I've been called he and they in derogatory ways, but you sure as shit don't see me telling others they can't use those pronouns. it/it's isn't any different.
Can a White Author Responsibly Write a Lakota-Inspired Magical Story About Religious Colonization? If so, how?
Mentallyamoth asks:
CW: war, genocide, colonization
Hello, I am currently writing a book in a fantasy world setting centering a Lakota-inspired main character. In this world, the magic that you develop depends on your religious beliefs. A long time ago, two large groups with two different religious beliefs silmutaniously decided that their religion was the right one and that they had to convince everyone of it. They colonized smaller groups, fought each other and killed all those who wouldn’t give up their beliefs. Now fast forward, my main character is part of one of these colonised groups, living in a city full of the colonizers.
She secretly still believes in her religion, which is Lakota inspired, but knows that openly trying to resist the system will kill her and everyone important to her. So, instead, her goal is to become the first one of the once colonized people to earn respect, power and success for herself and her people. She believes that will be enough to undo the injustice done since she’s been fed with propaganda that the war and genocide “wasn’t so bad”.
She then finds out that there is still people who resist the system, living in secret and preparing for a war. Yet she doesn’t believe that they can do any change and instead originally plans on ratting them out in order to cast a good light on her and her family. Throughout the story, she slowly learns more about what truly happened to her people and decides that she wants to challenge the system she had always been told was the “right one”. In the end, she helps build a society where people respect each other and each others beliefs.
Now, I am a white author and neither me nor my ancestors have experienced religious colonization. However, the topic of religion and the harm it can do, while still being something beautiful and empowering, is very important to me. Still, I don’t want to profit off of other people’s suffering and know that (religious) colonization is a very sensitive topic.
Would it be possible for me to write this story if I do enough research, and if yes, what are some things I have to pay attention to?
—
Let me begin this reply with the story of a real life person: Jody Wilson-Raybould. She was Canada’s first Indigenous Minister of Justice and Attorney General. She joined politics specifically to change the colonialist Canadian society, as an idealist.
Jody Wilson-Raybould. Photo by Erich Saide. image description: a dark haired, dark eyed woman with tan skin and a polite toothy smile, wearing a black blazer and red blouse
She was actually starting from a better position to change society than your protagonist—her grandmother persevered to maintain tribal governance, and her father was a hereditary chief. She was taught Indigenous leadership from birth, she grew up navigating the worlds of Indigenous and colonizer, and she wanted to be a lawyer, then prime minister.
It took fourteen years of lawyer positions, tribal counsel positions, and volunteer work for her to gain a seat in politics for the Liberal party. The next year, fifteen years after the start of her career in political positions, she was made the Minister of Justice, the third woman and first Indigenous person to hold the role. She accomplished some things in her tenure. She tried to change Indigenous rights, to make them better, but whether or not she succeeded is highly up for debate. She updated women’s rights and children’s rights. She passed cannabis legalization. She also passed MAiD legalization.
Under her tenure, a white man was acquitted by an all-white jury for murdering a Cree boy on his property in Saskatchewan, and people said she undermined the justice system by openly questioning the jury’s verdict on twitter. She had no power to change a Saskatchewan community with a deeply racist legacy.
Four years after she was made minister of justice, she was demoted to veterans’ affairs—likely because she pushed for reconciliation, and to change the colonial system. She was loud, and bold, and demanding, and she lost power for it. She openly called the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women a farce.
Weeks later, she resigned when there was speculation Justin Trudeau had pressured her to rule one way or another when she was attorney general. She ran as an independent for a bit, but seems to have quit politics since. Burned out, chewed up, writes books about this time in her life and tries other avenues. She’s basically disappeared from Canadian pop culture life, unless you happen to be very interested in this sector of the country’s culture. I don’t know how many Canadians could tell you anything that’s changed for them, unless they directly interacted with her laws—and I don’t know if they even know those changes came from her.
I tell you this story because here is a real life woman in a significantly better position than your protagonist. She had every single thing going for her, to create something. To change something. To create a middle ground society. And the system ground her down to the point she quit and functionally disappeared.
Indigenous communities are extremely divided on her, some saying she did good, others saying she’s a colonial shill who’s working far too much in the system to ever get land back. Either way, the main relevant thing for you to know is she failed.
The most fantastical part of the story you’re proposing is the fact there is implied success. That there is implied speed. But people like your protagonist exist in the real world. They are lauded and they are slandered. They move the needle slightly, sometimes in good directions, sometimes in bad. But one of the most universal constants in all of them is they fail at producing drastic cultural change. There is too much work to undo colonialism by a single person.
