Unpacking our Colonial Legacy

Jenn Steinfeld
8 min readDec 22, 2023

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I have been struggling for more than a month to publish this. It was my intention to publish before the end of November, but I kept getting hung up in my desire to learn more, to proof-read again, as a way to compensate for my fear at sending this into the world. But tonight is the 10th of Tevet, the Winter Solstice, the day the Levyatan or Leviathan emerges from the deep to roar a roar that puts the proud and powerful in their place. So in that spirit of speaking truth to power, I’m finally publishing.

In the United States, we designate November as Native American Heritage Month to commemorate the rich legacy of the peoples who lived on this land before first European contact. This official recognition happened in 1990, after decades of advocacy by native activists, the living legacy of the diverse thriving cultures and peoples who were on this land before 1492, before 1619, before today. Europeans decimated these robust peoples and cultures by disease and warfare; cheated them of their sovereignty by different cultural understandings of ownership, and violently removed from their land and shoved them aside to designated “reservations”, forcibly dependent on the state which occupied them. Native Americans continue to grapple with the legacy of this traumatic uprooting, cultural destruction, and resource extraction, also known as colonization. And yet, the native people of North America have nurtured the glowing embers of their languages and cultures and land connections for hundreds of years. Over time, the embers of indigenous cultures not lost have been fanned back to life.

On the fourth Thursday of November, I attended the 54th National Day of Mourning, held annually at noon on the US Thanksgiving holiday in Plymouth, MA. As described on the website of the United American Indians of New England, “Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Indigenous ancestors and Native resilience. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.” I was moved by not just the stories of living in the colonial project called the United States, but the deeply intersectional calls for liberation. Every speaker shared solidarity with all native people everywhere; solidarity with people in Palestine and Congo and Sudan; with people living under gender and racial oppression; with trans and two-spirit and other LGBQ people. To me this felt like such a sharp contrast to Jewish exclusivity, as though the legacy of the Holocaust gives us an exclusive understanding of suffering.

Since my nephew was born nearly 3 years ago, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of legacy. In Jewish tradition we call this process l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, sometimes translated as what we pass on. Usually we use this in reference to the stories and practices and traditions we intentionally hold and cultivate. But I have been thinking a lot recently about what we pass on unintentionally — the fears, traumas, and biases. As the contemporary Franciscan friar Richard Rohr writes, “if we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” I’ve been thinking about the difference between scars and wounds — those injuries that leave a lasting reminder, and those that continue to cause us pain. As Jews, we continue to hold on to the wound of not just the Holocaust, but also the Alhambra decree, pogroms, and modern antisemitism. I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to reactivate trauma that is living in us, and how when we are living in our trauma all we can see is our own pain. My brilliant friend prabh kehal, upon reading an earlier draft of this essay, shared the observation that “living in trauma can become a site of comfort and safety, a resting place that becomes a destination and a home. And therefore, just like a home, we become very fearful of who we let into our trauma and hurting. That fear becomes the seed for other-ing.” In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed (like the Buddha) that people may not be able to avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. That resilience, purpose, and meaning was clear to me in the speeches at the Day of Mourning.

I’ve never lived with a deep connection to land. Though I’ve spent most of my life in just two places, my connection is more with the communities I find and make than to a physical location. There is a Yiddish word for this, doykeit, which means something like “hereness” and refers to making community in diaspora. I’m an amalgam of Europeans fleeing various horrors at various times to make a new life in this land. I live in a nation that was created by violently suppressing and removing the people who are native to this land, violently uprooting and transporting other people to labor on this land, and extracting its natural resources for the economic benefit of the few. Though mostly my people were not here, I gain the everyday privilege of being on the powerful side of this settler-colonial occupation. While my Sephardic Jewish forebears had a distinctly racialized experience in the US, I experience white passing privilege in my daily life.

And what makes someone a settler-colonist as opposed to an immigrant? Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang posit that “settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain.” And that’s what White Europeans did across the Americas — arriving, making a home on this land, imposing their cultural values and architecture and clothing traditions not created for these environs, and forcing them to adapt. British colonists brought a new language to this land which they foisted upon those living here. This language, English, became the official language of treaties, land deeds, and other business arrangements. The European colonists became American settlers, outlawing Native and African languages from being spoken and forcing assimilation to English. The battle for linguistic supremacy continues to this day, with questions over translation, language access, and movements toward monlingualism.

