By El Machetero

“Precisely at the point that you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society.” –James Baldwin.

 “The primary difference between the western and indigenous ways of life is that we relate to and experience a living universe, whereas western people reduce all things, living or not, to objects.” –Vine Deloria

The very concept and idea that I have anything even remotely resembling any sort of right to be on these territories is a relatively new one for me.  As the oldest son of political refugees from Chile (a nation with its own definitive set of entrenched colonizer-derived contradictions) whose ancestry can loosely and lazily be described as Basque/indigenous (Mapuche/Selk’nam)/semetic (both Arab and Ashkenazi Jew)/with probably at least a little bit of African splashed in there who comes from a highly politicized background and whose family came here during what can…