NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7853021" data-attributes="member: 4937">I can see how off-putting that would be, but I'm not sure it's accurate to describe that as white supremacy or colonialism. But I think there is an even deeper complaint that he touches on in the text and that is that people back on the reservation at home look at him funny and tell him he's not a "Native Person" as well. The feelings of alienation that he describes himself having don't come primarily from the Germans being characteristically insensitive, but from the fact that he has feelings of abandonment from what he considers his own people. And that sounds rough too and I wouldn't want to walk a mile in his shoes, but I don't think that's "white supremacy" or "colonialism" either.Nor do I think we can blame most of that very human experience on "the historical stance of the Government of Canada regarding native people."  Ethnicity is a really complex issue because historically all the separate facets of ethnicity were tied up together - person, place, culture, language, sovereignty - it was all a bundle.   In the modern world, in the world America helped create, that package has come untied.   Now your blood heritage, your place of residence, your culture, your language, and your national identity aren't all aligned, and this creates all sort of new possibilities but also all sorts of new challenges of figuring out  who you are and how you get along with your neighbors.I grew up as an 'ex-pat', even though I became an 'ex-pat' at such a young age that I ended up culturally knowing more about the place I grew up in than the place I was born. When I moved back to the place of my birth, I considered myself as much or more of a Jamaican as a I did an American. But now, both I and Jamaica have moved on. That culture that I grew up in decades ago hardly exists any more. In it's place is a culture that emerged from the culture I knew, just as I have emerged as an adult from the kid that I was. If I were to return to Jamaica it would be as a stranger - not a total stranger, I'd know my way around a good deal more than someone how hadn't lived there - but it wouldn't be 'home' any more and I'd have a lot of learning to do. So now this guy is living in Germany but also identifies as a Native American. He's got far more challenges than I would. I have a lot of sympathy for that. I don't have a lot of sympathy for describing these problems as "white supremacy" and "colonialism".</blockquote>

Verification