So after years of constantly making words up (because English isn’t expansive enough to describe its own f**kery) I’ve decided to bring a number of “isms” together and compile a little glossary:
Indigiphile: n. person who fetishizes Indigenous culture, most often white new age/hippy folk but especially those with exploitative intentions (haka workshops in Germany for middle-class white folk; white”shaman” healers etc)
Frag-ally: n. people whose allyship falls apart as soon as they need to critically examine their own behaviour, or not center themselves. Also tend to act up if you refuse to hold their hand on their journey or be their public brown endorser.
Flagophile: n. colonizer who loves beating themselves up publicly for being a bad, bad colonizer rather than changing their behaviour and have little to no regard for how their self-flagellation & demands for attention are also a waste of our time & energy.
Colonielle: n. Female colonizer. Extremely venomous. Avoid at all costs.
Bekhi: n. Becky (basic white girl without a clue), but new age. Often marked with a dreamcatcher tattoo, wants a moko kauwae SO BAD, wears a lot of tassels, bindis, and partial to claiming Indigenous spirit guides.
Coloni-splaining: (v) When colonizers explain colonization (and what should be done about it) to Indigenous people. Quite often with theories they pulled outta their colon.
Compulsive Unimaginative Non-Solution Disorder [CUND]: n. incontrollable compulsion to develop the most boring self-serving solutions to problems we never said we had in the 1st place & then trap us in “cundsultation” meetings asking what we think even though we all know that approach sucks.
Ancestral-planing: (v) Indigenous dissociative technique employed when stuck in a room with a coloni-splainer or anyone with a bad case of CUND. Usually begins with wondering what’s for lunch, then eyes glaze over, sounds turn into blah blah blah background noise and your spirit goes off to more interesting places.
Bro-moter: n. Cuzzies that act as colonial wing-men, enthusiastically introducing colonial businessmen and NGOs to native communities. You’ll generally find them online defending colonielles & colonizers (including tone-policing Indigenous critique).
Euro-magination: (n) the part of pakeha minds which creates make believe worlds where everyone has wifi, iwi are all rich, Maori all get free University education, wāhine Māori want your attention and need your opinion etc etc
Asstorian: (n) Ahistorical historian. Fond of starting history at convenient points which erase the colonial f**kery leading up to an event. Also usually (but not exclusively) Tory historians.
Colon-eyes: (n) A way of looking at the world which glazes right over non-White voices & rights in the here & now so you can continue to gleefully extract from & exploit them. Example (click to enlarge):
*This will be a living post, and as new forms of fkery evolve, and new words come to light, I’ll be adding them here.
🖤🤍❤️✊🏾
As an (un)settler who has strayed into CUND-land and coloni-splaining myself, while thinking I was actually being self-reflective (but perhaps was actually centering my own issues while thinking I was doing the work – cue white tears, sigh), these are superb. I’ve added ‘enclosurising’ to my own ‘are you being an unreflective colonial dick’ checklist – ie the unchecked urge to compartmentalise, package and ultimately appropriate Indigenous knowledge in ways that are useful to, and are skewed to reflect, the enclosed worldview of the coloniser, but still gives the impression there’s conceptual land left for all to use. But I’m also conscious that this reply, and sharing my own checklist, may in and of itself be an act of CUND-y coloni-splaining, so I’ll understand if you’re ancestral-planing as you read this…
That was DELIGHTFUL.