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Letter to the Web, 2020-10-28: I touched a nerve

So yesterday’s newsletter about planning for the future upset a sizeable portion of my small readership, enough that I got multiple complaints. I was told that it, and my newsletter so far, have been “unnecessarily antagonistic” by multiple people.

To everyone who felt the same flurry of emotions but didn’t encourage me to talk about something else: thank you. But the response makes me think, maybe I should explain what this newsletter is. After all, some of you got subscribed automatically from Patreon, and others might not have read the [about page](https://emsenn.substack.com/about).

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That page encourages a development of knowledge about certain topics, among them decolonization, both through this newsletter, conversations we have, and external resources. To help y’all with that, I’m going to share some items tagged decolonization from my reading list. Some of these will be academic, some casual; some very broad and some specific.

Now, that might seem like one hell of a reading list. But before you get too tense about the number of resources (nevermind the length,) I want you to mull over a few questions:

Too many, probably not, and probably not, are the likely answers. So click around, find some sub-topics that interest you enough to give a foothold, and happy learning!

(And as you read know: even decolonization is now being criticized by Indigenous land defenders for having become a colonized philosophy: this is an active process of education and exploration of our world, not a static thing you can memorize, enact, and move on from. Like Tuck and Yang famously said, decolonization is not a metaphor.)

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Created: 2025-08-19 Tue 23:03