Even white males can advocate for decolonization; it’s an important site for contestation

The subject formation and governance inherent to settling also involves processes of ordering, which govern the very notions of belonging. These processes of ordering, such as those based on white supremacy, not only enhance our privileges through exploitation, but also further enable my family and I to feel at home in other’s homeland(s), or as the case may be, to disparage and even flee at the sight of Other(s). Belonging, after all, requires the discursive production and circulation of those who do not belong. “To settle” then remains differentiated in terms of race, national-origin, religion, class, dis/ability, sexuality, and gender. All of these differentiations though are underwritten by the dispossession of Indigenous lands and eschewal of Indigenous governance orders. So while all non-Indigenous peoples residing in settler states may be complicit in settlement, making us all settlers, not all settlers are created equal. Subject- formation in settler colonies works in multiple ways, privileging in multiple ways, and settler colonialism’s conditions of possibility rely on the differentiated forms of subject-formation and privilege. For myself, as a white, class-privileged, temporarily able-bodied, heterosexual, university-educated cis-male, the social world really is crafted in my image... In spite of this worldly reflection, it is not the world that I want to live in. Thus, the term “settler” and the reason for its use, which brings forth the intimate and affective relationships to ancestral, social, cultural, economic, and political histories and presents which shape this world, necessarily leads not to pride, but rather to shame, frustration, alienation, and anger towards myself, other settlers, as well as the structures of settler colonialism. These feelings though also potentially signal an opening, a recognition of an un(der)realized interdependence. However, alone, these feelings are not sufficient. After all, I cannot just critique or declare that this world falls short of my desires and expect it to transform itself. Nor can I ignore the power differentials between settlers, as such willful acts risk stalling the decolonial engine. Instead, if these desires and simultaneous feelings of shame, frustration, alienation, and anger are to be at all transformative, they must be accompanied by thought and practice attentive to their respective sources; they must be guided by accountability and respect, care and renewal, with urgency and insurgency, to address and destroy the parasitical relations that exist between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples, as well as to support those (potentially) good relations that already exist, and those that we wish to establish between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples.