#(btw black folx as descendants of the slave trade are inherently not settlers i mean anyone who came here by choice white or not.)

[ladyimaginarium]

okay so i hate to be Like That™ but like. i kinda have to laugh at people who think it's just sooooo easy to do this cutesy witchy western cottagecore farm type beat. & that's not even getting into the historical & political context that a lot of y'all settlers in the americas (especially white queers) seem to either fail to grasp or straight up don't give a fuck about. but also from a personal perspective. lemme take y'all back through my family line.

these are my great great grandmother (who was born in 1860 & passed in 1934), great grandfather & great grandmother (who were born around 1894 & 1898 respectively) & my grandfather (on the right, born 1933, he passed when i was really small), my granduncle (he also passed when i was young when i was about 8-9) & their siblings respectively in my maternal line. my great grandfather worked his ass off to get & buy our family this relatively small plot of land (to the point where my specific family has our own street). he worked & farmed the land, & he taught his sons including my grandfather how to farm, hunt & fish. my grandfather like his brothers (& i'd imagine his sisters, too) barely had the chance to be a child because he had to work to support the family. i need y'all to understand that it was hard, backbreaking work. i can only imagine how difficult it was in my great(x2) grandmother's time. family friends & my mom would say my great grandfather was so damn tough he would straight up go into the woodstove & get wood while it was still hot with his bare hands. he died of a heart attack. my mom would talk about how hard my grandfather worked, how he worked for himself & how he'd lend out a helping hand for free to those in need & how at his funeral the church was PACKED to the brim with some people having to linger outside to pay their respects. that's how loved & respected he was.

as you can see, they're indigenous (although it wasn't ever really talked about aside from the occasional whispers, because remember, being indigenous, especially if you were back in the day — & make no mistake still is — was basically considered shameful & inferior to whiteness due to systematic racism & nobody was allowed to practice their culture and/or spirituality and/or religion and/or speak their traditional languages at risk of being imprisoned or sometimes even killed so i'd imagine that played a part on why it wasn't talked about so they assimilated, context matters). they had to work their asses off for what they had.

so when i see all these settler queers, especially queer white women or queer white men talk about how it'd be oh so nice to move away into a seemingly abandoned cottage in the middle of the forest or have a barn with their partners with conveniently abandoned lands i immediately have my eyebrows raised & im immediately sideeyeing you with wary suspicion. my ancestors were hunters, fishers & farmers because they Had to be or else they fuckin starved. & even then they didn't just give a shit only about themselves, they focused on helping others in their local communities because that's how it Works irl. i'm not saying you can't enjoy an aesthetic, hell, i love the pretty visuals & i intend to live out a similar life when i get older (you know, living on MY own traditional land) but if you can't do your own work that's required to sustain the lifestyle responsibly, if you think your queerness or your white/settler status somehow excludes you from this whole manifest destiny but its queer now bullshit, if you think there's no historical or political context behind this & you think it's completely apolitical or you don't respect the lands & the rightful stewards & guardians of those traditional lands (aka indigenous peoples) of the land you live on (because they're STOLEN land & this doesn't just apply to the americas, this applies to asia, africa & oceania & parts of europe too because let's be so ffr indigenous peoples are on every continent) then you're a fucking colonizer. tl;dr: for the love of creator just be aware of the political & historical context of your aesthetics before you start being obnoxious & listen to & center indigenous voices (& poc) in your aesthetics.