Wordly Treasures – The New Inquiry

2.3.15

Wordly Treasures – The New Inquiry: Language Matters is not insensitive to this—its locales are all sites of violent occupation by colonial capitalist powers, and this is multiply and explicitly acknowledged by both Holman and his interlocutors. Yes, we know very well that universal suffrage for Aboriginal Australians did not come until the 1960s, and that until 1967, Aborigines were not even classified as human under the Anglo settlers’ national constitution. Yes, we know very well that Hawai’i, like the rest of the United States, was forcibly occupied to guarantee European commercial interests in the region, in this case, Anglo-controlled sugar cane plantations. In making open note of this, the film participates in an emerging practice by politically progressive settler descendants who would like to position themselves as allies to the indigene they have displaced: Anglo and Irish Australians and New Zealanders who often begin public addresses by thanking the area’s traditional landholders, Anglo and French Canadians who speak of their hometowns as “so-called Montreal” or “so-called Toronto.” While this tactic can be useful in raising awareness of the ongoing character of colonial occupation, violence, and dispossession, it must be placed in the context of an anticolonial project that exceeds the limits of works like Language Matters.