This phrase seems inadequate

The first part of my book is an account of settler colonialism in Canada and the US. Or I should say the US and Canada since it’s a US publisher so most of what I talk about is centered around the US. Which is ok. They found me and asked if I had ever thought about writing a book so I don’t mind telling a mostly US story. There’s lots of Can-con, I even use Kent Monkman’s painting The Scream to talk about residential schools.

At one point I’ve described a lot of horrific things. The clearing of the west, residential schools, Wounded Knee and I say “following this period of upheaval …” My editor comments, this phrase just doesn’t seem adequate to what you’ve just described.

So I thought find, you want adequate you got it and I changed it to “following this period of genocide and ethnic cleansing” and then I added more like this bit: "Native peoples are pushed aside and replaced by the new Americans. A relentless ethnic cleansing that began on the East Coast and moved westward as big brother’s hunger for land and resources grew ever more demanding. "

I use the word genocide 6 times in the manuscript. Ethnic cleansing is also used 6 times. Idk, I’m currently in revisions, again, so maybe I’ll find more places for it. But I don’t want to put it in so many times that people roll their eyes either. I want them to engage with the book, not be traumatized by it the way I was traumatized by Clearing the Plains. If you haven’t read my essay about that book you can go back and read it. That was a relentless piece of writing, important and necessary but not the book that I want to write.

These were new additions, they aren’t in earlier versions and I’m grateful to my editor for her comment. What I had said, calling it a period of upheaval, was indeed inadequate. It was wholly and entirely inadequate and I don’t think I’m editing myself for this audience, this mostly Christian or at least raised by Christians which is so much of America, audience. But maybe I am. Maybe it’s just ingrained in me, this resistance to speak certain things out loud or put them in writing. Which is odd because you probably follow me on Twitter and think I’d be the last person to self edit that way.

It feels liberating to use these phrases, to call it what it was. What it is, because settler colonialism is a process not an event. These things are ongoing and made visible at Standing Rock and Wet’suet’en and in Suriname and around the world, this clearing of Indigenous people off the land and out of the way by whatever means are necessary.

It feels liberating but also sad because next week is Rememberance Day or Armistice Day or whatever your country calls November 11 and we’re going to hear about brave soldiers sacrificing for freedom.

But whose freedom?

What does that even mean in the context of a genocide at home?