Moral Legibility Quotes

“Another way of expressing this difference between history and settler colonial studies is that the former is primarily interested in the past, while the latter is primarily interested in using a story about the past to change the present. And for that purpose, it's necessary to make the past as morally legible as possible. One way of accomplishing this is to describe the violence of white settlers against Natives while omitting any mention of the violence deployed by Natives resisting settler expansion.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice