Um Sourcebook Jan10 Revision

Unsettling Ourselves:
Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality
a
sourcebook
compiled by
Unsettling Minnesota
foreword by
Derrick Jensen
texts and guides from:

Andrea Smith Waziyatawin
Dee Brown Ward Churchill
Elizabeth Martinez Denise Breton
UM collective members and others
Reflections and Resources

for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality:
a sourcebook compiled by the Unsettling Minnesota collective

edited by and with contributions from the collective members
September, 2009
copyrights are reserved by the respective authors
contact UM: [email protected]
share this book again and again
about the imagery

the gray line on this page follows the path of the Minnesota River from New Ulm to
Mankato, Minnesota, site of the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men in 1862.
the lines on the facing page trace the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi
Rivers, the site of both the genesis and genocide of the Dakota.
these images should be a reminder to settlers of our legacy
on the land we questionably call home.
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sources
Introduction by Unsettling Minnesota
Introduction by Wicanhpi Iyotan Win and Scott DeMuth
Foreword by Derrick Jensen
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6
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Part 1 | FOUNDATIONS
Unsettling Minnesota Points of Unity
How Minnesotans Wrested the Land From Dakota People

from What Does Justice Look Like? by Waziyatawin
Working Definitions

Their Manners Are Decorous and Praiseworthy

from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Desire to Belong: Reflections As a Settler Searching For Sense of Place

Claire
Little Crows War

from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
What is White Supremacy?

Elizabeth Martinez
Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide

from Conquest by Andrea Smith
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12
42
47
54
57
71
75
Part 2 | ALLYSHIP
This Is How It Seems To Me:

Flo
Mirroring Colonial Power Structures in Radical Organizing: Rape Culture
as Colonization and Community Accountability

Claire
Shut the Fuck Up

Dan Spalding
Unlearning: Thoughts on Allyship

Lindsey
From a Male-bodied Settler Moving Towards Allyship...

rivers
Anti-Classism

(Author Unknown)
What You Can Do About Classism

Class Action
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90
93
99
104
107
112
113
Cultural Appropriation: Beginning Reflections from a Settler Standpoint

Courtney
Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence

from Conquest by Andrea Smith
Indians Are Us? Reflections on the Mens Movement

from Indians R Us: Culture and Genocide by Ward Churchill
Understanding Colonizer Status

Waziyatawin
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118
127
151
Part 3 | ORGANIZING
Un-Settling Settler Desires

Scott Morgensen
Indigenous Feminism Without Apology

Andrea Smith
White Supremacy Culture

Tema Okun
Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy:
Rethinking Women of Color Organizing

Andrea Smith, from The Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology
Talking to Settlers About Unsettling

Rita
Brainstorm: the Beginnings of Unsettling Minnesota
Decolonizing Restorative Justice

Denise C. Breton
Colonialism on the Ground

Waziyatawin
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APPENDIX
Additional Resources
Dakota Decolonization: Solidarity Education for Allies (syllabus)
Letter to the New Ulm Journal: Cherusci, Dakota Both Resisted Colonization
Watershed

Nick
Decolonizing Ourselves: The True Face Behind Minnesotas History

Ly
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202
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207
208
Introduction
In March 2009, Dakota activists Scott DeMuth and Wicanhpi Iyotan Win, along with activist and ally Paper
Buck, offered a ten week course through the Twin Cities Experimental College entitled Dakota Decolonization:
Solidarity Education for Allies. The class met weekly and from the outset we were challenged to profoundly
re-examine our relationship to the land we live upon. The facilitators pushed us to address the genocide, colonial
rule, and the settler mentality of illegitimate entitlement that has defined the recent history of Minnesota. As
people with an interest in solidarity with the original people of this land, we were asked to explore what it
means to hold settler privilege on stolen land. The question posed to us on the first evening of class was Why is
there not a word for white ally in the Dakota language?
Our course material spanned a variety of topics as our facilitators moved us toward an understanding of
allyship and solidarity. We explored spiritual appropriation, colonial history, and cultures of resistance and
accountability, among other topics. Members of the class both talked and listened. We heard from each other,
non-indigenous to this land, and from those who are indigenous to this land. We tapped into our own roots and
histories as well as those of the state and its imposed rule.
Since the class ended, a group of us have come together as a collective which weve named Unsettling
Minnesota (UM). Our name reflects both our political goals of decolonization as well as the personal processes
of unlearning our colonizer mentalities in both heart and mind. We strive to become the allies for whom there is
no word in the Dakota language.
Here we offer you, as a seed, a collection of readings about this land and the people who live upon it. We offer
you this sourcebook in the hopes that it will serve as a guide in your own process of decolonization. We hope it
will motivate and inspire you toward the necessary action for justice.

In remembrance that this land is Dakota land,
Introduction
Wicanhpi Iyotan Win and Scott DeMuth

I admit, I was dragged into this project. Not the sourcebook per se, but the instruction of the class that
eventually would bring rise to the sourcebook. My entire life, I have only seen a handful of white people
actually sort through their colonizer history and settler mentality to become real, genuine allies to Indigenous
peoples. The process that these people have undergone was so time consuming, so grueling and often times
incredibly painful. It was amazing they hadnt stopped where most other people did, convincing themselves of
their own white-savior/pan-Indian-ally mentality, entitled to our meetings, ceremonies and spaces. We do not
need any more of those, and their creation was and remains a real danger in beginning to educate anyone on
Indigenous issues.

Deconstruction of colonizer mentality inside of ones self is important, but it is not enough. This
sourcebook is not the be-all and end-all of colonizer privilege, nor the definitive text on How to be an Indian
Ally. It is, however, a place to start. Yet the knowledge imparted by this class and by this sourcebook requires
more than simple acknowledgement. It requires action. Action was the hope behind the conception of the class.
Only through action will anyone see justice for wrongs perpetrated.

Like we have said many times, we are not looking for apologies, promises or confessions of guilt. We
have gotten all of those and more in the past, and while those people may have been useful and supportive for
a time, in the end, they behaved just as their ancestors had in the past, just like every single modern settler on
Indigenous land: with sick superiority and entitlement to everything that is not theirs.

