Internalized Oppression in Wales

Screenshot Image description: The Red Dragon national flag of Wales showing a detailed red dragon with a serpent like tongue, wolf life head, pointed tail, wings, all on a background of white at the top and green on the bottom. The white is said to represent north Wales snowcapped mountains while the green represents the valles of south Wales. Text in the bottom left hand corner reads: “St David’s Day”

Do you know what today is?

St. David is the patron saint of Wales (I know this because I lived in Wales for three years and have a deep love and respect for that land).

As the patron saint of Wales, St. David made Wales into a Christian country by preaching and building cathedrals and enforcing strict monasteries and fighting battles with all the usual fanatic Christian supremacy. He did this all over Wales and also across Southwest England.

For those who are unfamiliar with how this works because you’ve been listening to colonizer narratives all your life, what this means is that St. David was involved in genociding the Indigenous Welsh tribes and forcibly converting them to Christianity. The descendants of those forcibly converted genocided peoples celebrate this history and thus "St" David is a symbol of national pride.

Screenshot Image description: Traditional St. David’s Day parade in Wales where the crowd are flying the Welsh Red Dragon flag alongside St. David’s flag of a yellow cross on a black background. Some of the celebrators are wearing kilts, and tartans. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and the parade is in a paved street next to a red bricked building on the right.

When I lived in Wales, I saw the Welsh people celebrating this day and felt pain that they were so unaware of their internalized oppression they were celebrating the genocide and slaughter of their own Indigenous ancestors. It was a genocide that began centuries before when the Romans invaded Britannia and then wiped out the Druid stronghold on Anglesey (in North Wales) but it was continued by the Christian missionaries who through the centuries forced every single person into Christianity. Of those missionaries, St. David was said to be a native born Welshman. Native born missionaries can be even worse than foreign missionaries because they are so filled with self hate for their own ancestry, while rabidly adoring their oppressors, that they continue the influence of their oppressors upon their own people. Do you know when the records say "St." David lived? The 6th century, shortly after the fall of the Roman empire and the collapse of Roman influence in Europe in the 5th century. The Romans withdrawing their control over Britannia led to much unrest and chaos as well as feelings of abandonment by the internally oppressed while Indigenous resistors saw this as an opportunity to assert their sovereignty over their own land. Due to that Indigenous resistance that continued for centuries in Wales, there is still a certain amount of Indigenous Welsh practice to this day. They still speak their native language, for instance, which is a huge achievement after 2,000 years of colonial oppression. They also still have their Indigenous Welsh dragon on their national flag, even if they mostly ignore how that dragon is representative of their ancestors' Indigenous spiritual beliefs. Many of their Indigenous beliefs have been subsumed into Christian coopted mythologies like Merlin and Arthur, the Round Table, sacred dragons, and on and on. King Arthur’s father was said to be named Uther Pendragon.

Screenshot “Illuminated manuscript showing Uther Pendragon, Aethelbert, King Arthur, and Oswald of Northumbria, from *Epitome of Chronicles* of Matthew Paris”
Image description: The art shows each of these respective legendary/historical figures in clockwise manner starting from the top left, with Uther’s background in blue, Aethelbert’s background in red, Oswald’s background in blue, and Arthur’s background in red. They are all seated on their own thrones showing or holding emblems of their own stories while wearing crowns. Uther has a dragon’s head depicted to the right of his head, Aethelbert is holding an unrolled parchment in his left hand, Oswald is holding a cross in his right hand, what looks like a book in his left hand, with a crowned figure on the floor under his feet, and Arthur is holding a crown in either hands with two more crowns on either side of his head as well as the crown he is wearing.

In a bizarre twist, however, the Welsh see their red dragon as some kind of nationalist symbol that celebrates their Christianity. On St. David's Day, they fly the red dragon high with pride, while girls and women wear traditional Welsh clothes.* People eat traditional foods like cawl and Welsh rarebit with Welsh pride. Most wear a daffodil which is said to be a recent symbol of St. David and Wales while some also wear a leak which is said to be a more ancient symbol of St. David (legend says he made his soldiers wear leaks). This is a typical occurrence among colonized people, by the way. They somehow get their own Indigenous identity mixed up with their colonizer’s identity and then take pride in their colonizer’s identity, thinking it is their own. An obvious example of this is how the British empire, and later the US empire, saw themselves as heirs to the Roman empire, even though the Romans colonized Britannia causing much pain and suffering for centuries that still reverberates to this day in things like “St. David’s Day”.

Screenshot Image description: A white blonde woman and white blonde child in a field of daffodils. The woman is kneeling holding the child in front of her while the child is dressed in a black hat with a wide brim, a white blouse covered with a red shawl with white tassels, a black skirt below with the front of the skirt covered with a lace edged black and white checked apron. Both the woman and child are holding bunches of blooming daffodils and smiling for the camera.

If you’re particularly sharp, you may have noticed that March 1st would be an obvious traditional day to celebrate spring. For those of my sharp friends out there, I wouldn’t consider you too hasty if you jumped to the conclusion that the Christians, perhaps, coopted an Indigenous Welsh spring celebration to celebrate their missionary “St.” David just like the Roman celebration of Saturnalia was probably coopted for Christianity’s Christmas or the Saxon Goddess of Spring Eastra and other pagan practices were coopted for Christianity’s celebration of “Easter”. I wouldn’t consider that to be too outlandish a guess at all considering that Christianity is basically just culturally appropriated and bastardized Judaism and pagan practices that were forcibly spread to control an empire of colonized Indigenous peoples with Abrahamic monotheist patriarchal supremacy that also became white supremacy.

