"Nomads"

You know those young women.  Young women from Wisconsin or wherever who are all about yoga and travel.  The people who blog and call themselves "nomads."  Yeah, I know a few.  None of them mean any harm, really.  But none of them seem to acknowledge the extent and particular type of harm that has been done, by "us" to them.

The funny and ironic and absolutely shameful part about being a pseudo "nomad" is that middle class anglophone twenty-somethings are the exact opposite, the polar antithesis of actual real life nomadic people. 

Their love of travel is not the problem.  The problem is privilege.

There is scarcely any commons remaining to be shared freely, which is the sort of thing that genuine nomads participate in.  Nomadic livelihoods which include animal herding and small scale foraging in places like Mongolia, Tanzania, and Alaska are without question under siege.  Colonization helped chain people into easily exploited labor pools, and into centralized, national boundaries.

You are not a nomad because you like to travel, you are just a person who likes to and is able to travel, due to financial freedom.  Your cultural tradition does not depend on a nomadic livelihood.  Sorry, pick another word.

If only every nation could have it's own state.  If only.

The nation-state is a European contrivance and it is the map we inherit today.  The places where nomads still live and struggle to survive sit across, between and among states.  India, Mali and Angola, are the types of places where old school colonization persists.  I don't mean to say that elsewhere colonization has stopped.  It never halts.  1492 onward, more on this later.  Nowadays, oppression is alive and well under the aegis of multinational corporations.

So, unless you are one, don't dress/act/speak like one.  I won't accuse anyone of cultural appropriation by blogging, that's not my prerogative.  I do at least want to offer some context and a counterpoint.  At least.  That's a phrase I use all the time, think of it as my blog theme.

The Sami, the Tuareg, and the Yupik are being forced into, fenced into the mainstream consumer culture.  If you are a fellow settler, and I absolutely find it necessary to refer to myself as such, you should not call yourself a nomad.