I hope for something different. I hope the beginnings of something else will grow and flourish, despite
the legacy of genocide and land theft so many have inherited. I hope that gradually, this education and action
will spread, and we will no longer have to fight for the basic human right to live as people in our own way and
on our own land. I hope that one day, things like this class and this sourcebook will no longer be necessary. I
hope that you will take this and use it to fight back against the colonial empires that plague us all. I hope that
you will be different.

But I am not going to hold my breath.
-Wicanhpi Iyotan Win
A Challenge: If one word could be used to describe the class, it would be this.

The first challenge was just wrestling with the idea of whether or not settlers, who currently occupy our
homeland, can even act as allies in Dakota struggles for liberation. Our experience with allies has consisted
of liberals driven by guilt and feel-good politics, old white guys with their own agendas, and another class of
individuals who can only be described as New-Age fruitcakes.

The second challenge was the preparatory work between the three facilitators, and creating a bridge not
only between Dakota, mixed-blood, and white, but also across genders and class.

It was also a challenge to my own identity as an anarchist. Facilitating the class fundamentally changed
my conception of what it means to be an anarchist, not only for myself, but also my expectations of that
community, and any community of resistance.

But more than anything else, we as facilitators presented a challenge. In the Dakota language, there is no
word for settler-allies. The only word we have for settlers reflects our experience of settlers in both the short and
long-term. They are takers.

This class was a challenge to settlers to start becoming real allies, and maybe challenge us to create a
word for those people.

This class was a challenge to the descendents of settlers and colonizers to make a different choice than
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those of their ancestors.

We challenged the participants to turn their guilt into grief and anger; their privilege into accountability;
their half-hearted apologies into action; their complacency into resistance.

A challenge. Nothing else could encapsulate the experience of this class more than this one word. A
challenge was presented to us all.
Yours, S.
Foreword
Derrick Jensen
The Osage chief Big Soldier said of the dominant culture, I see and admire your manner of living. . . . In short
you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use.
You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I
should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.
The essence of the dominant culture, of civilization, is slavery. It is based on slavery, and it requires
slavery. It attempts to enslave the land, to enslave nonhumans, and to enslave humans. It attempts to get us all to
believe that all relationships are based on slavery, based on domination, such that humans dominate the land and
everyone who lives on it, men dominate women, whites dominate non-whites, the civilized dominate everyone.
And overarching everyone is civilization, is the system itself. We are taught to believe that the system
civilizationis more important than life on earth.
If you dont believe me, ask yourself, what do all of the mainstream so-called solutions to global
warming have in common? The answer is that theyre all trying to save industrial capitalism, not the real world.
They all take industrial capitalism as a given, as that which must be saved, as that which must be maintained
at all costs (including the murder of the planet, the murder of all that is real), as the independent variable, as
primary; and they take the real, physical worldfilled with real physical beings who live, die, make the world
more diverseas secondary, as a dependent variable, as something (never someone, of course) which (never
who) must conform to industrial capitalism or die. Even someone as smart and dedicated as Peter Montague,
who used to run the indispensable Rachels Newsletter, can say, about an insane plan to solve global warming
by burying carbon underground (which of course is where it was before some genius pumped it up and burned
it), Whats at stake: After trillions of tons of carbon dioxide have been buried in the deep earth, if even a tiny
proportion of it leaks back out into the atmosphere, the planet could heat rapidly and civilization as we know it
could be disrupted.

No, Peter, its not civilization we should worry about. Disrupting civilization is a good thing for the
planet, which means its a good thing. Far more problematical than the possibility that civilization as we
know it could be disrupted is the very real possibility that the planet (both as we know it and as we have never
bothered to learn about it) could die. Another example: in a speech in which he called for urgent action to fight
global warming, and in which he called global warming an emergency, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
gave the reason he wants urgent action to combat this emergency: We must be actively engaged in confronting
the global challenge of climate change, which is a serious threat to development everywhere. Never mind it
being a serious threat to the planet. Hes worried about development, which is in this case code language for
industrialization.
This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. In all physical truth to be civilized is to be insane,
to be out of ones mind, out of ones body, and out of all realistic touch with the physical world.
Civilization is a disease, a highly contagious disease that kills the land, that kills those who live with or
on the land, that attempts to kill all who do not accede to becoming its slaves.
Civilization is an addiction. My dictionary defines the verb addict as to bind, devote, or attach oneself
as a servant, disciple, or adherent. In Roman Law, an addiction was A formal giving over or delivery by
sentence of court. Hence, A surrender, or dedication, of any one to a master. It comes from the same root as
diction: dicere, meaning to pronounce, as in a judge pronouncing a sentence upon someone. To be addicted is to
be a slave. To be a slave is to be addicted. The heroin ceases to serve the addict, and the addict begins to serve
the heroin. We can say the same for civilization: it does not serve us, but rather we serve it.
Theres something desperately wrong with that.
8

We must stop this addiction, this disease, from enslaving us, stop it from killing the planet. And while
there are many actions we can and must take to protect the land and the human and non-human people we love
from this culture, in many ways the first and most important step we must take is to decolonize our hearts and
minds. That process of decolonization will look different for every person. It will look different for men than
women. It will look different for those who are indigenous than for those who are not.
But there are some common features. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with
and loyalty to this cultureindustrial capitalism, and more broadly civilizationand remembering your
identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means reexamining premises and stories the dominant culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm the
dominant culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. If you are a member of settler society, it means
recognizing that you are living on stolen land and it means working to return that land to the humans whose
blood has forever mixed with the soil. If you are an indigenous person it means never forgetting that your land
was stolen, and it means working to repossess that land, and it means working to be repossessed by that land.
It means recognizing that the luxuries of the dominant culture do not come free, but rather are paid for by
other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning
democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization
means internalizing the implications of that. It means recognizing that neither technological progress nor
increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that the dominant culture is not good for the planet.
Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that the dominant culture is killing the planet.
It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail.
It means remembering that the real world is more important than this social system: without a real world you
dont have a social system, any social system. All of this is the barest beginnings of decolonizing. It is internal
work that doesnt accomplish anything in the real world, but makes all further steps more likely, more feasible,
and in many ways more strictly technical.
Another way to put this is what my friend the environmentalist and medical doctor John Osborn says:
the first step toward cure is proper diagnosis. Decolonization means making that proper diagnosis.
There is an even more basic process common to all decolonization, no matter who you are. It is this.
The Russian author Anton Chekhov once assigned a young writer to create a story in which someone squeezed
every drop of slaves blood out of his body.
This is what we must do.
Civilization cannot survive free men and women who think and feel and act from their own hearts and
minds, free men and women who are willing to act in defense of those they love.
This sourcebook is about squeezing every last drop of slaves blood out of your body. This sourcebook
is about breaking your addiction to the dominant culture, and about remembering what it is to be a free woman
or man, what it is to live with a land that lives with you, and how to protect and defend that land, and your
freedom, as if your life depends on it.

