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Tequesta

jonCates
5 min readDec 2, 2023

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Her name is not Tequesta. That is what the colonizers called Her. When they killed Her. Over and over again. She was older than them by thousands of years but then they arrived, they stole everything, and they burned the world down. 1513. Early 1800s. Her relations. Her hystories told the truth. Their stories, traditions, and family. The Mayaimi, not Miami.

In 1994, Johann Addlerr, The Österreichische Filmmakerror, came to find Her. He traveled to the place they now call Florida. He found Her there, living all Her ages at once. She is real, but he is a dream. He is a fiction, a fantasy. Johann Addlerr is a parafictional person, a version of the author. His name is jonCates. He went looking for Her in Mayaimi. Miami. Florida. The killers came during Pascua Florida, the “Feast of Flowers” they said. Destroyers. Of worlds. They claimed.

Pope Nicholas V issued the Dum Diversas in 1452, and then the Romanus Pontifex in 1455. These papal decrees codified settler colonial imperialism’s Catholic justifications for genocide, enslavement, theft, resource extraction, and the creation of international criminal corporate enterprises. in the name of God. The Vatican established the basis for the Doctrine of Discovery.

Doctrine of Discovery began to define any form of ‘discovery’ as being justified genocidal violence. These Catholic laws also set the stage for more broadly defined and ambiguously applied ‘Christian’ biblical explanations for the settlers and their fantasies of American Exceptionalism. The Machine in the Garden. The War. La Frontera. Flowers. Flow errors. The killers.

The author, jonCates, writes: “as an active Catholic myself, and as someone who was born into and benefited from settler colonialism, i reflect on this always in order to take responsibility and as i seek to be truthful in my contrition. Kelly Lytle Hernández, Harsha Walia, Leo Marx, Caroline Fraser, and Anna Dempsey are all folks who detail the extremely psychotic violence of these (delusional) belief systems.“

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jonCates
jonCates

Written by jonCates

Glitch Art pioneer, Digital Art teacher, Media Art Hystories scholar; founder of Glitch School && Glitch Art Gallery in 台北,台灣 (Taipei, Taiwan) and online.

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