#so that extremely colonialist entry about the old Sith was a major factor in me beginning to write Dance

[tishinada]

100 Days of Writing – Day 16

Shifting back to the cultures in the Dance universe: My inspiration for my story's traditional Sith-blooded cultures started shortly after the game launched when I dug through some of the lore they'd written for the game (some of which has vanished into obscurity on their website by now.)

The one that irritated me the most (it might have been attributed to Gnost Dural) was an entry about the conquest of the old Sith species by the dark Jedi fleeing their civil war. This was a classic colonialist example of justifying conquest by reducing the indigenous people to violent, superstitious brutes who needed to be conquered. The old Sith weren't primitive. They had hyperdrive ships and controlled multiple planets. And even if they were engaged in in-fighting (unclear if that's actually true,) that's kind of the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it, from a group fleeing a civil war they just lost?

Casting them as “Superstitious” people who viewed the interlopers as virtual “gods”? Yeah, that's been written a lot too, as justification. Take the conquest of Tenotchtitlan---now Mexico City---by the Spanish in the early 1500s. New European-imported deadly epidemic diseases were probably the most significant factor, but the Aztecs' indigenous enemies also allied with the Spanish, another major factor. Not because they believed the Spanish were “gods”, but because they thought they were forming a traditional alliance against the Aztecs. They didn't realize that they would be enslaved too until it was too late (the Spanish didn't play by the cultural rules common in that area of the Americas and these enemies of the Aztecs were also devastated by new epidemics.)

Back to SWtOR: The writers’ decision to frame the conquerors’ own “religion” “replacing” the older beliefs being framed as “civilizing” the old Sith? Another extremely common colonialist theme is justifying the destruction of indigenous religion as “civilization” replacing “superstition.” (Right alongside destroying any of their written records or other culture that the conquerors find inconvenient.)

The enslavement of the old Sith was also called “civilizing” (a common justification for slavery) then glossed over how most Old Sith died as expendable front line slave shock troops in these renegades' own bloody conquests. Or that once they realized the old Sith were virtually all Force-sensitive and genetically compatible, they began “intermarrying” (it's unclear whether or not the old Sith had any choice in this) so their own descendants would have a better chance of being Force-sensitive.

All of the above together? Several forms of genocide, btw.

This is the tip of the iceberg, but the remnants of the Sith species still visibly exist during the era of SWtOR. It's a continuing form of colonization to insist they're really part of the conquerors' species now and not still their own species just because they have some human ancestry now. Indigenous peoples don't simply give up their culture and identity and let themselves be absorbed voluntarily even if there’s been intermarriage of some sort. They often take those things underground, waiting for a more favorable time...

(Day 15 here) (Day 17 here)