Because in all physical truth it does.
Activist and philosopher Derrick Jensen is the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, and A
Language Older than Words, among many other books; he lives in northern California. Jensens philosophy
and rousing calls to action are debated amongst radicals, environmentalists and solidarity activists worldwide.
His writings and other works can be found at www.derrickjensen.org.
Part 1
FOUNDATIONS
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Unsettling Minnesota Points of Unity

Unsettling Minnesota is a collective of non-Dakota people working in solidarity towards decolonization in
Dakota homelands. We share these points of unity to guide our allyship and activism.
All people not indigenous to North America who are living on this continent are settlers on stolen land.
In particular, the vast land base surrounding the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers is
the homeland of the Dakota Oyate--the original people of this land. We acknowledge that the state of
Minnesota was founded through genocide and colonization of indigenous peoples which continues
today and from which settlers directly benefit.
All settlers do not benefit equally from the settler-colonial state, nor did all settlers emigrate here of
their own free will. Specifically, we see slavery, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, market imperialism,
and capitalist class structures as among the primary tools of colonization. These tools divide
communities and determine peoples relative access to power. Therefore, anti-oppression solidarity
between settler communities is necessary for decolonization. We work to build anti-colonial movements
that actively combat all forms of oppression.
We acknowledge that settlers are not entitled to live on this land. We accept that decolonization means
the revitalization of Dakota sovereignty, and an end to settler domination of life, lands, and peoples in
Dakota territories. All decisions regarding human interaction with this land base, including who lives on
it, are rightfully those of the Dakota Oyate and the Oceti Sakowin.
As settlers and non-Dakota people acting in solidarity, it is our responsibility to proactively challenge
and dismantle colonialist thought and behavior in the communities we identify ourselves to be part of.
As people within communities that maintain and benefit from colonization, we are intimately positioned
to do this work.
We understand that allies cannot be self-defined; they must be claimed by the people they seek
to ally with. We organize our solidarity efforts around direct communication, responsiveness, and
accountability to Dakota people fighting for decolonization and liberation.
We are committed to dismantling all systems of oppression, whether they are found in institutional
power structures, interpersonal relationships, or within ourselves. Individually and as a collective, we
work compassionately to support each other through these processes. Participation in struggle requires
each of us to engage in both solidarity and our own liberation: to be accountable for all privileges
carried, while also struggling for liberation from internalized and/or experienced oppression. We seek to
build a healthy culture of resistance, accountability, and sustenance.
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Working Definitions
The following definitions have been put forward by members of UM as useful tools in our process. Unlike
the Points of Unity, these definitions have not been subject to a collective editing process and are a work in
progress.
Accountability: The acknowledgment of privilege(s) and the responsibility for ones actions and inactions in
ones relationships. For example, a white male acknowledging white male privilege in a white-supremacist
and hetero-patriarchal society and taking actions to dismantle those privileges. To help foster a community or
culture of accountability one might hold another that occupies a similar position of privilege accountable to that
privilege, such as male-bodied people calling out other male-bodied people on patriarchy, rather than putting
that responsibility on female-bodied people who are often negatively impacted by this power dynamic.
Ally: A person who is a member of the dominant or majority group who works to end oppression in their
(personal and professional) life through support of, and as an advocate for, the oppressed population. Being
an ally entails an intimate understanding of ones own identity and privilege, especially in relation to the group
one is acting as an ally towards. Allies actively seek to interrupt and dismantle oppression in all its forms, even
when doing so could jeopardize ones own position of relative comfort and security. Allies cannot self-define as
such, but must be claimed by the group one strives to be an ally to.
Anarchism: A political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory
government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and undesirable, and promote the elimination of the state. Specific
anarchists may have additional criteria for what constitutes anarchism, and they often disagree with each other
on what these criteria are. There is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered
anarchists at best share a certain family resemblance.
Anti-Capitalism: Opposition to the system that colonizes people and nature as resources of power. Marxism,
democratic socialism, anarchism, and Indigenism are all anticapitalist methods of societal organization. Of the
above-mentioned movements only Indigenism and anarchism address the hierarchical nature of government as
well as capitalism.
Assimiliation: Ihdutkudani -to make yourself into nothing. The process of indigenous people being
incorporating into colonial society. As a part of colonization, indigenous society and culture must be dismantled
and erased. This is institutionalized within the Colonial society with boarding schools.
Capitalism: The socio-economic system where social relations are based on private ownership and commodity
exchange. This system defines the natural world, including humans, simply as a body of resources to be
exploited and reshaped to serve the purposes and interests of power. As such, it entails colonization and
exploitation of all life forms, land, and the natural environment. Capitalism results in competition for resources,
accumulation by dispossession, class structures, involuntary relations, and a coercive hierarchy. Adherents of
capitalism trust a god-like invisible hand of the market over human guidance of economies.
Colonialist Mentalities: Frameworks of social, political, and cultural thinking that normalize colonization and
eliminate anti-colonial visions from the picture of potential and desirable social transformation. Ideals that do
not explicitly ally themselves to decolonization.
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Colonization: The practice of invading other lands and territories for the purpose of settlement and/or resource
exploitation. Colonization exists in four stages: reconnaissance, invasion, occupation, and assimilation. It is
comprised of two primary aspects physical and mental. Colonization also includes the physical occupation of
land and the domination of indigenous peoples through military conflicts, genocide, and relocation. Religious,
cultural, social, and economic assimilation follows.
Colonizer: A person who is not indigenous to the land, that benefits from their occupation of the land, and
displacement of the indigenous Peoples. All colonizers, by continuing their occupation of another Peoples
homeland, remain colonizers, no matter their intent.
Colonizer Privilege: The institutionalized rights and power afforded to settlers by a colonial power structure.
Modern day colonizer privilege often comes in the form of something the colonizer does not have to deal
with, such as not being expected to think or do anything about the fact that they are living on stolen land at the
expense of indigenous people.
Dakota Oyate: the Dakota people or nation.
Decolonization: Ki waicu etaha ihdudayapi - to tear yourself away from the waicu way. The ending of
colonialism and the liberation of the colonized. In order to be liberated from the oppressive state, the process of
colonization must be reversed - beginning with the mental aspects and moving towards the physical. While
decolonization can be an act of cultural revitalization, it also requires the dismantling of the colonial
government and the entire social system upon which control and exploitation are based. This is a struggle
that has historically involved peaceful negotiations and/or violent revolt and armed struggle by the native
population. The United Nations has stated that these are legally justified actions, and that in the process of
decolonization, there is no alternative to the principle of self-determination.
Economies: Should foster community, not the other way around.
Exploitation Colonialism: A policy of conquering distant lands not with the intention to supplant its
population, but rather to exploit its natural and human resources.
Fourth World: In the succession of worlds, including the First World (Capitalist States, i.e. United States,
United Kingdom, etc), the Second World (Communist States, i.e. China, Soviet Union, etc), and the Third
World (Impoverished States), the Fourth World is the Host World to the Parasitic Worlds of the colonizer. It
is the nations of indigenous peoples who today are completely or partly deprived of their own territory and
its resources. This includes the Native Nations of North and South America, the Smi people of Northern
Scandinavia, the Catalonians in Spain, the Australian aborigines, the Maori of New Zealand, as well as the
various indigenous populations of Africa, Asia and Oceania. This also included segments of the European
population, evidenced in the struggles of the Irish, Welsh, Basques, and others to free themselves from settlerstate oppression. The goal of struggle in the Fourth World is often not the creation of a State, but the expulsion
of alien rule, the ending of colonization, and the reconstruction of indigenous societies.
Genocide: Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic,
racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and]
forcibly
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transferring children of the group to another group.
