All Ye Jacobites (Part I)

Being an Indigenous person, no matter whether you are displaced or at home, no matter which continents or ethnicities you come from, is an exercise in perpetual code-switching. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this is politics-- specifically, engaging in the politics of whatever settler-colonial government that currently holds sway over you. 

There are two layers to this incongruity. The first is practical: being forced to choose between participating as an act of harm reduction, or refusing to participate and risking losing what little say you have. The second is ideological: Indigenous ways of being and understanding are so radically different to settler colonial ways of being and understanding that being asked to choose which settler political party one likes better is like being asked to choose whether to drink tea off a dinner plate or out of a sieve. (I will leave it to the reader to determine, which, if any, specific political parties were referenced in that metaphor). Even when we have our own functioning governments, those entities-- whatever their own merits might be-- are stifled by the necessity of at least some cooperation with their colonial occupiers, which is both understandable and deeply frustrating. 

That, I think, contributes to the persistent appeal of Jacobitism in Scotland, even 275 years after the ‘45. Being able to throw off the shackles of respectability politics-- including the feeling that one is at least expected to play at respectability politics in public-- is both an emotional relief and an intellectual liberation. My personal attachment to Jacobitism is less an interest in restoring the Stuart monarchy and more an interest in a clear and public rejection of respectability politics and the sanitization of history. Time that I once spent carefully couching the truth so as not to disturb the fragile veneer of ‘civil’ discourse-- which usually means sugarcoating the reality of ongoing settler colonialism-- is spent thinking about real solutions, and I am glad of this tradeoff.