Now, if you read this and think “okay, so I’ll scale back the idealism”, I would invite you to keep reading. Because you’re going to need to fundamentally change multiple parts of this in order to write a respectful story.
1- half of a reclamation character arc
I think this is where the plot falls down the most. Because you jump from “learning everything is a lie” to “and now things are rebuilding and I’m free”, which is how a lot of people think it goes—especially if they haven’t experienced religious colonialism and deconstruction work.
You basically have the first half of a character arc here, and it’s a perfectly fine first half… until it goes into an altruistic dream instead of really sitting with repercussions.
What I feel like is missing is simple: what is she grieving?
The grief of growing up in a colonial system is staggering. Not just your life, but your parents’ lives, your community’s lives, the pieces of broken chain and disconnect you can see.
One of my steadfast beliefs is that people need a culture that connects them to something. They have traditions, they have food, they make things, they steward things. They feel ownership over taking care of their families, their property, their community, their everything.
To me, the root of colonialism is it strips you of that and replaces it with itself, leaving your world a hollowed out shell either fighting to get something, or numbing to stop the pain. It’s traumatic. It is nothing short of traumatic, and that trauma lives in your bloodline as pain. Abuse, addiction, and a disconnect from emotions because you don’t have anything to teach you how to process the world around you, anymore, with these external systems.
This has created breaks in chains that had survived for ages before, and the amount of chain you retain depends on where you landed after it was cut. Someone who lives on a reservation on ancestral land, who returned to the reservation after residential schools, and who has done reconstruction work and knows the language and rituals and crafts and food stewardship and survival strategies has a lot of chain. Someone like me, whose great grandfather left everything to try and become white, hardly has anything. I need to manually go and learn everything from scratch. A bunch of people are in the middle, for varying reasons with varying bits and pieces of what used to be.
The arc right now is the arc I see mirrored in dozens and dozens of asks: I have learned about injustice, and I will gain power to “fix” it. I will be Good. I will Inspire. Things Will Be Better.
Where is the healing? Where is the grief? Where is the time spent unpacking everything and learning to not be bowled over every time you’re reminded of something that was awful because people decided you were sub-human, all because of an idea and a god that told them it was okay to kill everything you loved?
When looking at this character and plot, there’s no real… understanding, on a narrative level, that this colonial system replaced something. It’s treating her secretly practicing magic as enough, when it’s not. She lost so much more than just magic, and she’s only managed to retain the smallest part of her ancestral way of life.
She’s also kinda recreating colonialism by trying to make a new, better thing to replace the present with, instead of reaching back to the broken chain and seeing what parts of it can be pulled into the future. She’s not doing anything to make space for other colonized groups to do the same, as well. It just… ends. With an unrealistic ideal, and a neat little bow that it’s simply realization of lies and injustice that’s enough to get your life back. It’s not.
We can’t go back to the “old ways”, no—the chain is cut, the land has been depleted by extractive processes, the people are traumatized. We do need a new system. But in the end, it’s just as colonial to go full replacement all over again. We need a set of systems informed by the past, before the chains were cut, that lets those colonized become whole again in a way that fits each and every one of them.
What parts of the chain does she hold, beyond magic? What does she want to grab that belonged to her that was stolen generations ago? How will she make space for that? What is fundamentally incompatible with the way the system is now, and what trade-offs will she make to get what she wants? Will what she wants change as she discovers there was an old way, or will she give up connecting fully to her history in the name of trying to move the needle?
I will caution you, however, this sort of story is getting extremely, extremely close to an identity story, and reclamation narratives are fraught in the best of times. I would not make your MC bipoc in this scenario at all, but instead an accomplice to help get the story out and move the needle. I’m simply explaining this in detail for you to understand why this narrative does not land.
2- you’re using a closed practice
Having a magic system implies that it will be used within the story, and will be a plot point. Either way, I’d assume her magic would be described, somehow, and your end goal would be to have it shown in its full Indigenous glory.
This is not going to be possible.
The vast majority of Indigenous belief systems are closed. This means you physically cannot research it. The data might exist, but the likelihood of it being stolen or coming from someone who is selling culture for clout is exceptionally high. This means your research data will be unusable. You’re either going to have to make it up wholecloth—at which point it stops being Lakota and is just your idea of what Lakota practice is like—or you’re going to go off corrupted research and it’ll be a coin flip on if it’s still Lakota inspired or not, and whether or not Lakota will be mad at you for including it. You’d need a beta reader, and a close connection to the community.
Ergo, you have failed the fundamental first step of using others’ cultures for your protagonist: researching it. If you cannot research it, then do not write it. Outsiders can absolutely write Indigenous protagonists if they use publicly available cultural practices, fade to black for closed practices, and work with the communities to ensure they’re showing respect to these practices and not revealing stuff that can’t be written down.
