Decolonial Reading List
I am working on learning about decolonial principles, general decolonial design, and specifically what it might mean in the context of hex crawling and TTRPGs.
I am not claiming to be creating a decolonial setting or to be a decolonial designer. I do think decolonized design can only be done correctly by indigenous people. I believe objections to this assertion can be redirected to further reading materials, unless they come from the authors of those materials or from the field of indigenous decolonial literature. I am, however, interested in decolonialism and anti-colonialism, and intend to continue finding ways to bring that forward as I imagine an "OSR system agnostic hexcrawl in a mythic greened Antarctica".
I am a cis-het male and a beneficiary of various European settlers. I was raised in central Minnesota by my grandmother and mother. My grandfather died when he was in his 30s of a heart attack, and my father was transient with undiagnosed PTSD and bipolar II disorder after Vietnam. My grandmother was a generous woman who found sanity in fulfilling her religious obligations. She had a sharp wit and was terribly mean about the presentation of one's fitness, clothes, and grooming. She was raised by German-speaking Catholics on a farm, I reckon, that belongs to the Lakota. She said she was told her grandparents were encouraged by the Catholic Church to move here, take this land to plant and build upon. She grew up in the great depression and had the perplexing experience of having her mother tongue slapped out of her until she spoke English. When this was done, she would be sheltered from the worst persecution by Protestants and granted the relative advantages of American whiteness. I believe she internalized those kinds of experiences as compliance = safety. My mother, on the other hand, was a single parent in the 1980s who discovered some sanity in the rituals of Wicca, energy work, and Tai Chi. Let's just say she wasn't a good fit for the religiously compliant community mothers and fathers, despite their general sense of liberal reason and kindness. As for my father, part of his healing and mania has found sanity in Bible centered non-denominational Christianity, which would evangelize at length for most of our phone calls and much of our time together.
Why do I share this? I have colonial thinking baked into every level of my education, and while these assumptions will bleed into my preferences and designs, my proposed set of glitches might provide a way for colonial settlers to metabolize them and develop a decolonial curiosity complex, as I have, because glitches.
I do think the deconstruction of colonialism and the centering of ecological and decolonial concepts constitute productive weird hope and transpersonal (look it up) futurism, which is inherently anti-colonial.