Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day. (Fuck Christopher Columbus).

About five years ago I started a media company called Terra Incognita Media. It’s a feminist response to the outdoor industry. The intention has always been to discuss issues that weren’t being discussed anywhere else in the outdoor industry. As a rock climber, this was a space I had access to, and I was sick of the lack of important issues being addressed surrounding race, class, and gender.

What I didn’t realize was how mired I was in my white feminism. I grew up a suburban, upper-middle class white girl, being taught my whole life the horrible myth of pilgrims coming here on the Mayflower and showing up to share a “Thanksgiving” meal with the “indians.” I found out too late in life that the true story is that European colonizers, my ancestors, came to these shores emboldened by “Manifest Destiny,” the doctrine of belief that the expansion, pillaging, and raping that the US did throughout the Americas was justified, inevitable, morally sound, and willed by God.

The “Doctrine of Discovery” was also hugely influential, which established a religious, political, and legal justification for colonization and the seizure of land inhabited by indigenous peoples for time immemorial. The document bolstered Spanish conquest of the “New World.” But the US established itself on land that is ancient — the true name is Turtle…