Critical Perspectives and Reflections

It was a bitter cold winter. We had one warm barn for our dairy herd with a space at the front for calves born during the winter. For the yearlings, we only had a shelter with no heat. That year during the month of January the temperature dipped below -40 degrees. We felt sorry for the yearlings shivering in the cold, so we brought them into the barn to share a pen with the younger calves. We supplied nice fresh hay for the yearlings and the younger calves to eat. But, instead of eating the fresh hay the yearlings began to push the calves out of the way and made life miserable for them. The only choice we had was to remove the yearlings and return them to the cold shelter outside. This is a good metaphor for the age of colonization. After the discovery of the “new world” people moved in and settled into these resource rich areas they had come upon. Rather than sharing the resources equally, they pushed out, and made life miserable for, the people who had lived there for millennia. Inst...