I look at an argument like this and am rather baffled: “Meaning, are settlers buying Indigenous jewellery, art, and fashion to consume and co-opt for themselves some aspect of imagined notions of authentic Indigeneity, or can this transaction be situated in self-reflexivity, respectful engagement, and decolonial reciprocity?”

One cannot choose what an exchange–that is, a purchase–means. That meaning is structurally inherent in the exchange relation in capital. The abstraction that occurs–that transformation of a product of labour into a commodity and all that that entails–cannot be wished away by good intention.

As Yellowknives Dene scholar Glenn Sean Coulthard argues in “Red Skin, White Masks”, colonialasm–what he calls the “colonial relation”–incorporates what he, following Marx, calls the “capital relation”; as much as the former is more than the capital relation, the latter cannot be selectively removed from the former. There is no purchase, to put it bluntly, that is decolonial.

Yes, there can be purchases that “support” Indigenous makers, but let’s not call it decolonial. Let’s call this sort of gesture–the purchase of Indigenous art– what it is: liberal and in many ways assimilationist.

love you , from jungle george

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