I picked up this book after seeing it quoted in the video essay, “The Politics of Forgetting”, about the violence of the archive. It is about our collective memory and history and how it is often distorted by those in power — pushing us to forget certain events and emphasising, even mythologising others. This theme of human memory, of how we remember history, is ever present throughout the book, from the erasure of history performed by the Xiosphanti elite to the denial of the sentience of the native species on January to facilitate the colonisation of the planet.
The Premise
The story takes place on a tidally-locked planet, named January. Humanity colonised January when 7 city states on Earth (listed below) collaborated to build a mothership to settle the planet.
- Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
- New Shanghai, China?
- Calgary, Canada
- Zagreb, Croatia
- Khartoum, Sudan
- Nagpur, India
- Merida, Mexico
One side of the planet known as the Day constantly faces the sun while the other side known as the Night never gets any sunlight. Both sides are inhospitable to human life, due to the extreme temperatures, confining civilisation to a small twilight zone. However, humanity is not alone on January. Alien life lurks in the pitch-dark night, with the interaction between the human colonisers and the planet’s native inhabitants being a central thread weaving through the novel.
This incredibly foreign setting is something I really love about the book. The world-building throughout the book such as the specifics on the languages spoken or the socio-political environment of the cities is fascinating. And yet, despite this, the themes of the story, remain poignant and relevant.
Xiosphant and the Erasure of History
Xiosphant is one of two cities on January, and is where one of the main characters, Sophie, begins her story. Due to the lack of a day-night cycle on the planet, the fascist government has embraced an ideology known as Circadianism. All people are forced to conform to the times as set by the government — when to sleep, when to work, when to have dinner, etc. Curfew Patrols patrol the streets at “night” when people are meant to be sleeping.
Bianca
Everything in Xiosphant is designed to make us aware of the passage of time, from the calendars, to the rising and falling of the shutters, to the bells that ring all over town. Everyone always talks about Timefulness, which could be simple—like, making it home for dinner before they ring the final chime before shutters-up, and the end of another cycle.
The society is also incredibly socially-stratified, with the language itself, Xiosphanti, requiring a social status to be pinned on each and every person. Sophie, a queer girl, is part of Xiosphant’s lower / working-class. She is expected to get an apprenticeship and work in farms or other industries. In contrast, Bianca, whom Sophie has feelings for, is part of Xiosphant’s ruling elite, expected to take up a place in government or as leaders in Xiosphant’s industries.
We see this class difference starkly in the unequal way justice is applied. The inciting incident in the story occurs when Sophie attempts to cover for a small theft that Bianca committed, not fully understanding their differences in class. While Bianca would have simply gotten a slap on the wrist, Sophie is expelled from the city without even being given the chance to defend herself and left to die in the Night.
What disappoints me most about all this, is how despite centuries passing between our time and the time when this story happens, both on Earth and on January, the very same racist and homophobic attitudes from our world remain. All Xiosphanti are taught that homosexual relationships are unnatural. The segregation of society into the ruling and working-class is done almost exclusively by race. As Omar, one of the smugglers who Sophie follows to Argelo (the other city on January) says,
Omar
New Shanghai built the Mothership’s life support, food supply, and gardens before leaving Earth, while Calgary built the water reclamation and sewers. And then once the Mothership had launched, those two compartments ended up in a position to demand whatever they wanted — and all this time later, their descendants still rule Xiosphant.
In order to maintain and perpetuate this unjust racial hierachy, Xiosphant has to convince its people that this division of society is natural. To achieve this, the Xiosphanti ruling class intentionally misrepresents and warps its history. Sophie replies to Omar,
Sophie
That’s not the version we were taught in school, and it makes me wonder what else we were taught that nobody else believes.
This weaponisation of history is in no way unique to Xiosphant. It is a tactic used by most all authoritarian, and especially fascist regimes. As the philosopher, Jason Stanley, writes in his book (Stanley, 2024),
Jason Stanley
A fascist form of life … has certain requirements. … [It] requires an education system that can validate the dominant group’s elevated status as a justified consequence of history rather than the fabricated result of intentional choices. It does this … by selectively doctoring the historical record, erasing perspectives and events that are unflattering to the dominant group, and replacing them with a unitary, simplified account that supports its ideological ends.
