Enjoying stories from our horrific settler history is probably my guiltiest. I reread the Little House books a couple years ago, and it's BAD. Real bad. Very dehumanizing stuff about Native Americans, and it completely ignores why all that "free land" was free for settlement. I still do have a weird affection for them though--I reread them over and over as a kid and just found them completely enthralling as a picture of another life so different from my own, and the sense of adventure in striking out somewhere new. But the ugly truth is that all that new, empty, unsettled lands had been the homes of others who were forced out, massacred, and herded into camps for our profit, and you really can't divorce that context from the books. Then there's The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis, which is basically The Disappearing Indian Trope: The Movie. I'm trash, I love that movie. My brain is colonized by settler-colonialism. I am an absolute sucker for that frontier shit.
Enjoying stories from our horrific settler history is probably my guiltiest. I reread the Little House books a couple years ago, and it's BAD. Real bad. Very dehumanizing stuff about Native Americans, and it completely ignores why all that "free land" was free for settlement. I still do have a weird affection for them though--I reread them over and over as a kid and just found them completely enthralling as a picture of another life so different from my own, and the sense of adventure in striking out somewhere new. But the ugly truth is that all that new, empty, unsettled lands had been the homes of others who were forced out, massacred, and herded into camps for our profit, and you really can't divorce that context from the books. Then there's The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis, which is basically The Disappearing Indian Trope: The Movie. I'm trash, I love that movie. My brain is colonized by settler-colonialism. I am an absolute sucker for that frontier shit.