The Settlers continue to erase
our existences from the cultural, social, and political landscape of our
homelands.
A
true revolution is spiritual at its core.
How
you fight determines who you will become when the battle is over.
The
truly revolutionary goal is to transform disconnection and fear into connection
and to transcend colonial culture and institutions.
Many
Onkwehonwe today embrace the label of “aboriginal”, but this identity is a
legal and social construction of the state, and it is disciplined by racialized
violence and economic oppression to serve an agenda of select surrender. The acceptance of being aboriginal is as
powerful an assault on Onkwehonwe existences as any force of arms brought upon
us by the settler society.
Change
cannot be made from within the colonial structure. Institutions and ideas that are the creation
of the colonial relationship are not capable of ensuring our survival.
All
of the world’s being problems are in reality very small and local
problems. They are brought into force as
realities only in the choices made every day and in many ways by people who are
enticed by certain incentives and disciplined by their fears.
[Colonization]:
we cannot allow the word to be the story of our lives, because it is a
narrative that in its use privileges the colonizer’s power and inherently
limits our freedom, logically and mentally imposing a perpetual colonized
victim way of life and view on the world.
However
noble and necessary justice is to our struggles, its gaze will always be
backward. By itself, the concept of
justice is not capable of encompassing the broader transformations needed to
ensure coexistence. Justice is one
element of a good relationship; it is concerned with fairness and right and
calculating moral balances, but it cannot be the end goal of a struggle.
Peace is
hopeful, visionary and forward-looking; it is not just the lack of violent
conflict or rioting in the streets.
To be
Onkwehonwe, to be fully human, is to be living the ethic of courage and to be
involved in a struggle for personal transformation and freedom from the
dominance of imperial ideas and powers.
A warrior
makes a stand facing danger with courage and integrity. The warrior spirit is the strong medicine we
need to cure the European disease.
The new
warriors are committed in the first instance to self-transformation and
self-defence against the insidious forms of control of the state and capitalism
use to shape lives according to their needs – to fear, to obey, to consume.
Survival
is bending and swaying but not breaking, adapting and accommodating without
compromising what is core to it’s being.
Imperialism
has not been a totalizing, unknowable, and irresistible force of destruction,
but a fluid confluence of politics, economics, psychology, and culture.
Political
power and money, the things we’ve worked so hard to achieve, are still not
going to be enough to liberate us from the present reality.
We still
turn to white men for the answers to our problems; worse yet, we have started
to trust them.
We
are the prophetic seventh generation; if we do not find a way out of the
crises, we will be consumed by the darkness, and whether it is through
self-destruction or assimilation we will not survive.
Before
we can start rebuilding ourselves and achieve meaningful change in the areas of
law and government, of economies and development, we must start to remember one
important thing: our communities are made up of people. Our concern about legal rights and empowering
models of national self-government has led to the neglect of the fundamental
building blocks of our peoples: the women and men, the youth and the elders.
We
will begin to make meaningful change in our lives of our communities when we
start to focus on making real change in the lives of our people as individuals.
It
is still true that the first part of self-determination is the self. In our minds and in our souls, we need to
reject the colonists’ control and authority; their definition of who we are and
what our rights are, their definition of what is worthwhile and how one should
live, their hypocritical and pacifying moralities. We need to rebel against what they want us to
become, start remembering the qualities of our ancestors, and act on those
remembrances. This is the kind of
spiritual revolution that will ensure our survival.
The European way is to see the world organized in a system of names
and titles that formalize their being.
Onkwehonwe recall relationships and responsibilities through languages
that symbolize doing.
Living
as Onkwehonwe means much more than applying a label to ourselves and saying
that we are indigenous to the land. It
means looking at the personal and political choices we make everyday and
applying an indigenous logic to those daily acts of creation.
Survival
demands that we act on the love we have for this land and our people.
Everyone
involved in the Indigenous Industry knows that we are negotiating with our
oppressor from a position of weakness.
Communities are disintegrating socially and
culturally at a terrifying speed as alienation, social ills, and disease
outpace efforts to stabilize our societies.
In this environment, negotiation is futile.
It is senseless to advocate for an accord with imperialism while
there is a steady and intense ongoing attack by the Settler society on
everything meaningful to us: our cultures, our communities, and our deep
attachments to land.
Fifteen
years of working in Onkwehonwe communities and organizations has taught me that
continued cooperation with state power structures is morally unacceptable.
What
it comes down to in confronting our imperial reality is that some of us want to
reform colonial law and policy, to dull the monster’s teeth so that we can’t be
ripped apart so easily. Some of us believe in reconciliation, forgetting that
the monster has a genocidal appetite, a taste for our blood, and would sooner
tear us apart than lick our hands. I think that the only thing that has changed
since our ancestors first declared war on the invaders is that some of us have
lost heart.
Make no
mistake about it, Brothers and Sisters: the war is on. There is no post-colonial situation; the
invaders our ancestors fought against are still here.
The
freedom and power that come with understanding and living a life of indigenous
integrity are experienced by people in many different ways, and respect must be
shown to the need for individuals to find their way according to their own
vision.
There are no redemptive teaching or easy answers on how to be happy,
only directions towards the truth and rough pathways to freedom.
The
culture of being colonized takes away a people’s ability to resist the racist
aggression and political, economic, and cultural pressures of the colonial
state and Settler society to surrender remaining land and rights and to further
assimilate culturally.