This often involves erasing the perspectives and histories of marginalized groups — forcing them to assimilate into the dominant ethnic group. In China, the CCP has detained massive numbers of Uyghurs in “re-education camps” where they are constantly monitored with absolutely no privacy, forced only to use Mandarin Chinese (speaking in any other language is forbidden and punishable) and prevented from practising their religion — all with the goal of erasing Uyghur culture and assimilating them into the dominant Han Chinese identity (Amensty International, 2021).
One Chinese official even posted on Weibo in 2017 (Human Rights Watch, 2021), echoing the “kill the indian, save the man” motto of American Indian boarding schools,
Maisumujiang Maimuer, Chinese Religious Affairs Official
Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins. Completely shovel up the roots of “two-faced people,” dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end.
Xiosphant is no exception. In Xiosphant, it is taboo to discuss one’s ethnic identity and their roots, with assimilation being considered to be a trait of a good Xiosphanti. Even Bianca would never discuss her roots with Sophie despite being good friends. In Argelo, Sophie meets Omar’s brother who says,
Ahmad
Everyone in Khartoum was a cyborg, and they all wore bioneural interfaces around their heads, making them smarter than a hundred regular people, and they built on a legacy of Islamic science and math that went back a thousand years. But then we came to this planet, and we were taught that our heritage was meaningless.
This changes Sophie’s perspective on the importance of understanding history and the value of traditional culture. Just because they were now on January, doesn’t mean they should leave the old world behind. In fact, forgetting our history is dangerous, as Sophie later reflects when thinking about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre — a genocide of Sophie’s ancestors who came from Nagpur.
Sophie
I talk to Bianca about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, when her ancestors killed mine onboard the Mothership. The Nagpur compartment was all but wiped out, thousands of people, and the survivors were “integrated” into the other six populations, their children raised to forget. There are no pictures, no firsthand accounts.
The real-world is awash with countless examples of such horrific acts, such as aforementioned detention facilities in Xinjiang and American Indian boarding schools to the Nakba of 1948 and the subsequent denial of the violence that occurred, with the term Nakba even being banned in textbooks for Arab children (Black, 2009) — so that they would be raised to forget. The lack of pictures, of any firsthand accounts is a clear example of the violence of the archive. The ruling class chose whose perspectives would be preserved and whose would be lost to the sands of time, erasing anything that would be inconvenient. As the Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote in his book, Decolonising the Mind (wa Thiongʼo, 1994),
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
The night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom.
Bianca responds in a manner, reminiscent of how Republicans scream about anti-White racism and how liberals are rewriting American history to saddle all Whites with crushing guilt for the crimes of their ancestors. Such individuals claim that they are only trying to prevent interpretations of history that are known to be “biased” from being taught and bringing back “objective” history.
Bianca
[We don’t talk about Nagpur] because its not constructive. We can’t focus on building a better future if we spend all our time agonising about things that happened a long time ago. And you won’t get people to help you change the world by telling them they’re descended from criminals. We all spend too much time caught up in the past already, and looking backward all the time is killing us.
Sophie realises that this idea, that “progress requires us to curate the past, to remove from history things that aren’t ‘constructive’”, is be a dangerous mindset. Leaving aside the fact that there can be no such thing as an “objective” historical interpretation (Carr, 2018), if we choose to curate the past, to whitewash and collectively forget the atrocities committed by those who came before us, how can we learn from our mistakes? Those who don’t learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.
Just look at the countless places where far-right neo-fascist parties are rearing their ugly heads once more, with millions of people failing to notice and stand up to the dangerous erosion of democratic rights. Look at how the centre-right party in Germany is once again collaborating with and adopting the policies of the far-right (von Pezold & Lunday, 2025), because that worked out so well last time 1. As Sophie says,
Sophie
Ahmad says that everything that’s wrong with us is because of things that happened on the Mothership. Maybe the past is all we are. The same people who flushed thousands of bodies into space went on to invent Circadianism.
If we do not approach history in an open and critical manner, if we explain away the unsavory and often disgusting aspects of our history with myths, we will not learn. These myths may be comforting but they are dangerous. History is meant to be uncomfortable, to be grappled with, because we humans are fallible and we always make mistakes, terrible mistakes. And if we do not confront our history honestly and acknowledge the atrocities of the past, how can there be justice for those who were wronged? How can we avoid repeating them?