Meanwhile, many Welsh people don’t know that the Druid stronghold where most of the Celtic people from all over Europe would go to learn how to be a Druid was in Anglesey in their own country of Wales. Nor do many of them know of the ancient Welsh tribes and what territories they safeguarded for who knows how many centuries and millennia.

Screenshot Image description: A map of Wales showing the ancient tribe territories of Wales and their names using color coding. The Demetae (dark grey) held southwest Wales, the Silures (bright yellow) held southeast Wales, the Ordovices (blue grey) held the large region of central Wales with the possible addition of the northern Island of Anglesey also (which we know was the stronghold of the Druids), while the Gangani (bright yellow) held the small peninsula off the western coast of North Wales just below Anglesey, and the Deceangli (dark grey) held northeast Wales.

If they do happen to know of these things, or if they happen just to speak their own language, they may well devolve into racist nationalists demanding an end to immigration, not realizing that their so-called “white” ethnic ancestry is actually only a recent gene mutation (about 10,000 years old) that doesn’t even come from Europe, let alone Wales. In fact the very first Homo Sapien Britons who arrived in Britannia maybe 40,000 years ago were actually Black or brown just like everyone else in the entire world. Modern ethnic Britons have about 10% of their DNA.

Screenshot Image description: A bust on a pedestal showing a reconstruction of 10,000 year old Cheddar Man done for Natural History Museum based on the DNA evidence from his fossilized remains. The bust shows a dark brown skinned person with dark curly hair that falls to his shoulders. He also has light blue eyes, a broad nose, wide face with square chin, and somewhat but not very pronounced cheekbones.

The lighter-skinned Beaker people arrived around 4,500 years ago by mass migration from Europe. That means that the people who built Stonehenge 5,000 years ago as well as many other ancient stone circles all over Britannia were probably not white or even light-skinned. While Stonehenge is in England, some of its stones came from Wales, about 150 miles away in Preseli Hills. It may even be that Stonehenge originally stood in Wales at least 5,400 years ago and was later moved to England - making Stonehenge definitely not white.

Screenshot Image description: map of south Wales and southwest England, showing the 150 mile distance between Preseli Hills in Wales where the original Stonehenge may have stood and Wiltshire England where Stonehenge stands today. Preseli Hills is in far south western Wales, close to the west coast of Wales that borders the Irish Sea, while Wiltshire is much deeper inland in south England. The Severn River divides south Wales from southwestern England. That river flows into the Bristol Channel that in turn flows into the North Atlantic Ocean.

Screenshot Image description: Stonehenge on summer solstice. The sun is low on the horizon and peaking through the central stones of the henge, while the earth and stone structure is cast in black shadow and the cloudy sky above is lit up in shades of yellow and golden with intermittent darker yellow and brown reflecting off the clouds.

All of this means that throughout those millennias of pre-history, the population of Britain was not “white”. In fact, it may well have been the Romans who imported white desirability politics into Britain. Ancient Roman face cream that contained skin whitening lead has been found recreated in Britain with the local ingredient of tin 2,000 years ago. It was found near an ancient Roman temple in what the Romans called Londinium, which is modern day London. Yes, it was actually the Romans who founded the modern day capital city of Great Britain. The racist white nationalism of many modern day “Celtic” movements or “Pagan” movements or “British” movements are thus totally wrong in their understanding of their own history. Did you know that more than 1,000 years after the Romans left Britain, Queen Elizabeth I was killing herself with lead based face cream to look more “white”? She was a redhead. Redheads are the whitest people in the entire world and she was still putting lead on her face to look whiter. And where did she rule from? Oh yes, London, exactly where the Romans ruled Britain from before her and where the current British monarchy rules from today.

Screenshot Image description: 2,000 year old skin Roman whitening cream found in London Britain with perfectly preserved fingerprint indentations from the last user. The cream is in a high quality original round tin container, still filled with the cream on both parts of the open tin container, with clear impression of finger marks. Both parts of the container are held up by two hands wearing blue latex gloves. The cream itself is a light beige cream from age.

Here’s the thing: Understanding that Welsh nationalism can manifest itself as white supremacy doesn’t mean we should ignore Welsh trauma of colonization and the yoke of Christian and white supremacy that has been imposed upon the Welsh people. What it does mean is that we need to help our Welsh friends research their true roots, ancestry, and practices, so they don’t continue to celebrate their own oppressors and continue their own colonial trauma.

My Welsh friends, it’s time to heal. You are not Romans. You are not English. Christianity is not your Indigenous religion. You are so much more than what your colonial oppressors have allowed you to believe. Ignoring the Indigenous spiritual origins of your red dragon is not a sign of national pride. Thinking that white supremacy is your ethnic heritage is not a sign of national pride. Celebrating a Christian missionary on your first day of spring is not a sign of national pride. Wearing leaks on St. David’s Day because St. David’s Christian supremacist soldiers wore leaks to slaughter your ancestors isn’t a sign of national pride. When you do these things, you erase your own Indigenous ancestors who are the only reason you still exist as Welsh.

I support your struggle to decolonize and in that struggle is a lot of healing work to peal back all these layers of internalized oppression. You will never truly reclaim your land and your identity until you do that work.

Note: On St. David’s Day, the girls are said to wear traditional clothes while the boys do not dress traditionally as much. No one says a word about trans people or any Welsh trans Identities because no one wants to even touch that topic after 2,000 years of indoctrination into Abrahamic supremacist gender binary. What if, for example, the Druids or Celts had a place for trans identities but we know nothing about that because the only records we have left were written by patriarchal colonizers who may well have erased any mentions of Indigenous Welsh or British transness? There is not one part of the world where queer and trans identities have not existed, there are only parts of the world where queer and trans identities have been oppressed, suppressed, and erased. So how much Welsh transness has been erased through colonization? It’s something to think about.