Through Ceremony I realized how expansive the impact of white imperialist power is. I’ve learned about it a lot in many of my non-Western History of Art and Visual Culture classes and I’ve witnessed it personally through my own experiences and my family and ancestral history. What really hit home for me is how much history repeats itself in the form of imperialist power. I read about Tayo sitting in the abandoned Uranium mine that scars the landscape of his home, and my thoughts immediately went to one of my own homes, El Salvador. My dad is from there and I travelled there every summer when I was younger to live with my abuelos for a month. The last time I was there, which was about three years ago, I learned of the threat that a company called Pacific Rim posed to the country. Pacific Rim, a Canadian-Australian company was set to mine the country extensively for gold, upsetting the country’s environment and ecosystems as well as displacing a lot of the population from their homes. The company craftily opened an office in the United States so that it could argue its rights to mine in El Salvador through the North American Free Trade Agreement. While I was there the displacement had already begun from the construction of a highway commissioned by Pacific Rim to convenience transportation. There had also been disappearances and deaths of activists who had spoken out against the project. Today, the threat of another scar being dug in my own home is alleviated, but Pacific Rim is still at it, suing the entire nation of El Salvador for 300 million dollars for not allowing the operation to go through.

After a history of colonization by Spain and 12-years of Civil War in which the US Government funded the Military regime, you would think that El Salvador wouldn’t continue to have issues like that. It all comes down to that same white imperialist agenda: people of color are savage and therefore shouldn’t manage the resources of their own lands and pretty much deserve to get fucked over. Betonie says it best in Ceremony on page 126:

When they look

they see only objects.

The world is a dead thing for them

the trees and rivers are not alive

the mountains and stones are not alive.

The deer and bear are objects

They see no life…..

Stolen rivers and moutains

the land will eat their hearts

and jerk their mouths from the Mother.

The people will starve.

They will bring terrible diseases

the people have never known.

Entire tribes will die out

Betonie is telling the story about how that imperialism works. The colonizer comes in, seeing the land and the people as objects, commodities, for their taking. They obliterated the Pueblo lands and people just as Pacific Rim attempted to do in El Salvador.