Then are you American, or the colonized

Ultimately, like many Americans, I belong to both groups. “American” and “Chinese” work a little bit differently as monikers due to structural differences in both imperial projects. The Chinese imperial project is ancient and its cultural impact is more broadly understood by the people who live within the boundaries of the current People’s Republic of China (though per my understanding this exact nature of this cultural impact is felt and understood a little less directly by the people with privilege within the system such as the Jianghuai and the Shandong). Meanwhile “American” is a little more wibbly wobbly in its nature. There are times that “American” means “A profiteer of Americanism” and others that it means “An advocate of Pan-Americanism” which are both directly opposed ideologies, one being nationalistic in nature and the other being diasporadic in nature. So the only truly unifying “American” trait that is held across both left and right side of the aisle about what “American” even means is someone in the American continents whose ethnic and cultural background is so blended and so remixed that at any given moment they may not have any deeply rooted grounding in what the cultural origins of something they’re doing is. From this perspective I am having an American experience, and am thereby American.

However I also belong to a culture of people, the Appalachians, whose cultural heritage is rooted a little bit more deeply than most, and is currently undergoing a process of elimination by the dominant culture of America, Americanism, which is rooted much more directly in western Anglo-European ideals, norms, and standards. The roots of our culture are traceable back about 600 years when the Cherokee people, pushed from their native homelands in the Piedmont by Spanish, French, and English settlers, re-perpetrated the violence they were experiencing against the Osage who had lived in the Appalachian mountain range for ~6000 years. Even then, the Cherokee encountered escaped enslaved Africans (marooners) from the peninsula of Florida who spoke a pidgin language based on a mixture of Bantu, Appalachee (more on them later), and Spanish. From the very start, our culture’s roots are the preservation of cultures who were being actively eliminated by neighbors and invading forces from abroad seeking to enrich themselves through extraction economies. As the centuries have gone on, other diasporas have entered the mix of this region, notably Germans who found them persecuted in the coastal tidewaters of the early USA following the American War of Independence, eastern Europeans (then called

course language

Pollocks

in census data, but were often of various Eastern European ethnicities, including Ukrainian, Jewish, and Romani), Irish, and Jewish (here counted separately due to different diasporadic pressures than the initial population who arrived from Poland because persecution experienced by the Russian Empire in the 1770s was VERY different from the same empire in the 1880s) (more on this, and me personally, later). These cultures mixed together, brought their own tales of escaping genocide, and created something within the American Empire that isn’t quite like anything else anywhere on earth, though at the same time, very analogous to other hill cultures throughout the world such as Gorani, Kurds, Gorals, Jumma, Khmer Loeu, Laotians, Merina, Montagnard, northeast Subcontinental Indian tribes, Pahari, Pamiris, Pogorzans, Rusyns, and Vlachs. The American Empire doesn’t see value in this culture though. What it sees is the value of the Bituminous Coal, Anthracite, Uranium, and rare earth minerals that sit beneath our feet. From this perspective, I am colonized.

I disassociate from their label, esp. because they are colonists

I, too, dislike the term “American” because I much prefer to identify myself as Appalachian. However, I am also aware that I do not get to opt out of the culture I was born into. I have traveled all across this so called nation, and I have seen the many things that unite us and did participate in the monoculture that has been defined for us through mass media before I was old enough to understand that was what was being done to me. I watch baseball because I enjoy it. I’ll probably watch the next superbowl so I can catch the halftime show and discuss what messages my coworkers are missing in the iconography the performer put on screen the next day. These are things I am not necessarily proud of in myself, but things I find value in when organizing my neighbors because I’m not a scold telling them they’re wrong to like these things, but instead providing new directions for their frustrations that their cities aren’t safe because of Flock cameras and ICE agents. These are American things, and to deny this about myself would be delusional and counterproductive both when having discussions about the future of Appalachia and the possibility of a Post-American society.

At the same time, I am also aware of the harm of the homogenization of the American monoculture. I have participated in Appalachian dance and music since I was 5. This is something I continue to do. I play the bass, and I flatfoot. These are things that are important for me to do because they’re things that remind me that it is possible to have your own culture, to be a member of a community, and even to have shared cultural experiences that cross imaginary boundaries on maps with other people without those shared experiences being universal. I have become increasingly interested of late in the value of these things as counterprogramming within and without Appalachia as a form of counterprogramming to the American monoculture. The three musical genres that I think we do differently from anywhere else in the country, and that we have opportunities to share out into the world as an expression of an alternative future to Americanism and the American monoculture are Bluegrass, Egg Punk, and Dungeon Synth. I’m sure there are others, but these just seem to me to be the things we’re doing a little bit differently from anyone else that other people outside our region have the most interest in. We can attach messaging about what harms us to these genres of music that helps us to resist our demise, and to build international solidarity. Here’s examples of all three from here:

• https://thelocalhoneys.bandcamp.com/track/cigarette-trees
• https://powerpantsrock.bandcamp.com/track/be-the-change
• https://foglord.bandcamp.com/track/whispers-in-the-holler-2

What have they decided to called the land they are reclaiming?

The Cherokee called North America “Turtle Island” long before European settlers arrived on it. However, they have no name for a Pan-Turtle-Islander experience, especially because this leaves out South America as they have no name for that continent. So they call the people of these two continents “American” when they are referring to Pan-Americanism and citizens of the United States having an American experience American when they are referring to Americanism.

Glad to find a comrade here who isn’t a dengist

Fuck every hierarchy

Reflect if you’re truly American, or Cherokee

I am ABSOLUTELY not Cherokee. To call myself as such would be deeply disrespectful to my neighbors and the specific experiences they have within the American Empire. As a tangential metaphor, I am white. The specific kind of white I am is a mixture of Irish, Ukrainian, and Jewish. If I started calling myself Cherokee that would be like if I suddenly started calling myself Armenian. I am not of that culture, I do not have roots into that culture, none of my stories, songs, or recipes come from that culture. It would be cultural appropriation, and an example of white privilege. I exist with that privilege and do not get to opt out of it. It happens before an interaction even begins because it can be seen in the color of my skin when a police officer pulls me over (or even simply opts not to because of that privilege). Similarly, I do not get to opt out of some of the intrinsic benefits of being American I have received, such as an early life spent traveling Canada without a passport because a president negotiated a trade agreement that allowed me to do so by the coincidence of me being born in a building where doctors used to torture Cherokee children. So even if I don’t like that I’m American or the American Empire, that doesn’t change the fact that I am American and have received intrinsic benefits from this. The fact that I dislike these things means that I must work to ensure reparations are paid, and that when they are made, the land that must be returned is returned still as in tact as is possible from what is left of it. I can drive 1 hour from my house and find a mountain that is completely gone now. We can never return that mountain to its people, nor the cairns that represented ancestors who were alive as recently the 1970s, nor the paper birch that represented ancestors who were alive as recently as the 1990s. But we can maybe save the next mountain if we act in solidarity with each other to bring about a permanent end to all surface mining.

we have gotten along extremely well in the past
Wait where and when?

We’ve interacted in a few threads. I’ve enjoyed our interactions

conservative or a liberal rather than what i am: an impoverished anarchist who doesn’t think electoralism can save us, only buy us time to organize a robust insurgency movement
What part of this is «American»? I am all for robust insurgency anti electoralist action, but what even is «American» about that?

Nothing. Which is the point I’ve been making all along. “American” is not a monolith despite the American Empire’s attempt to make it so. And I still don’t know what anyone is talking about that “All Americans admitted they were terrorists”