skibreaux:

saltfishandbake:

saltfishandbake:

saltfishandbake:

Noah fence but y’all white people want to talk about colonialism like its ancient history but the current queen of England was literally already queen when my dad was a kid and Trinidad was an English colony and he was beaten in missionary school by his white teachers for speaking Hindi and refusing to convert to Christianity

Like my great grandparents, some of whom I knew and were alive in my lifetime were freaking indentured servants

Like if u dnt know what that is, it’s the system that the British created after they abolished slavery to get cheap Labor to the colonies (it didn’t just happen to Indians but that’s the narrative of my ancestors so that’s what I’ll talk about)

They promised some labourers free passage to and from India if they agreed to go to the colonies and work on the plantations in order to fund the British economy and some Indians they just plain stole like my great grandma arrived in Trinidad with no husband and a baby on her hip and spoke no English and had to live in an old hut that once housed slaves and performed the backbreaking work of cutting sugar cane in the hot sun all day with her baby with no compensation

And thousands of Indians had a similar narrative only to have it turn out that the promise of return to India was a false one that the Brits never intended to keep like the Brits exploited their labor for nothing more than empty promises

I have no idea what ethnics groups I belong to, I speak little more than kitchen Hindi that I picked up from speaking to my great grandparents who knew no English, I know little about my culture or family’s religion, and I could have family in India/Pakistan/Kashmir that I will never know anything about

I feel the phantom limb of India every day of my life

Fuck all y’all who pretend that colonialism was far in the past and that none of us feel its aftershocks today

I’ve only had two white people comment something ignorant on this post and I am pleasantly surprised

Australia is placing so many indigenous kids in state care even an ex Prime Minister is saying we’re risking a “new stolen generation,” we have our own pipeline protests in the Northern Territory, and we are on the verge of rewriting native title legislation so we can dig up 2 billion tonnes of coal and ship it through the Great Barrier Reef. 

Yeah, colonialism is very current, even by the standards of 240 years of occupation of a 40+ millennia old culture.