… written from a USA point of view, but relevant around the globe, wherever colonisation had been carried out:
“… We are all inheritors of different traumas, different histories. We inherit – through story, social history, family traditions, language, wealth, place, resources. psychological complexes, and epigenetic inheritances – differently textured legacies. … I will focus on a troop of specters that I designate the Specters of Empire: War, Dislocation, Slavery, Racism, and Christian Dominionism. … We cannot continue to live in ignorance of each other’s stories, or fail to hear the wailing of each other’s specters. What other specters haunt our landscape, our shared social and ecological flesh? Who struggles most under the weight of these legacies? Might this practice of listening to specters reshape our collective relationships to each other and the land? A whole haunted history is implicated in our traumatically fractured, complex present. Recognizing this breaks open the present into something more complicated, full of possibility. The present is composed of and contains the immense diversity of the materiality of the past, as well as the “promise” of the future….”