You can’t do that with Indigenous beliefs where an entire magic system based on a closed practice.
If you want to keep this magic system, you need a culture with an open religious practice. You can keep Indigenous beliefs in here, I’ve answered an ask about this before in All Myths are True, Native Spirits Invisible to Outsiders, but to have the magic be used on page you need an open practice. It would work better as a side character, unless you’re willing to not show the magic—one of the cores of this premise—on page.
3- two religions ruling the world
I recognize I have spoken about the colonial religious proxy wars between Protestants and Catholics extensively, and that is probably what you’re pulling from in cultural background radiation to write this. You’re pulling from a normal, very well known scenario, and flattening it for fantasy as so many authors are wont to do.
And you’ve inadvertently created a drama bunny that really does not register as realistic.
There are a handful of religions that have known histories of colonization, enslavement, and genocide. The two big ones that spring to mind are Christianity and Islam, but they’re not… unified. I know of at least two major Muslim branches (Sunni and Shia) and four major Christian branches (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Protestant), which is not counting splinter groups, offshoots, individual denominations, or regional variations in practice that defy the central orthodoxy.
These branches happened via a series of schisms over the course of their histories—everything from leaders dying (the split between Sunni and Shia) to “we just spread across multiple continents and are now trying to get together and agree on how to do things. We don’t? I’m making my own church” (oversimplified ancient Christianity—Protestant reformation is a different kettle of fish).
Sometimes these sub-groups agree on stuff, but they’re often wildly different faiths both in day to day living and in their active worship time. So two religions large enough to just fight to the death registers as extremely hollow to me, and would register as hollow to a lot of religious people. As an antagonist, this premise feels kind of toothless. You’d need to figure out how two religions got that large and why they suddenly decided they had to win.
I’d also caution you that these religions being able to subjugate everyone else successfully leaves a very powerless taste in my mouth that genuinely undercuts any resistance efforts you show in here. You cannot have them be this successful and still have a triumphant story—it’d be a bittersweet victory at best.
I’d suggest watching Religion For Breakfast, which has a lot of videos for writers trying to make fantasy religions along with a bunch of really cool info about real world religions. You can start with Why Fictional Religions Feel So Fake which gives a broad overview of how to create something living and breathing instead of just a plot device.
4- colonial respectability politics
The thing about being “one of the good ones” is, getting promoted that way is fundamentally incompatible with creating change. It’s respectability politics in a nutshell—it begs and pleads with the oppressor to see your worth, turns you into an awful version of yourself because you must agree with the oppressor, and the moment you ask for anything you’re turned on because you stopped being one of the good ones. You’re mostly gaining status, not power, via this route.
Beginning here is fine. It goes very well with the “half a character arc” thing. Starting her as a villain in this way—a subtle one, but a villain none the less—is great.
Playing into respectability politics produces a different kind of wound than being a colonial victim. Instead, its wound is one of deep grappling with your own morality, the depression that comes from denying yourself to earn basic respect, and the alienation of self and community that comes from being a mouthpiece for the oppressor. There’s past snobbery, people she’s thrown under the bus before the plot started, community ties she didn’t have, principles of her ancestral community she’s denied or twisted to justify herself.
And none of this is in the plot, other than a token mention she wants to rat out resistance.
This avenue of getting power also makes you extremely unlikely to change anything. You played the system to gain the system’s power, and you’re willing to throw it all away by dismantling the system that now keeps you safe and protected for being good? Or, as is the case with Jody Wilson-Reybold, be demoted when you start pushing too hard. Sure, you can claim altruism, and you can do a bunch of good at that level, but the system does not care about those outside of its bounds and a lot of people will lose a bunch of privilege if it changes, so there’s a ton of resistance to changing it.
The higher up your protagonist gets in the system, the more they lose touch with the worst off. Not to mention, breaking those boundaries hurts. A lot. And leaves a ton of psychological damage that can make it so that you don’t have any more fight to change the system and just leave. (To quote Daniella Mestyanek Young, a veteran who helped break the combat ban for women in the American military: “I was bleeding to death from breaking the glass ceiling.” She now talks about the problems with the military, and has gotten 0 military support after her career of trying and “succeeding” to change it—male veterans who talk about their military experience are promoted far and wide. She was flat out drummed out of the military for being too different)
And this propping up of the colonial system really shows up in how you don’t mention any land back principles. These are, in my opinion, fundamental for creating a society that respects Indigenous sovereignty. An Indigenous character who is genuine about changing a colonial system should at least be informed by these principles. They’re often an end goal for reconciliation, for how they say the land should be managed by their original stewards.
