dead people had a social personhood in precolonial Māori society, they could still participate in community decisionmaking processes and end conflicts. living ancestors embodied in their preserved remains was a coherent category of person which existed, and capitalism and the colonial state destroyed it. capitalism is so evil it can kill the dead.
i’m writing a paper at the moment.
what happened was we kept the preserved heads of our dead. british people were fascinated by the heads, so they sold arms to escalate regional conflicts into bloodbaths and then accepted preserved heads as payment for firearms. we had to sell all our mokomokai to maintain a stock of firearms or risk being killed by other tribes in the same situation.
western capitalism and (proxy) war profiteering turned mokomokai from a kind of person into a commodity which we had to sell to them or die. our population declined by 20,000 people over this period. capitalism is absolutely and from its inception violently white supremacist.
(via mahia)
i really fucking need a harpsichord tbh