Hetero-patriarchy: The dominant colonial systems of hetero-normativity and patriarchy which are inextricably
linked in their function as tools used to establish and maintain a colonial state. This term draws attention
to the ways in which hetero-normativity and patriarchy intersect one another, reinforce each other, and
function together. Heteropatriarchy is a tool of colonialist and capitalist societies that enforces hierarchical
gender oppression (patriarchy) by enforcing a binary gender system in which one is assigned either male or
female identity at birth. Hetero-normativity eliminates the space between male and female and criminalizes
disassociation or non-conformity to these gender identities and associated expectations of each gender role.
Hetero-patriarchal societies work to give and ensure power and privilege to males and positions females as
subordinate to males.
Homeland: In Dakota: Ina Makoce - Mother Earth. The land that claims you, that speaks your language. The
land base with which a culture/people has a deep history and a sustainable relationship. Note: United States
citizens generally do not refer to their country as their homeland.
Indigenism: The political belief that places the rights and struggles of indigenous people as the highest priority
in political life. It is an ideology which draws upon the traditionsthe bodies of knowledge and corresponding
codes of valueof native peoples to both make critiques of and conceptualize alternatives to the present social,
political, and economic status quo. Indigenism offers a vision of how things might be, that is based in how
things have been since time immemorial, and how things must be once again if the human species, and perhaps
the planet itself, is to survive much longer.
Internalized Oppression: The manner in which an oppressed group comes to use against itself the methods and
mentalities of the oppressor. Members of a marginalized group can hold an oppressive view toward their own
group, or believe in negative stereotypes of themselves. Historically, colonization has sown seeds of self hatred
manifesting itself in generational trauma affecting the physical, psychological and spiritual well being of
individuals and communities.
Land reclamation: Restoring an area to a more natural state. This includes a dismantling of the systems that
hold and exploit the land bases of indigenous peoples, as well as the physical reoccupation of indigenous
homeland(s).
Liberation: To live ones own way of life. To gain autonomy. The act of freeing from control or domination by
a foreign power. Having the ability to make decisions as a sovereign entity and having the power to act upon
them.
Male Privilege: Colonialist societies were constructed on and around the values of hetero-patriarchy, thus
colonialist societies function to ensure and maintain the dominance and power of males. Colonial institutional
power and society functions to ultimately benefit males yet hetero-patriarchy works together to ensure other
forms of hierarchical oppressions so that some males may benefit more than others and other males are
oppressed in other ways. In colonial society, males and females are socialized differently to either exert power
and dominance or to be silenced and submissive. Male privilege means that within hetero-patriarchal societies
men have more voice, control, power.
Market Imperialism: The process which undermines the autonomy of communities, coercing them into serving
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the interests of multinational corporations, and the global capitalist system. This includes the commodification
and extraction of resources, the exploitation of the workforce and the subservience of local economies to the
global system. In this system, structural adjustments and privatization ultimately destroy social, cultural, and
economic infrastructures and replace them with a homogeneous system which benefits the global capitalist
establishment. What many might call globalization or neoliberalism.
Mutual Liberation: The understanding that our liberation is bound up with that of all peoples of this world,
that all oppression is interconnected, and that without everyones liberation we cannot be free.
Nation: A body of people who share a common history, culture, language or ethnic origin, who inhabit a
particular country or territory, or claim a common homeland. Nations traditionally include mutually recognized
structures of social and political self-determination amongst the people of the nation.
Nation State: see State.
Neo-colonialism or New Colonialism: the use of Natives to control their own people for the benefit a
colonizing state or for market imperialism. Unpopular and undemocratic, neo-colonialism means giving some
of the benefits of the dominant society to a small, privileged minority, in return for their help in making sure the
majority do not cause trouble for the Colonial government. Neo-colonialism often involves the establishment of
puppet governments (e.g., BIA regimes such as Dickie Wilson at Pine Ridge) and/or the state-funding of
Native governments, businesses, and organizations to indirectly control indigenous peoples. By manipulating
grants and funds, the Colonial government can determine the activities and strategies of governments and
organizations. It is no coincidence that when organizations were independent of government money (and
funded by grassroots communities) in the mid-sixties, they followed a militant strategy which confronted the
government. Now, after twenty years of grants, they are following a strategy that requires subservience to the
state.
Oceti Sakowin: [pronounced Ohti akw] Seven Council Fires. Each fire is symbolic of an oyate. The
seven nations that comprise the Dakota Oyate are: Mdewakantunwan, Wahpetunwan (Wahpeton), Wahpekute,
Sisitunwan (Sisseton), the Ihanktunwan (Yankton), Ihanktunwanna (Yanktonai), and the Teton (Lakota).
Rape Culture: A society in which rape is encouraged, condoned and perpetuated by its own institutions, social
and cultural values. A rape culture means that sexual violence is used systematically to maintain and perpetuate
hierarchical oppressions. It is used as a tool of hetero-patriarchal societies to ensure and maintain hierarchical
gender oppression while intersecting with and reinforcing other forms of hierarchical oppression. It is used as
a tool of colonialist and capitalist societies to dominate, conquer and maintain its power through systematic
sexual violence targeted at women, particularly native women and women of color.
Settler: All people not indigenous to North America who are living on this continent are settlers on stolen land.
We also acknowledge that the state was founded through genocide and colonization which continues today
and from which settlers directly benefit. However, all settlers do not benefit equally from the colonial state. Not
all those residing on this land immigrated here of free will, and while a pronouncedly racist power structure
determines who gains the most from Dakota genocide, it is all of our responsibilities as settlers, especially those
of us who descended from European colonizers, to challenge the systems of domination from which we benefit.
A way to describe colonizers that highlights their desires to be emplaced on Indigenous land.
Settler Colonialism: The policy of conquering a land to send settlers in order to shape its demographic contours
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and geography. This practice contrasts, but usually coincides, with exploitation colonialism.
Settler State: A settler state is a state with origins in settler colonialism and is built on settlement. Examples
include the United States, Canada, Israel, Australia, South Africa and many other states.
Sexual Violence: Any act that forces, pressures, or coerces someone into a sexual act without their consent.
It is the act of taking or disempowering someones ownership over their own body or physical identity. It is
subjecting someone physically or mentally to objectification or unwanted sexualization.
Solidarity: Bonds of support arising from common goals and the understanding of shared struggle. To be in
solidarity means getting each others back . I stand with you, against another (Chandra Mohanty).
Sovereignty: Sovereignty is a political term indicating the internationally recognized independence of a nation.
A sovereign nation determines its own laws and form of government, its own economy, culture, policies and
programs, defense and international relationships. Indigenous nations assert their right to be treated by their
colonial governments as sovereign nations.
Spiritual/ Cultural Appropriation: The act of colonizers taking the spiritual and cultural practices of the
indigenous peoples whose lands they occupy and claiming it as their own property.
State or Nation State: An organization that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and
political power in a given territory, which may include the armed forces, civil service or state bureaucracy,
courts, and police. Borders are defined by states. States and nations are distinct: there are many stateless nations
globally, which are typically indigenous and colonized. For example, the United States (territories) currently
occupies hundreds of indigenous nations. For peoples subject to their authority or within their borders, states
institutionalize hierarchies and privileges. States usually claim exclusive sovereignty within their territories and
therefore do not generally recognize the sovereignty or political structures of occupied nations or nations that
are not states.
Sustainability: The ability to live with the land and environment instead of exploiting the land and
environment. Evidence of sustainability includes: more buffalo, cleaner water, more rainforests, fewer coal
factories, less carbon emissions, less pavement and fewer dams than the year before.
Waicu: Literally, One Who Takes the Fat. See also: Capitalism, Colonization, Neocolonialism.
White Supremacy: A historically based institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression
of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white people (and nations of the European continent) for the
purpose of maintaining and defending systems of wealth, power, and privilege.
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Desire to Belong: reflections as a