The Gelet, Colonialism and Myth-Making
Known most humans as “crocodiles”, the Gelet are the native species of January. They have a long history and live in a massive flourishing city — the titular, City in the Middle of the Night. However, the imposition of the name “crocodile” by humans, dehumanises this sentient species, implying they are no more than mere animals. Recognising this, after befriending one of them, Sophie gives them a new name, calling them the Gelet, “[trying] to call [them] what [they] called [themselves]“.
One of the main differences between the Gelet and humans how they communicate. The Gelet, unlike humans, communicate through their tentacles, passing their thoughts and memories directly to each other, without the need to translate them into vibrations in the air first. This telepathic form of communication reminds me of the Trisolarians from Liu Cixin’s Three-body Problem, whose telepathic communication makes them incapable of lying.
However, due to this significant difference in their way of life from humans, they are viewed simply as “animals”. Even when Sophie tries to tell Bianca that the Gelet are people, and that she does not “control” the Gelet, Bianca insists that she has “tamed” or “domesticated” them, unable to let go of the notion that the Gelet are mere animals.
Bianca
They’re animals. You remember the Biology lectures at the Gymnasium. You were still there when we did that unit. Crocodiles don’t have a complex nervous system.
This is akin to how Europeans viewed indigenous peoples across the world as “uncivilised” and “primitive”, just because they did not have the same ideas about things like religion or how land is owned and used. Just because they did not understand them. Such a mindset is central to colonialism. By viewing anything different from European culture — shared land stewardship, communal ownership of property, oral traditions, animistic beliefs — as primitive, as requiring civilising, it becomes easy to rationalise swooping in and taking their land, culminating in ideas like Manifest Destiny and the White Man’s Burden. The differences in culture don’t even need to be as vast as those between Europeans and say, Native Americans. The Irish were once seen as savages by the British and brutally colonised, for among other things, believing in a different denomination of Christianity.
Bianca admits this when pressed by Sophie, asking what she finds problematic “about the idea that the Gelet could be people”. She requires the dehumanisation of the Gelet to be able to morally justify the actions that humans have undertaken on the planet.
Bianca
Because if they’re people, then what does that make us? Invaders? Is our struggle here even meaningful, if we’re just squabbling on the margins of their history? Because I’ve eaten crocodile meat, at some of those feasts I used to go to.
We see a more explicit example of denial when the Gelet bring to Sophie visit the City in the Middle of the Night after Bianca’s attempt to invade Xiosphant by travelling through the Night. Sophie undergoes an operation to enable her to be able to share memories like the other Gelet and she realises an important difference between the Gelet and humans.
Sophie
After many visits to the hammocks in the plaza, sharing the collective memory/dream, I realise that human civilisation is based on forgetting. If I own a pair of shoes that used to belong to you, then my ownership is based on forgetfulness. Humans are experts at storing knowledge and forgetting facts, which is why we saw this city from orbit and pushed all evidence into a hole.
Due to the Gelet’s sharing of memory, they almost never forget anything, even remembering their past leaders so completely that it is as if they live on within their memories. Sophie “[wonders] if the entire government of the Gelet is made up of ghosts and dreams.” On the other hand, humans are constantly misremembering and forgetting things. Our memory is imperfect, biased and becomes cloudly as time goes on. Hence, our collective memory of the past is imperfect, and often distorted. This collective amnesia is what allows the creation of all kinds of myths and half-truths about our society.
The denial of the existence of the City in the Middle of the Night is extremely similar to various colonial myths, particularly how the government of white settlers and government of Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) denied evidence that Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of a large medieval stone city, was constructed by Africans. They ignored the archaeological evidence pointing towards the conclusion that the native peoples living in the area had built it. Instead, archaeologists “concluded on the basis of a few architectural and stylistic features that the ruins had been built by ‘a northern race’ that had come to southern Africa from Arabia in biblical times” (Trigger, 2009). Even after a consensus was established amongst archaeologists that it was constructed by Africans, the white settlers and their government maintained the claim that the ruins were constructed by people from another land. Such claims seek to dehumanise the native Africans, because as Bianca says,
Bianca
Because if they’re people, then what does that make us? Invaders?
