Of course they only reward us with awards when we perpetuate their settler colonial ideologies for them.

This movie is so close to being good, so close to rearticulating the Western, so close to critiquing capitalism, so close to making a commentary on settler colonialism. But instead it just reproduces it.

It is perhaps useful that the movie won, so that we might be able to interrogate the ways in which Asian Americans can better be in relation to rural, working class, and Native people. I find incredibly instructive. But I wish it was instructive in more than just critique.

This is a movie about sacred land, and those who are allowed access to the spirituality of such places. This is a movie about after fall of capitalism, those of the Empire return to the frontier. How the spiritual, stolen under settler colonialism, comes to solve capitalism.

But only for a moment. Because the settler cannot live permanently without access to Empire. How the settler must return to Empire, no matter how ravaged. The settler cannot access the spirituality of the land, except through Empire. And so, they cannot know true spirituality.

So the settler is caught in this bind: between empire and the sacred land upon which stands. Between empire, which necessarily makes invisibility the sacred, and the sacred, which dies under empire. But being of empire, the sacred constantly slips away. Away and away and away.

I do not believe this is the project that Zhao set out to accomplish, but it what we see, ultimately. And so, again, I feel this is a useful movie. But I just know the academy was not thinking of such a critique. Instead, they see the movie as a vehicle for their settler dreams.

As an Asian American, I do not dream of Empire. I dream of sacred land belonging to Native people. I dream of a nomadism that is open to all people. I dream of a world in which the crisis of capital is not the sole driver of the decision to become a nomad.

I do not contest the fact of the nomad. I believe that in a decolonized world, nomadism is an useful frame through which we might imagine America. But we must first engage with what it means to be a nomad on sacred land. And remember all that prevents Native people access to this