Like any other American kid I grew up spending the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving making tall buckled hats out of construction paper and tracing my hand to make a turkey, and learning the story of Squanto welcoming the Pilgrims to the “First Thanksgiving.” I was 35, reading a Bernard Baylin’s book The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America-The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675, when I first realized that it had never occurred to me to wonder why Squanto would have spoken English. I grew up in such a hegemonically monolingual culture, and had been indoctrinated with this fairy tale from such a young age that I never applied critical thinking. Turns out he had been captured by British explorers and transported against his will to England; when he returned to North America in 1619, he found his tribe decimated by disease. He walked until he found the Wampanoag settlement near what is today Plymouth, MA, where he was able to find community. Despite facing devastating conditions, Squanto made an effort to welcome new residents to share the land. As the victors, we tell the story of his generosity and not the ramifications of colonization on the Wampanoag.

I know that many Jews around the world feel a deep kinship connection to Israel as not only the Holy Land, but also as a homeland where we are always welcome. I have heard a lot of debate lately about indigeneity, and who has a right to the land where the State of Israel now resides. As part of my graduate study, I did some research into the question of what it means to be indigenous. And sociologically and linguistically, indigeneity is defined in relationship to a colonial power. That is to say, native people are the people who exist in and with a land; once a colonial power makes contact, they are redefined as indigenous, while others are marked as settlers, colonists, and immigrants.

The earliest documented use of the word “Israel” is in an Egyptian inscription in 1209 BCE, and that much history is more than I can cover here. How you understand a story depends often on when you believe that story to start. Are we talking about Rome destroying Jerusalem and the Temple in the 2nd Century? The rise of the Roman Empire? The Crusades? I’m going to start with the 1922 census of Palestine, taken at the start of British rule, in which 11% of the population was found to be Jewish. Arabic was the common language of the land, across Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities.

Like in the British colonies, language was used as a tool for wielding power and creating exclusion in the colonial project that became Israel. In 19th Century Europe, it was a commonly held idea that to be a nation worthy of rights and recognition, a common spoken language was required. So as the idea of forming a Jewish homeland grew, so did the the idea of transforming liturgical Hebrew and reviving it as a spoken language. The Clear Language Society was formed in 1890, with the intent of making Hebrew the language of settlement in the Zionist project of creating a Jewish homeland. As the Jewish population grew in Palestine in the late 19th Century, European Zionists created language schools for those planning to emigrate, and grew them in the settlements. (For more on this, read Scott Saulson’s 1979 text “Institutionalized Language Planning — Documents and Analysis of the Revival of Hebrew”.) By the time of the 1922 census, there were more than 80,000 Hebrew speakers, representing just over 10% of the population. Correlation is not causation but it sure does seem like those Hebrew speakers might be the Jewish population in Palestine.

When I hear Jews of European descent claim to be “indigenous” to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, what I hear is a rejection of diaspora. I hear a pain in displacement, and a trauma cutting them off from connection to others. I hear a desperate desire to belong, to have a place to be safe. And underneath that, I hear resistance to the awareness creeping in the edges of what our people have done to others. It is extremely painful to wake up to the harm that you benefit from. It is dislocating to realize that the stories you have learned from childhood have led you to become what you most fear.

I know that when I can’t envision a solution with the way things are, I need to ask bigger questions. The question I have been meditating on recently is, what would it look like for all people with a historical and cultural connection to this land to be respected and welcome? I don’t have an answer, and I don’t feel very hopeful right now, but I believe that liberation for us all is possible. Eman Abdelhadi recently summed up this vision on social media: “One day, it will be easy for anyone of any religion or ethnicity to drive from Jerusalem to Gaza just to have a picnic by the sea. No checkpoints, no special documents, no tanks, no guns, no border walls. That’s the promise of a Free Palestine.” I invite you to join me in living into that vision.

Sources for further reading:

E. Tuck & K.W. Yang Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, №1,2012, pp. 1–40

Bernard Bailyn. The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America; The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Scott B Saulson. Institutionalized Language Planning — Documents and Analysis of the Revival of Hebrew. Mouton Publishers, 1979. ISBN 90–279–7567–1.

Viktor E. Frankl. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Boston, Beacon Press, 2006.

Lisa Brooks. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. Yale University Press, 2018.

Rashid Khalidi. The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Henry Holt and Co, 2020.

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Jenn Steinfeld

Queer white Jew. Abolitionist, antizionist, liberationist and relationship anarchist.