While the attached does not directly address Buddhist thought & practice, it is relevant to the issues raised in considering Black Buddhist History Month. In American popular culture, the image of “settler” (along with pioneer, and colonist) usually carries a positive tone—which automatically implies a negative tone for any existing residents of the land being “settled.” And, automatically implies that the land previously was unsettled—that is unclaimed, up for grabs, a wilderness that needed to be tamed. (See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind [Yale, 1967, fifth ed. 2014] for a very important historical study of how the idea of wilderness has shaped American history.)
The author of the attached reading is Mike Charney, or Prof. Michael Charney of SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. He is described on their website as a military historian of Asia. Directly relevant to the readers of this substack is his Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (University of Michigan, Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006) which examines “the rise of monastic, military, and ministerial elites and their impact on the religious and intellectual life of the precolonial Burmese kingdom.”
For those of you familiar with Heather Cox Richardson’s analyses here on Substack, much of what he says will be familiar. Charney extends to more global perspectives—and I would emphasize that his comments regarding the positive image of “settler” have been probably purposely deployed to characterize Jewish “settlers” who take over Palestinian land illegally.
From the perspective of Vesely-Flad’s analysis, the triple motivations and justifications of greed, hatred and delusion characterize the White Settler Mentality that as Charney points out is creating more wars and environmental destruction—karmic consequences we as a society, a nation, a species can ill afford.