settler searching for sense of place
Claire

For many years now I have struggled with the question of belonging. I felt a lack of significant connection to a place called home. I grew up dreaming of travel and faraway places- confident that I belonged somewhere and that this fantasy land waited for me to find it. Ive spent the last five years between Minneapolis and
wandering across oceans, borders, highways and train tracks, hoping that somewhere would make sense.

Eventually, I always ended up back in Minneapolis- seeking what I understood to be home, for the familiarity of the snow and pine. Yet, after a few months, I would again grow frustrated with what was around me.
I began to feel panicked and stagnant. I did not feel the connection I desired, so I left again.

As I continued to put new cities and places behind me, I began to understand that a sense of place and
belonging were not waiting for me somewhere else. The problem would not be solved simply by running away
when a place failed to meet my desires and longing.

I realized that my sense of place in Minneapolis was founded in the concrete and brick structures of
a colonized place. I would miss the familiarity of its sidewalks and faces. I would miss the ability to expertly
navigate myself through the constructed city I knew not just by sight, but by sound and smell. I return to Minneapolis for these things, the only things that I know well. Yet there is a superficiality that permeates this notion
of home. I grow frustrated and disappointed by the community I know here and imagine that surely I would find
a better fit elsewhere. The concrete is suffocating, it is inanimate; I feel nothing to ground or connect myself to.
I have no connection to the actual land of Minnesota; I only desire it. Through my wandering I have learned that
I am not just seeking to learn and see, but also what I identify as seeking to claim for my own. I seek and desire
to claim a connection to land. What does it mean when I, as a settler on occupied land, desire to belong to this
land?

A couple of years ago, I remember wanting to learn the Dakota language in order to understand the
land better. I identified Minnesota as my home and sense of place, but there was a large void- I did not feel the
connection and belonging one would associate with home. I thought that if I learned Dakota and spent more
time away from the cities, I would learn to understand Minnesota better and would feel like I knew that place
well. I wanted to connect myself to Minnesota and the way I saw to do this was to take from Dakota culture. At
the time, I understood this to be a positive thing; I thought it was important for Minnesotans to learn Dakota as a
way to depart from colonialism in order to develop a healthier, significant, positive relationship with the land.