Even if you adjusted for everything else I’ve addressed, this point makes your plot a very specific type of story that a lot of privileged people tell themselves—they’ve been benefited by the system, so they’ll just climb the power ladders and make it better for everyone!
It’s altruistic at its core, I understand this. It’s a very, very common plot.
The way it is here, it’s not going to work. The big giant payoff of “we all respect each other now” is just a fantasy, and a lot of BIPOC are tired of this plot because it’s so fantastical. It does not reflect the work involved in change, and can make a lot of people not put in the work to change because they’ve been sold by stories that it’s this easy. And as evident by the very introduction of this answer, people who try often fail on some fundamental level.
All in All
Can this story be done respectfully? Not the way you have it now. I’d personally not trust a white author who’s never experienced religious colonialism to do such a deeply trauma-informed, identity-based story that we haven’t had a chance to tell ourselves, yet. You need so many more community ties to write this kind of thing than you have, by your own admission.
To put it bluntly: finding something empowering or interesting personally is not the same as writing something that will be empowering for others. From the sounds of it, you want a reclamation story, and you’re grabbing the most barebones version of North American colonial history to get it—with an idealized fantasy ending that’s based in individualism instead of the necessary collective healing. You’re putting Lakota paint on a character, then putting her in a narrative that’s fed by the mainstream and has produced much frustration from marginalized groups because it sells an idea that just isn’t true. It can even make people more likely to give up working to make the world better, because in real life there’s no grand finale where suddenly everyone realizes they were wrong and we all get along now the way there is in a story.
If you want to write something with these sorts of notes, here’s what I’d suggest. Some of these are mutually exclusive, but pick which one feels the best:
Keep a pretty similar story but do the work required to make it nuanced and worthy of the topics your exploring, while also changing the MC’s race because I don’t think this is a story outsiders can really do
Make the story much more individualistic and smaller—someone who is personally subjugated in a (white, Christian-coded) religious community who doesn’t fit and is lesser, without a bunch of colonialism history—unlearning their religious indoctrination and trying to change the system and creating their own little community of friends and found family, without anything beyond the scope of a single town (I’d suggest reading the book “I Belong to Me” by Tia Levings as a start to this, as it sums up her fourteen year rebuilding journey in a linear fashion. Her memoir A Well Trained Wife explains why she needed to escape and rebuild, too)
Play with secondary world fantasy in ways that explore this from different angles—either focus on Indigenous power fantasies without colonialism and reclamation identity stories, religious colonialism from a different point in in its execution from someone not experiencing a ton of violence, or just yank an unlearning propaganda arc without the heavy religious and colonial bent from, again, someone who shares more of your identity.
I recognize this is a monster of a reply, but this was a lot of opportunity to touch on a lot of aspects of religious colonialism and reclamation arcs. I hope you managed to find something helpful in this, and have a better understanding of how social justice works.
"Can't have this going around now, can we?
…Your work may be praised by the people around us, but deep down you know it's nothing, but trash.
Just like you."
Clarification: this phrase was heard in the VS. Eteled: Reincarnate.
And this is what we see in Christmas with the Sanders | Wii Deleted you: Aftermath (Episode 1).
Honestly, I don't know how to react to this. Henry claimed Reclamation was "trash." Austin claimed the Wii U was a "garbage console." And in the end, it all ended with the "trash" ending up in a "garbage console." Huh…
— · A blankqueer stance which supports the reclamation of every single word, term and/or label that was originally created to discriminate or mock on minorities. It claims that there shouldn't exist words or terms for discrimination purposes anymore. Thus, any term with these kind of intentions must be reclaimed, in order to give them whole new definitions. It also supports the reconstruction of other type of harmful labels.
This blankqueer itself is neu-radqueer, so anyone is free to use it.
It was also inspired by stances like trollpunk and madqueer.
The emoji combos are: 🤝💝, 💝🤝, 🤝🛠️
It supports the reclamation of:
Pejorative slurs, giving these new definitions so that these are no longer seen as something negative.
Any term commonly used to insult minorities (mad, invalid, weirdo, slow, etc).
Any label which was originally made to mock on the LGBTQIA+ and MOGAI communities (animesexual, purplesexual, rabiosexual, dreamsexual [not yumesexual], etc) and seeing these as actual valid sexualities/identities/xenosexualities.
Exclusionist orientations and totally separating them from bigotry. For example: Vixenamoric meaning lesbians with preference for she/her women instead of being exclusionist, Todamoric meaning gays with preference for he/him men, "super" orientations meaning a personal preference for cisgender entities instead of inherently being transphobe, etc. Claimqueers may also support the total deconstruction of these terms.