Another example of such a myth would be the central Zionist slogan of “a land without a people, for a people without a land”. It implies that Palestine was effectively empty, and reframes settler-colonisation as simply a return to an ancestral homeland. Firstly, Palestine can hardly be considered a land without a people, with a population of 462,465 in 1878, before the first Aliyah in 1881, and had its own major dialect, customs, folklore, and traditions (Pappé, 2017). Furthermore, the fact that the Jews once lived in Palestine does not give them any right to colonise that land, displace its native inhabitants and establish an ethnostate. Do the Romani people, who have been persecuted just like the Jews, have right to setup an ethnostate in North India, where geneticists have traced their ancestry?
These kinds of myths are far more common than we realise. Every nation-state engages in some kind of myth-making (though in many cases far less harmful than shown above) to create a sense of shared identity and to legitimise their claims to territory and authority. As the scholar Karl Deutsch wrote,
Karl Deutsch, Nationality and Its Alternatives
A Nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.
I first realised this when watching this excellent history video about the denial of Austrians’ complicity with the Nazi regime’s crimes, known as the Austrian victim narrative. At the end of the video, he highlights how people relied myths to help overcome the trauma of WWII.
Mr Manatee
Austria is not the only country where myths and legends have prevailed since the end of the war. Consider the United Kingdom where the memory of the London Blitz or the Battle of Britain is at the forefront and the narrative that the British civilian population stood united and unshaken against the Germans. … Or in France where the role of the Résistance has been repeatedly emphasised, but the widespread collaboration during the war has always been conveniently glossed over. … I could go on forever with this list. In virtually every European country, people clung to such myths to somehow overcome the unimaginable trauma of the Second World War.
So what myths did / do Singaporeans cling onto about our nation’s past? The book, Living with Myths in Singapore, which is a collection of essays by various writers seeks to answer this question. The book opens (Loh et al., 2017),
Living with Myths in Singapore, Introduction
Singapore is a mythic nation. It is mythic in the sense that what Singaporeans take to be ‘reality’ and ‘common sense’ are in fact shaped by a group of myths. … [T]his book is not all about myth-busting. It is more interested in the role that myths play in everyday life. The word ‘myth’ is commonly used to refer to a falsehood that is widely believed. … It is not so much that myths are half-truths — although they often are — but rather that they are widely held.
One myth covered is the myth of Singapore’s vulnerability which argues that our tiny island is beset by external threats on all sides, possibly seeking to set alight the volatile mix of religions and ethnicities which call this place home. In the book, Thum Ping Tjin highlights how this myth originiated from the British and was used to justify the banning of the Malayan Communist Party despite the lack of evidence of any conspiracy to subvert the state. With this pretext, the colonial government arrested 300 people and detained them without trial in 1956. The PAP continued to use this as an excuse for further arrests into the late 1980s, justifying them as necessary to “stop seditious actions that were the result of external machinations” such as 1963’s Operation Coldstore and 1987’s Operation Spectrum. However, no evidence was ever produced to support the detentions nor have the detainees ever been charged in court (Thum, 2017).
The myth and its possible harmful impacts is elegantly put by the Singaporean Australian writer, Judith Huang in her novel, Sophia and the Utopian Machine, where the ruling party has transformed Singapore into a dystopian, cyberpunk-like society with a rigid class hierarchy. The father of the main character, warns of the dangers of our eternal siege mentality, writing in an essay,
Sophia and the Utopia Machine, Chapter 5
In the mythology of our founding, we were born profoundly alone, and into an already-sinking leaky sampan of a situation. We have no water! goes the cry, the old cry of helplessness. … And this myth is incredibly powerful. … The problem is we retain even in success that siege mentality that makes … the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good — incredibly dangerous.
Xiosphant, in fact, uses a similar myth, about the hostility of their natural environment, to justify their oppressive social structure. George, one of the citizens of Xiosphanti, said that the idea that people should sleep when they want is “aimed at cutting [their] throats. Wrecking our whole society. People don’t realize how much we’re all just hanging on by our fingernails. This planet really doesn’t want us here.”