It never occurred to me that perhaps I should not have access to the Dakota language; I simply assumed
I was entitled to it. I never thought to question why a white settler like myself can so easily have access to Dakota language. I thought that by learning Dakota culture, I could move away from settler society. I failed to
understand that I was re-enacting colonization and that my desires were intrinsic to settler society. What I desire
and seek to claim on this land are acts of colonization as long as I remain unaccountable to my settler identity.
I want to claim that connection, belonging and identity for myself because I do not have it and I imagine myself entitled to it. I seek to belong because I do not belong. I never considered that I did not belong because of
a history of conquest, genocide, and displacement. Nor did it occur to me that I didnt belong because the land
remains occupied by colonialist power that I benefit from, or because of the fact that my ability to call this land
home is dependent on the continued displacement and repression of Dakota people. The colonizer in me did not
see these things as the issue, but rather assumed that I belong here. I thought: of course this is home and I am
entitled to it. The answer to my alienation was to take more from the people who have had everything taken
from them in order for me to be here.

I imagine that most settlers, like myself, share this sense of disconnection. In our quest for belonging,
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perhaps many of us have resorted to long stretches of aimless wandering. Many of us have also turned to cultural and spiritual appropriation of indigenous cultures. Taking from indigenous cultures as a settler is not cultural
exchange; because it takes place within the violent constructs of colonization and colonial power, it is cultural
appropriation.

When I sought to connect and belong to Minnesota, I was acting from the colonial values of claim
through dominance and assertion. I took without asking because colonial society taught me that I have a claim
and a right to what I desire. I did not have to ask because it is already mine. I never thought that I should have
asked to learn Dakota language or culture, because colonial society has claimed it as its own property.

Andrea Smith, in her essay Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence taught me how this desire of settlers to belong and find connection through spiritual and cultural appropriation becomes an act so violent it is
like rape. A large part of living in colonial society means living in a rape culture where men are taught they have
right and claim to womens bodies and sexuality. Women are taught that their bodies are property to those in hierarchical power above them- primarily men. This comes from and reinforces colonial values of power through
property, entitlement and claim. As a colonizer I learn to extend these values of property, claim and power to my
own desire, mirroring the values present in a colonial rape culture. A rape culture tells men that they can take
without asking because what they seek already belongs to them. As a colonizer, Ive learned to see this land as
something I have right and claim to. That extends to the cultural heritage connected to this land. I identified myself as belonging (or desiring to belong) to this land and to see this land as home. I learned to see Dakota culture
and language as something I can claim and take through this claim. I did not think to ask for it, as through this
history of conquest, the connection to the land has been claimed as something that should be ours. When a settler enacts cultural and spiritual appropriation, they are taking something that is part of a people without asking.
They are taking it forcefully, just as colonization stole through force and continues to allow settlers to do so.

Spiritual and cultural traditions are a physical, mental and spiritual part of individuals and peoples.
When people are stripped of their land, home, language and identity- when a people has been subjugated to
genocide, rape and incarceration for the benefit of my sense of place- and I then decide that I have a right to that
peoples language, culture, spirituality- that is an acute act of violence. When I as a colonizer decide that a persons spiritual and cultural identity is something they do not have claim or ownership over and that I can take it
without asking, I am exploiting not only that culture but the people it belongs too. I am disempowering people,
silencing voices, and diminishing identities. I am violating people in a way that goes beyond a simple aggression; I am perpetrating deep mental and physical violence. For a settler to take that identity for themselves is
violence so personal, mental, physical and spiritual that it becomes a form of sexual violence, of rape.

I cannot seek a sense of home and belonging on this land without being accountable to my settler identity and actively working towards decolonization. The colonizer in me sought to claim, romanticize and pervert
indigenous cultures into my own making as a way of legitimizing my place on this land. I do not know how to
belong absent of colonial desires because it is colonization that allows me to be here. I have learned now that
my sense of belonging lies in my commitment to dismantling my own colonial mentalities and dismantling colonial power. Because colonization so heavily marks my identity, I cannot seek any sort of connection or home
without confronting this identity. As long as colonial power and society is in place, I cannot seek home without
dismantling my colonial mentality.

In one of UMs classes, Scott Morgenson led a discussion on settler identity- he spoke about how seeking to connect as a settler to occupied land is an act of colonization because it seeks to legitimize and justify our
place here. I think this is true when we are not engaged in decolonization work and are not accountable to settler
identities. When we are not thinking about how we came to be here, what had to happen in order for us to be
here, and who does and does not have access to land and resources- we are perpetuating colonization. In terms
of access to land, if I can have access to land that indigenous people do not have access too, then I need to work
in solidarity to change that. Because of the privileges I carry, its very easy for me to turn away from and ignore
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things that are unpleasant and problematic. This also reinforces colonial power because it is colonial power that
creates this violence and oppression, and it is colonial power that gives me the privilege and ability to ignore it.

I come back to Minneapolis because of the sense of community I have there. Yet, when I find it too frustrating and disappointing I leave. I think this frustration and disappointment is partially founded in the privilege
I have to be accountable to. My community is made up of mostly white settlers and my frustration comes out
of the fact that we are often able to look away when we want too. I have been very disappointed with my community when Ive seen many people resistant or indifferent to responding to the sexual violence present in our
scene. This is because many people have the privilege to remain indifferent to sexual violence as it does not
affect them in the violent, life-threatening ways it affects others. Rather than creating a community of support,
many find it too unpleasant so they turn away, because they can. Scott Morgensen spoke to our class about how
the colonized mind protects itself from responsibility, realization, reflection and action. When I feel too disappointed by my communitys lack of accountability and support, I leave hoping to find something elsewhere.
Yet I question my own accountability in leading this semi-transient life. If I continue to leave communities
when they disappoint me, I am not being accountable. I have the privilege to pick up and leave when something
doesnt work out, but any serious effort to decolonize and change requires that I remain committed and accountable to a place and a community. However, I must acknowledge that a communitys lack of accountability to
things such as rape culture and sexual violence inherent in a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal society creates
a space where many are forced to leave because the community is unsafe and violent. Some people do not have
the option of staying in one place because of the trauma and violence they have experienced there.

