Settlers: you CANNOT think or feel your way out of the colonial dynamic. You are colonizers with or without your consent and despite your personal feelings and opinions on colonialism. Colonialism is a form of SYSTEMIC POWER, not an individual relationship.
WHATEVER YOUR PERSONAL CONDUCT AND INVESTMENTS, YOU REMAIN AN OCCUPIER, NOT A GOOD/BAD/RESPECTFUL/DISRESPECTFUL GUEST.
The idea that a personal shift in conduct or affect is the fulcrum on which the colonizer "identity" turns needs to die.
This sounds like it's denying the possibility of someone born as a settler ever being able to become better, to ever meaningfully work together with indigenous folk as part of a common effort to build a better world for all of us.
I'm more than willing to accept uncomfortable truths, given sufficient evidence (indeed, I actively seek out evidence of uncomfortable truths where I suspect they exist, rather than remain comfortably ignorant) -- but just given what I understand so far, this sounds like regressive/exclusionary BS that lines up disturbingly with one tenet of "conservative" thought: "human nature is fixed and cannot be improved; there is no social progress, and progressivism is a lie".
I hope I'm misunderstanding it.