The Tragedy of the Citizens
Other than the 2 main cities on January, there is one more major group of humans living on January — the Citizens. The second main character of the book, Mouth, was a member of the Citizens… until they were mysteriously slaughtered, with Mouth as the only survivor. The Citizens were a nomadic people who wandered the twilight zone between the Day and Night on January and the only people who dared to live outside of the two major cities and a couple of small towns.
Other than the Citizens, another major part of the story is the changing climate on January, a clear allegory for climate change on Earth. Through out the story, we are told about how storms have made it harder for smugglers to sail cross a water body called the Sea of Murder and how a toxic rain that burns skin has become more frequent. Through one of the Gelet, Rose, we find out that this toxic rain is killing the Gelet’s children, potentially resulting in their whole species going extinct. This reminds me of the recent landmark advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which among other things, stated that in line with a state’s obligation to uphold human rights, including those of children, states have a legal obligation to address the climate crisis (Schaugg et al., 2025). A failure to do so, would be a violation of human rights.
When visiting the City in the Middle of the Night, Mouth watches with “emptiness … worse than ten thousand bones burnt to ash” as the Gelet inform her that it was in fact, the Citizens, who were responsible for the drastic change in January’s climate. The Gelet had no choice but to make use of their technology to massacre them.
This was pretty shocking to me as I was expecting the Xiosphanti to be the culprits, being the ones who are engaging in the most colonialism on the planet. The Citizens, on the other hand, are very similar to various nomadic and pastoral groups here on Earth. Their culture includes an emphasis on living sustainably off the land, as seen in one of their songs about a peach tree that was over-harvested by a sedentary population.
One of the songs of the Citizens
Sing the tart juice, taste the sweet peach bread
But never say you own the tree
The hot wind flows from the day
Tempered by a hedge, across the cooling waters
A crag guards the peach tree from ice storms
Cradled by chaos
Sing the tart juice, taste the sweet peach bread
Give praise to the meeting of day and night
Through hedge and rocks, and the generosity of fruit
You cannot organize luck, or make the perfect wind
Or bridge night and day with your foolishness
You will never again taste such beauty
Cradled by chaos
Various nomadic groups on Earth, similar to the Citizens, have faced discrimination — often viewed as being backward and primitive. They face an array of legal and societal pressures to assimilate into the existing sedentary population and give up their nomadic culture and lifestyle. In her book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Kingston, 2019), Kingston argues that these nomadic groups lack functioning citizenship as they are “viewed as suspicious strangers outside the state protection afforded to the ‘legitimate’ citizenry” (p. 130).
For instance, the Romani in Europe have been subjected to widespread discrimination ever since their arrival in the Middle Ages. After the war, the Romani were seen as “social problems” that had to be solved. This led to Roma women in former Czechoslovakia being offered financial incentives and being coerced into undergoing medical sterilisation from the early 1970s until 1990 (p. 140). Even today, Romani still face widepspread discrimination with 80% continuing to live below the poverty line (European Parliament, 2020).
Another example are the pastoralist Maasai communities in Kenya and Tanzania. Such communities “[depend] on access to grazing lands to support their animals and [require] mobility to avoid overgrazing” (p. 142). However, due to land privatisation and the subdivision of communal lands, these communities increasingly find that their movement is restricted, leaving them to be unable access vital grazing grounds. The rangelands used by these communities have also been set aside for wildlife protection or re-wilding, based on the false assumption that “livestock grazing is incompatible with biodiversity, even though domesticated and wild ruminants have shared these lands for millennia” (Niamir-Fuller, 2022). These pressures have forced these communities into ever-shrinking grazing areas, which leads to over-grazing and degradation of rangelands.
As such, I had expected the Xiosphanti to be responsible for the massacre of the Citizens, especially since they held the last remaining copy of the Invention, a book which contains the poetry and songs of the Citizens — eerily similar to how colonial powers like Britain plundered cultural artifacts from their colonies such as the Benin Bronzes (Gregg, 2022).
The author however, decides to subvert this expectation. It was the Citizens’ overharvesting of plants that were cultivated by the Gelet to stabilise the planet’s climate, that spelled doom for January. This is because just like all humans on January, they are colonisers. They are not native to the land and while their actions are certainly not ill-intentioned, they do not know how to live sustainably on the land.
