28/07/2025
Continuing from the earlier post about the "American Progress" painting:
This painting is often misread by settlers as a role reversal: an imagined act of vengeance upon colonizers. But to see it as revenge is to once again see through the eyes of colonialism, replicating its same mechanisms. What is expressed here is far more profound.
This is what rematriation looks like: sacred power returning to the soil, the bodies, the breath of this continent.
It is ceremony stretched across time, where tenderness dares to meet trauma and does not become it. The Land Back movement does not wish to mirror the blade of conquest. The Land Back movement extends the medicine of memory, the salve of restoration. It teaches that healing is relational, that the oppressor too has been disfigured by the machinery of empire.
Colonialism severed all of us from the sacred, leaving us hollow and haunted in different ways. It taught us to hoard, dominate, fear one another. But this has been an inherited fear passed through generations until someone decides to create a new path.
The new path signaled in this painting.
The work ahead is not to punish or displace, but to reconnect. To disarm the heart. To return what was taken, yes, but also to repair what was severed in all directions.
What Charles Hillard offers is not merely a reimagining of North America, it is a global invocation. A visual promise that healing is possible. That rematriation begins when we dare to remember. And that remembrance, fierce, tender, and rooted, is the healing balm.
