Colonia

Mural at a monastery in the highlands of Peru in 2005.

Mural at a monastery in the highlands of Peru in 2005.

Mural at a monastery in the highlands of Peru in 2005.

Mural at a monastery in the highlands of Peru in 2005.

Mural at a monastery in the highlands of Peru in 2005.

Residents of Rancho Bonito, high in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, leave church on Sunday morning in 2000.

The entire campus of UNAM in Mexico City, Mexico was occupied in 1999-2000, including an auditorium that was renamed after Che Guevara.

Day laborers line up for a portrait at the Casa Latina Workers' Center in Seattle, Washington, USA in the spring of 2001.

Rick Williams joined a rally against coal trains in the Pacific Northwest region from Seattle, Washington, USA in 2014.

A pause near the Salish Sea on the coast of Washington State, USA and British Columbia, Canada in 2014.

Today is meaningful regardless of whether it’s called Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of if you have a holiday, and regardless of your cultural frame of reference. Human history is relentless in its complexity but relevant to current events. Today is an occasion to pause, study, and discuss how migrations, conquests, invasions, interpersonal and economic connections, and various belief-systems, among all aspects of our lives, have contributed to conflict and oppression, and in some sense, opportunities. There are inevitably a variety of perspectives on the current situation that do not need to be divisive, though they sadly are. Please see a few resources that come to mind this year that might guide your understanding of these topics, or at least illuminate how I'm thinking about them.

Resources

Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a classic text by Paolo Freire

The Power and the Glory is a novel by Graham Greene

“A window to the see...” by Raúl de Nieves is an installation at The Henry on the University of Washington Campus

The poem Aun by Pablo Neruda