While reading this book, I was also reading another book called “Genocide Bad” by the Jewish writer, Sim Kern, which breaks down propaganda spread by Israel to justify its genocide. One of the passages reminds me about this situation and highlights how almost all colonisers harm the natural environment in the places that they colonise.
Sim Kern, Genocide Bad
By the metric of land stewardship, Israelis have proven they cannot possibly be Indigenous. The impact Israel has had on the ecology of Palestine over the last seventy-six years has been nothing short of catastrophic. Israel has replaced native agricultural crops like carob, hawthorns, oaks, olives, figs, and almonds with four million trees of non-native European species. These artificial forests, often planted to hide the evidence of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba, contribute more to global warming than cooling, have destroyed endangered native ecosystems, and are susceptible to extreme wildfires.
Indigenous people, having lived on the land they inhabit for generations, have developed practices to enable them to live sustainably with Mother Nature. Consider the Three Sisters of Native Americans or the Firestick farming of Aboriginal Australians. There is a wealth of knowledge about living sustainably accumulated by these indigenous people over generations, making them crucial players in the fight against climate change.
On the other hand, most everywhere, colonisers are responsible for destroying the natural environment. Despite supposedly being a “land flowing with milk and honey”, Israel’s colonisation of Palestine has been nothing less than an ecological disaster. They have uprooted over a million olive trees, a backbone of the Palestinian economy, to drive Palestinians off their land (IMEU, 2022). They have over-extracted Palestinian water sources, leading to a drop in the water table and reduced water supply for Palestinians (Human Rights Watch, 2010). They have drained marshlands, leading to the extinction of the Palestinian crocodile (Bentley, 2021). And so much more.
Another example is how millions of buffalo were slaughtered by US hunters for their hides to make leather in the 1870s, partly due to the then President Grant being unwilling to keep the hide hunters out of territory reserved for the plains tribes to hunt. The production of leather to fuel industrialisation was not the only reason for the unsustainable hunting — it also sought to starve the nomadic plains tribes into submission. As one officer put it, “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” (Smits, 1994) And just like that, in the blink of an eye, the 60 million strong buffalo population that once ruled the Great Plains were reduced to a less than 100 individuals by the mid-1880s (Hedrick, 2009).
The Possibility of Decolonisation
However, not all is lost. There is still hope for a brighter future for the Gelet. While visiting the City in the Middle of the Night, the Gelet performed a surgery on Sophie allow her to communicate in the same way as them. This enables her to show her own memories to the Gelet and to other humans. She then heads back to Xiosphant to help other humans understand them and work together to save their dying world. As Sophie says,
Sophie
Nothing will change, unless more humans learn to be like me. I remember the climate projections, and the rising trend line. We can’t fix this problem in my lifetime, or even several lifetimes, but we need to start now. There are places Gelet can’t go and things they can’t do, but humans can.
Back in Xiosphanti, Bianca has fulfilled her revolutionary dream of overthrowing the Xiosphanti government, yet her new regime seems not have fundamentally changed anything — merely replacing old oppressors with new ones. When Sophie meets Bianca, she is disgusted by her new form, leading her to start a manhunt for Sophie. As the book closes, we never set what comes of Bianca’s new government or of the resistance formed against it. It ends abruptly, with Sophie sharing her memories of the Gelet with Alyssa, Mouth’s closest friend, leaving her with “eyes are so wet they look like silver”.
However, based on the Translator’s Note at the beginning of the book, we know that Sophie was successful in her mission.
Translator's Note
Despite all of the apparent fabulations and liberties taken in both of these narratives, they remain the closest thing we have to primary sources regarding the origins of this emergent new form of human sentience.
So as the book closes, a question still lingers. How do the humans on January decolonise and heal the planet? How do we decolonise and heal our planet?
As Mayhew, a writer within the universe of the book, says,
Mayhew, Treatise on Inhumanity
We measure the freedom of human beings by their ability to change with their environment. The only truly alien influence is the dead grasping fingers of our own past.
