Having just begun a piece called “I am a Recovering Wasichu (white person): Revising Revisionist History” to help untangle my thinking about the issues that confront all of us involved in the state of the Earth, I opened Indian Country Today to your editorial, “Decolonizing decolonization,” [Vol. 28, No. 44]. Yours is an excellent piece and you have waded through the murky but fertile soils of scholarly, culturally, concerning, blaming, reactionistic, progressive compost to point the way to the growth of a new path.
All of us – the colonized and the colonizers – must decolonialize to create a viable new way. Through my own personal archeological dig I am coming to understand my historical disconizia and that the colonizer is just as colonized as those they have colonized – yet our present state has to some degree been co-created.
We have stripped away connections to our ancient roots. Just compare indigenous oral tracing of ancestry to our need in most cases to use computers to search vast genealogy databanks to track and reconstruct our backgrounds. Look at the disintegration of our own families. We have caused the same disintegration to other cultures. If our actions have poisoned others and their environments, so have we poisoned ourselves and our own environments.
We are so alienated from the land, the Earth, that only those who have dared to persevere despite every obstacle – the Pachamamas, the Mamos, and other indigenous survivors around the world – still have the awareness, the sensitivity to Mother Earth to see the dire changes and to cry out to we who are insentient – to raise a cry for help.
To look in the reflecting mirror of our own lives is to see that we cannot in good faith call other nations to task for “human rights violations” when we have been leaders in systematizing human rights violations.
Maybe we need to articulate a Decolonization Program – an outline or menu of steps and actions to take to untangle ourselves from our colonization addictions to free us to make conscious, better choices.
Although we have seen eight years of politicized “denial” thankfully come to an end, we are still in deep denial bolstered by deep enmeshment in the materialism and economic strings that have woven us into mummified insentient beings capable of inflicting pain, suffering, genocide and extinction on peoples, languages, animals, plants, the environment, and ultimately, upon the Earth.
You point to a new way. Perhaps the path leads through the stages of denial, awareness, apology, understanding and appreciation to greater simplicity of living to preserve what little of our food and water remain.
On the Hopi Prophecy Rock there are two lines. The straight line is the indigenous way of sustainability as instructed by the Great Creator. The jagged line is the wasichu (white) way. Perhaps the new world line is between the two – an undulating wave of collaboration and cooperation – a sign curve that corresponds to Universal Harmony.
– Karen Stein
Shoreline, Wash.