The state
doesn’t have to respond violently to Onwehonwe challenges, it chooses to do
so. The responsibility for violence
begins and ends with the state, not with the people who are challenging the
inherent injustices perpetuated by the state and who are seeking to alleviate
their own present suffering under the state’s existing institutions and
practices.
This is
why, for the colonizers, the most important and immediate imperative is to
assimilate indigenous peoples culturally: without an indigenous cultural
foundation or root there is no memory store or intellectual base upon which to
build a challenge to the empire.
Most
settlers are in denial. They know that
the foundations of their countries are corrupt, and they know that their
countries are “colonial” in historical terms, but still they refuse to see and
accept the fact that there can be no rhetorical transcendence and retelling of
the past to make it right without making fundamental changes to their
government, society, and the way they live.
How do we make their history and their country mean something
different to people who feel entitled to the symbolic and real monopoly they
enjoy on the social dynamics of our relationship and on the cultural
landscape? It seems that if we are to
move beyond the charitable racism of current policies or paternalist
progressivism of liberal reconciliation models, justice must become a duty of,
not a gift from, the Settler.
The colonial relationship is a dynamic relation of arrogance,
complacency, and complicity.
This is
what we have inherited from our colonial past: relationships founded on hatred
and violence and a culture founded on lies to assuage the guilt or shame of it
all. We are afraid of our memories,
afraid of what we have become, afraid of each other, and afraid for the future.
Fear is the foundation of the way we are in the world, and they way we think
about the future. It is normal, and we
have grown used to it.
The
present framework and the end-state of the decolonization process has left our
societies nose-to-nose and on the verge of a violent future. Think about it. Either Onkwehonwe accept the
Settlers’ response that justice is unaffordable or simply too onerous a cost
for them to pay – an acceptance that would mean Onkwehonwe will continue the
suicidal death spiral we are currently embroiled in – or Onkwehonwe will rise
to challenge the Settlers’ cowardly and selfish unwillingness to redress
injustices.
Decolonization…
is a process of discovering the truth in a world created out of lies.
If
language is the essential characteristic of an Onkwehonwe mentality, how do we
explain that the men who signed treaties surrendering millions of square miles
of our ancestral homeland, who waged war against their Brothers and Sisters,
and who worked with the colonizer to decimate the earth for profit, were all
mother-tongue, unilingual, Indigenous language speakers?
The
Onkwehonwe languages held as sacred repositories of culture today are very
different from the languages spoken by our ancestors, who were the originators
of the ceremonies, clans, and stories that are the substance of the traditional
culture we are seeking to preserve and reinvigorate.
People
always divide this way, between the ones who live for money and those who live
for something else.
We
transcend colonialism and begin to live again as Onkwehonwe when we start to
embody the values of our cultures in our actions and start to shed the main
traits of a colonized person: thinking of ourselves before others and
projecting the imaginary fears and harmful attitudes onto situations and
relationships.
Being
“Indian” and being “Aboriginal” is accepting a small self, imprisonment in the
small space created for us by the white man: reserves, aboriginal rights,
Indian Act entitlements, etc.
I see
three kinds of imperial forces that are causing our demise: destructive forces,
which cause discord and imbalances in our lives that lead to sickness;
deceptive forces, which cloud our minds and prevent us from seeing and thinking
clearly about our situations; and useless forces, which are simply distractions
that use up our time and energy to no good effect.
If the
goals of decolonization are justice and peace, then the process to achieve
these goals must reflect a basic covenant on the part of both Onkwehonwe and
Settlers to honour each others’ existences.
Change
will happen only when settlers are forced into a reckoning with who they are,
what they have done, and what they have inherited.
The terms
of restitution are calculated not according to morality or rationality, but
according to what the settlers
themselves determine they can afford or want to pay in return for their
new post-colonial identity.
Imperialism
is a machine that destroys indigeneity in all its forms and produces
identities, like that of the aboriginal, that are compatible with empire’s
capitalistic purposes.
Aboriginalism
is assimilation’s end-game, the terminological and psychic displacement of
authentic indigenous identities, beliefs, and behaviours with one designed by
Indian Department bureaucrats, government lawyers, and judges to complete the
imperial objective of exterminating Onkwehonwe presences from the social and
political landscapes.
Aboriginalism
obscures everything that is historically true and meaningful about Onkwehonwe –
our origins, lineages, and names; our land, our heritage, and our rights – and
puts in their place views of history and of ourselves and our futures that are
nothing more than the self-justifying myths and fantasies of the settler.
There
are many differences among the peoples that are Indigenous to this land, yet
the challenge facing all Onwehonwe is the same:
regaining freedom and becoming self-sufficient by confronting the
disconnection and fear at the core of our existences under colonial
dominion. We are separated from the
sources of our goodness and power: from each other, our cultures, and our lands.
Aboriginalism
is a cultural strategy on the part of the state; spiritual defeat and cultural
assimilation thus accomplished, political and economic negotiations become a
sort of mopping-up operation.
In this
spiritual and psychological war of genocide and survival, immersed in colonial
cultures, surrounded by Settlers, and falsely labelled as citizens of the
states which have forcibly integrated them, Onkwehonwe are offered only two
choices on the question of culture and identity within the aboriginal paradigm:
accept being excluded – and the alienation, loss, and frustration that that
situation implies – or choose to become assimilated