Just as Sophie decides to undergo and operation to become more like the Gelet, to learn about their senses, their ways of communication and ultimately, to work together to build a better world, we need to learn from indigenous people. We can learn from and be inspired by their agricultural techniques, which have evolved over millennia, to sustainably grow food without degrading the soil and damaging the natural environment. We can support indigenous communities in their fight to protect their land. Rates of deforestation on indigenous land are 17-25% lower than the global average (Kanungo, 2023).
Furthermore, we have to recognise that in much of the developed world, our wealth has been built off the exploitation of these people — from the displacement of Native Americans off their land to build slave plantations to the modern-day exploitation of Congolese workers to mine cobalt to satiate the world’s hunger for cheap electronics. We must ensure that indigenous peoples are treated as truly equal to everyone else — no more discrimination, no more over-incarceration. We must return the ancestral land that was stolen from them and pay reparations to help these communities pick themselves back up. Finally, we must never forget the horrors of colonialism, past or present, abroad or when it comes home, just as the Holocaust looms large over the memory of WWII. Never again, means never again for everyone.
Footnotes
-
In 1933, President Hindenburg agreed to appoint Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, believing that the government formed with Hitler as chancellor would be beholden to him and “he could see that the Nazi members of the government were ‘framed’ by conservative politicians and experts” (Longerich, 2019). Obviously, this didn’t work out as planned.
References
- Amensty International. (2021). Like We Were Enemies In A War. 63–95.
- Bentley, E. (2021). Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870–1935). Jerusalem Quarterly, 88, 9. https://doi.org/10.70190/jq.i88.p9
- Black, I. (2009). 1948 no catastrophe says Israel, as term nakba banned from Arab children’s textbooks. The Guardian.
- Carr, E. H. (2018). What Is History?: The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961. Penguin Books, Limited.
- European Parliament. (2020). Roma: what discrimination do they face and what does EU do?
- Gregg, E. (2022). The story of Nigeria’s stolen Benin Bronzes, and the London museum returning them. National Geographic.
- Hedrick, P. W. (2009). Conservation Genetics and North American Bison (Bison bison). Journal of Heredity, 100(4), 411–420. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esp024
- Human Rights Watch. (2010). Separate and Unequal: Israel’s discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories (p. 76).
- Human Rights Watch. (2021). Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots: China’s Crimes against Humanity Targeting Uyghurs and Other Turkic Muslims.
- IMEU. (2022). Fact Sheet: Israel’s Environmental Apartheid in Palestine. Institute For Middle East Understanding.
- Kanungo, A. (2023). The Silent Cry of the Forest: How Deforestation Impacts Indigenous Communities. Earth.Org.
- Kingston, L. N. (2019). Nomadic Peoples and Alternate Conceptions of Place. In Fully Human (pp. 129–149). Oxford University PressNew York. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190918262.003.0006
- Loh, K. S., Thum, P., & Chia, J. M.-T. (Eds.). (2017). Living with Myths in Singapore: Introduction (p. 1). Ethos Books.
- Longerich, P. (2019). Hitler: A Life (p. 272). Oxford University Press, Incorporated.
- Niamir-Fuller, M. (2022). Sustainable Pastoralism: a Nature-based Solution proven over millennia. International Union for Conservation of Nature.
- Pappé, I. (2017). Ten Myths about Israel. Verso.
- Schaugg, L., Jones, N., & Qi, J. (2025). Historic International Court of Justice Opinion Confirms States’ Climate Obligations. International Institute for Sustainable Development.
- Smits, D. D. (1994). The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883. The Western Historical Quarterly, 25(3), 312. https://doi.org/10.2307/971110
- Stanley, J. (2024). Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (First One Signal Publishers/Atria Books hardcover edition, p. 3). One Signal Publishers/Atria.
- Thum, P. (2017). Justifying Colonial Rule in Post-colonial Singapore: The Myths of Vulenrability, Development and Meritocracy (K. S. Loh, P. Thum, & J. M.-T. Chia, Eds.; pp. 15–22). Ethos Books.
- Trigger, B. G. (2009). A History of Archaeological Thought (2. ed., repr.). Cambridge Univ. Press.
- von Pezold, P., & Lunday, C. (2025). German parties’ boycott of far right looks to be over — with AfD on course for key jobs. Politco.
- wa Thiongʼo, N. (1994). Decolonising the Mind (p. 6). Zimbabwe Publishing House.