https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI4XYIhtAyU
TL;DW: don't travel unless you're invited by someone who lives there and who cares about you, else you replicate patterns of colonization, if not actively furthering present colonization.
this really speaks to my anxieties about traveling. i really want to go to different parts of the world! but more importantly, i want to do so with care. i know tourism is so counter to my values, yet those norms supersaturate my preconceptions of travel.
what the video highlights well, and what i want to pass on, is this insistence that the land matters; travel should be about relationships with the land and not with the colonial facade placed atop. travel should be about care and community, not about voyeurism and consumerism.
so now here i am, still stuck and paralyzed about traveling, but with some newfound desire to relate with the land i'm on, and to invite those who i care about to relate with this land, together. there's a lot of beauty on this side of the Great Lakes that i'd really love to show others. maybe in reciprocity i'll be able to visit friends far away, caring about their land with them.
