David Shorter: If I pay attention to my own body as a person going through checkpoints, I see how I start to look down, not wanting to make eye contact. How your shoulders start to cave in so you do not look too broad or proud. If you are big like me, you put a little bend in your knees so that you look easily push able, not one to stand tall or seem offensive. You have to control your emotions, not to look too frustrated or incensed. You have to done a respect when what you feel is disgust. So the checkpoints cause you to start lying to your own body: You feel mad, but show submission. Look at yourself, they have turned you into the animal they called you to justify taking your land in the first place.
There are other checkpoints too. Like when walking down the street with my Yaqui friends in Mexican cities and to see people not move out of their way when walking. When I see men literally shove a shoulder into my Yaqui friends as they pass by. These are check points to see keep my friends “in check.”
When I rushed one of my godchildren who had fallen to the state funded clinic and was told by the Mexican doctor that, “perhaps these Indians should stop having kids if they cannot take care of them.” This checkpoint is seeing if I will say anything back and risk the care of the baby now in his control.
When the waitresses at restaurants only take the orders from me, not from my indigenous friends who I want to treat to a meal. They Mexican waitresses do not look them in the eye, not wanting to lower themselves by taking orders from an Indian. These are checkpoints. If we want to be served and not caused a scene, we will comply.
But at the end of the day, when all you wanted was a day to live your life, you cannot help feeling, in your body, the sum total of all the times you were checked at some point. This is a big one: you just feel fatigue. You just wanted to go visit your friends. You wanted to say hello for their birthday, or take them a gift. You want to just go do your work. And this fatigue is unshakable, like the heat, or the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, or the lack of clean water. And this fatigue wears on your like the knowledge that life did not use to be this way. That someone came at a historical moment and did this; that others let it happen. This fatigue changes your body, changes how you want to love or be loved. And this fatigue, well, this fatigue is colonization.
[…] So when asked to come and speak about how I understand Palestinian rights to be indigenous rights, I did not want to once again refer to the International Court of Justice or the United Nations, or Desmond Tutu, or Jimmy Carter, Judith Butler, Angela Davis, or Noam Chomsky. I did not want to quote too many books or lecture you about theories of indigeneity or settler colonialism. I wanted to show up, in my body, and tell you how indigenous struggles feel, how colonization feels, as I empathize with native people being a person privileged by both race and nationality colonized by my education system, and epistemologically harassed by my incessant media. I empathize; I embody the feelings of fear, and of hope, because I do not need Frantz Fanon, or Aime Cesaire, or Linda Tuhiwai Smith to know that those holding the whip and the machine guns, those dispossessing and colonizing, they are proving themselves to be, again and again, the actual savages. More here.