Settler society leaves a large void because there is no significant connection or belonging to the places
we occupy. We further perpetrate violence and oppression by failing to identify that this is a result of how we
came to be on this land, and the colonial systems we participate in and benefit from. My sense of place lies in
the dismantlement of my own colonial mentalities. This includes understanding my own cultural identity, by
learning that I do come from somewhere and connecting to that. By being honest about where I come from and
how I came to be here, I do not seek to appropriate other cultures for my own as a way to feel connection. By
being accountable within my community, and my community being accountable to me, we create the sustainability to actually be in solidarity with other communities and affect actual deconstruction of colonial power.
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What is White Supremacy?

Elizabeth Martinez
White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression
of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the
purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.
(Definition from the Challenging White Supremacy Workshops conference, San Francisco, 1998)
I. What does it mean to say it is a system?
The most common mistake people make when they talk about racism is to think it is a collection of prejudices
and individual acts of discrimination. They do not see that it is a system, a web of interlocking, reinforcing
institutions: economic, military, legal, educational, religious, and cultural. As a system, racism affects every
aspect of life in a country.

By not seeing that racism is systemic (part of a system), people often personalize or individualize racist
acts. For example, they will reduce racist police behavior to a few bad apples who need to be removed, rather
than seeing it exists in police departments all over the country and is basic to the society. This mistake has real
consequences: refusing to see police brutality as part of a system, and that the system needs to be changed,
means that the brutality will continue. The need to recognize racism as being systemic is one reason the term
White Supremacy has been more useful than the term racism. They refer to the same problem but:
A. The purpose of racism is much clearer when we call it white supremacy. Some people think
of racism as just a matter of prejudice. Supremacy defines a power relationship.
B. Race is an unscientific term. Although racism is a social reality, it is based on a term which has
no biological or other scientific reality.
C. The term racism often leads to dead-end debates about whether a particular remark or action
by an individual white person was really racist or not. We will achieve a clearer understanding of
racism if we analyze how a certain action relates to the system of White Supremacy.
D. The term White Supremacy gives white people a clear choice of supporting or opposing a
system, rather than getting bogged down in claims to be anti-racist (or not) in their personal
behavior.
II. What does it mean to say White Supremacy is historically based?
Every nation has a creation myth, or origin myth, which is the story people are taught of how the nation came
into being. Ours says the United States began with Columbuss so-called discovery of America, continued
with settlement by brave Pilgrims, won its independence from England with the American Revolution, and then
expanded westward until it became the enormous, rich country you see today. That is the origin myth. It omits
three key facts about the birth and growth of the United States as a nation. Those facts demonstrate that White
Supremacy is fundamental to the existence of this country.
A. The United States is a nation state created by military conquest in several stages. The first
stage was the European seizure of the lands inhabited by indigenous peoples. Before the
European invasion, there were between nine and eighteen million indigenous people in North
America. By the end of the Indian Wars, there were about 250,000 in what is now called the
United States, and about 123,000 in what is now Canada (source of these population figures from
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the book: The State of Native America, ed. by M. Annette Jaimes, South End Press, 1992). That
process must be called genocide, and it created the land base of this country. The elimination of
indigenous peoples and seizure of their land was the first condition for its existence.
B. The United States could not have developed economically as a nation without enslaved
African labor. When agriculture and industry began to grow in the colonial period, a tremendous
labor shortage existed. Not enough white workers came from Europe and the European invaders
could not put indigenous peoples to work in sufficient numbers. It was enslaved Africans who
provided the labor force that made the growth of the United States possible. That growth peaked
from about 1800 to 1860, the period called the Market Revolution. During this period, the United
States changed from being an agricultural/commercial economy to an industrial corporate
economy. The development of banks, expansion of the credit system, protective tariffs, and new
transportation systems all helped make this possible. But the key to the Market Revolution was
the export of cotton, and this was made possible by slave labor.
C. The third major piece in the true story of the formation of the United States as a nation was the
take-over of half of Mexico by war -- todays Southwest. This enabled the U.S. to expand to the
Pacific, and thus open up huge trade with Asia -- markets for export, goods to import and sell in
the U.S. It also opened to the U.S. vast mineral wealth in Arizona, agricultural wealth in
California, and vast new sources of cheap labor to build railroads and develop the economy. The
United States had already taken over the part of Mexico we call Texas in 1836, then made it a
state in 1845. The following year, it invaded Mexico and seized its territory under the 1848
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. A few years later, in 1853, the U.S. acquired a final chunk of
Arizona from Mexico by threatening to renew the war. This completed the territorial boundaries
of what is now the United States. Those were the three foundation stones of the United States as a
nation. One more key step was taken in 1898, with the takeover of the Philippines, Puerto Rico,
Guam and Cuba by means of the Spanish-American War. Since then, all but Cuba have remained
U.S. colonies or neo-colonies, providing new sources of wealth and military power for the United
States. The 1898 take-over completed the phase of direct conquest and colonization, which had
begun with the murderous theft of Native American lands five centuries before. Many people in
the United States hate to recognize these truths. They prefer the established origin myth. They
could be called the Premise Keepers.
III. What does it mean to say that White Supremacy is a system of exploitation?
The roots of U.S. racism or White Supremacy lie in establishing economic exploitation by the theft of resources
and human labor, then justifying that exploitation by institutionalizing the inferiority of its victims. The first
application of White Supremacy or racism by the Euro-Americans who control U.S. society was against
indigenous peoples. Then came Blacks, originally as slaves and later as exploited waged labor. They were
followed by Mexicans, who lost their means of survival when they lost their land holdings, and also became
wage-slaves.

