Kids Making the "Complex" a Lot Simpler
“So when are they going to give the land back?”
Finch asked me this question while we were reading an illustrated book of the national parks. The book, while not mentioning Indigenous peoples’ one bit, there was, however, the line “They [the people who had the idea for the national parks] saw the flood of pioneers colonizing the American West.”
At this, I stopped and asked Finch “do you know what colonization means?”
When he said no, I then proceeded to do my job as uber-progressive-White-mom-trying-to-be-an-antiracist and proceeded to talk shit about colonization–in an age-appropriate way, of course. And by “talking shit,” I mean I just stated what it actually was: Europeans came here and stole the land from Native Americans and made them live on super small areas of land while the White people continued to post up and ruin nature. Woo hoo, go America!
And Finch, very astutely, asked me that question: “So when are they going to give the land back?”
I was kind of shocked at how fast he came to this question given that full-grown adult humans still can’t grasp the idea of LandBack as part of the Indigenous justice movement (here’s a good rundown of what LandBack is if this is a new concept to you). But that’s what is beautiful about a child’s brain. Their brains are still yet to be corrupted by ideologies that have caused us to justify away the horrible things we tend to do to other people and the planet. Finch was just asking a simple and very good question. I mean, when are they going to give the land back?!
After that initial shock, I think I just said something like: “That’s a good question…it seems like Americans don’t want to give the land back because they think it belongs to them.” And by “them” I also mean “us” because we are complicit in this. But I didn’t go down that road in this conversation. I thought about saying something about the whole (quite amazing) shelf of Land Back books at Powell’s that I saw that week–which included books from Indigenous and Palestinian authors–but I thought I’d leave it there because those books weren’t exactly for a seven-year-old. We do talk about Gaza in other contexts, so I put a pin in that and made a note to myself to link that back to our colonization discussion next time it comes up.
For the purpose of this reflection, I think of how Finch’s very matter of fact question shows how much we take kids’ perspectives for granted. Maybe we should even channel how they see the world to see where solutions lie. They can usually see the obvious answer before many of us adults.
True, Finch did not know about the concept of colonization and I was able to educate him on that. But he also grasped the idea of Land Back at seven-years-old when it took me well over 30 years on this planet to do so. And in that he educated me that, of course the concept is as simple as that! Maybe I would’ve grasped it when I was younger if that was the perspective White American kids were given about American history. But it was eye-opening to see the world through that very unclouded view of a child.