Mexican labor built the Southwest, along with Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and other workers. In short,
White Supremacy and economic power were born together. The United States is the first nation in the world to
be born racist (South Africa came later) and also the first to be born capitalist. That is not a coincidence. In this
country, as history shows, capitalism and racism go hand in hand.
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IV. Origins of Whiteness and White Supremacy as Concepts
The first European settlers called themselves English, Irish, German, French, Dutch, etc. -- not white. Over
half of those who came in the early colonial period were servants. By 1760 the population reached about two
million, of whom 400,000 were enslaved Africans. An elite of planters developed in the southern colonies.
In Virginia, for example, 50 rich white families held the reins of power but were vastly outnumbered by nonwhites. In the Carolinas, 25,000 whites faced 40,000 Black slaves and 60,000 indigenous peoples in the area.
Class lines hardened as the distinction between rich and poor became sharper. The problem of control loomed
large and fear of revolt from below grew. There had been slave revolts from the beginning but elite whites
feared even more that discontented whites -- servants, tenant farmers, the urban poor, the property-less, soldiers
and sailors -- would join Black slaves to overthrow the existing order. As early as 1663, indentured white
servants and Black slaves in Virginia had formed a conspiracy to rebel and gain their freedom. In 1676 came
Bacons Rebellion by white frontiersmen and servants alongside Black slaves. The rebellion shook up Virginias
planter elite. Many other rebellions followed, from South Carolina to New York. The main fear of elite whites
everywhere was a class fear.

Their solution: divide and control. Certain privileges were given to white indentured servants. They
were allowed to join militias, carry guns, acquire land, and have other legal rights not allowed to slaves. With
these privileges they were legally declared white on the basis of skin color and continental origin. That made
them superior to Blacks (and Indians). Thus whiteness was born as a racist concept to prevent lower-class
whites from joining people of color, especially Blacks, against their class enemies. The concept of whiteness
became a source of unity and strength for the vastly outnumbered Euroamericans -- as in South Africa, another
settler nation. Today, unity across color lines remains the biggest threat in the eyes of a white ruling class.

White Supremacy. In the mid-1800s, new historical developments served to strengthen the concept of
whiteness and insitutionalize White Supremacy. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, born at a time of aggressive
western expansion, said that the United States was destined by God to take over other peoples and lands. The
term was first used in 1845 by the editor of a popular journal, who affirmed the right of our manifest destiny to
overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great
experiment of liberty and federated self-government.

Since the time of Jefferson, the United States had had its eye on expanding to the Pacific Ocean and
establishing trade with Asia. Others in the ruling class came to want more slave states, for reasons of political
power, and this also required westward expansion. Both goals pointed to taking over part of Mexico. The first
step was Texas, which was acquired for the United States by filling the territory with Anglos who then declared
a revolution from Mexico in 1836. After failing to purchase more Mexican territory, President James Polk
created a pretext for starting a war with the declared goal of expansion. The notoriously brutal, two-year war
was justified in the name of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a profoundly racist concept. For example,
a major force of opposition to gobbling up Mexico at the time came from politicians saying the degraded
Mexican-Spanish were unfit to become part of the United States; they were a wretched peoplemongrels. In
a similar way, some influential whites who opposed slavery in those years said Blacks should be removed from
U.S. soil, to avoid contamination by an inferior people (source of all this information is the book _Manifest
Destiny_ by Anders Stephanson, Hill & Wang, 1995). Earlier, Native Americans had been the target of white
supremacist beliefs which not only said they were dirty, heathen savages, but fundamentally inferior in their
values. For example, they did not see land as profitable real estate but as Our Mother.

The doctrine of Manifest Destiny facilitated the geographic extension and economic development of the
United States while confirming racist policies and practices. It established White Supremacy more firmly than
ever as central to the U.S. definition of itself. The arrogance of asserting that God gave white people (primarily
men) the right to dominate everything around them still haunts our society and sustains its racist oppression.
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*Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, who wrote this presentation, has taught Ethnic Studies and Womens Studies in
the California State University system part-time since 1989 and lectures around the country. She is the author of
six books, including two on Chicano/a history. She has been an anti-racist activist since 1960. Her best-known
work is the bilingual book _500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures_, used by teachers, community groups,
and youth since 1976. It was recently made into an educational video, in both English and Spanish versions. She
has been a presentor at numerous sessions of the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop for activists in San
Francisco. For those of you who are interested in additional work by Elizabeth Martinez:
500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures/500 Anos del Pueblo Chicano
Elizabeth Martinez.
Viva La Causa! 500 Years of Chicano History. A two-part educational documentary video based on Elizabeth
Martinezs book 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures.
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Part 2
ALLYSHIP
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This is how it seems to me:

Flo
I am 3rd generation born in the US, white-skinned Jew of Russian Empire immigrants. My parents, 2nd
generation born in the US, white-skinned Jews of Russian Empire immigrants were the first to move out of
the Jewish, Russian Empire immigrant ethic neighborhoods of Chicago in which they were raised. My early
years were spent half between a mostly white-Euro Christian town with a large population of migrants from
the Americas, 45 miles outside of Chicago and half with my extended family in the Jewish, Russian Empire
immigrant ethic neighborhood in Chicago. In that ethic neighborhood, Yiddish was spoken, Shabbes was
observed and the synagogue was segregated by gender. In the town outside of Chicago where my parents, sister
and I lived, there were not many Jews and we did not belong to a religious institution. My parents also raised us
getting a Christmas tree and hunting for Easter candy, for the fun of it.

When I was in the third grade I returned home one day and informed my mother that I was Jewish
and needed to belong to a synagogue. We joined the only option available in the area, which happened to be a
conservative shul, serving as the sole choice for any Jew for miles around. There were not many Jews in the
area, so the culture of our Jewish identity was not concentrated like in the ethnic neighborhoods of my parents
in Chicago, but became the dilution of being few and other and Americanized. The Jewishness in which I was
steeped is Jewish identity as an American.

After pushing my folks to join the Shul while I was in the third grade, I become deeply invested in that
part of my identity, studying for my Bas Mitzvah, attending both Hebrew and Sunday schools, wholeheartedly
supporting Zionist initiatives like Plant a Tree in Israel, and being a very active participant in my Zionist youth
organization, serving as president for a stint. I held a deep and personal relationship with Israel, a land on the
other side of the world I had never glimpsed but was told was my homeland and strived to get there. It was not
until years later that I realized the ramifications of the Zionist projects in which I participated. I was a young
Jew in the US taking guidance from my shul and wanting to be the best I could.

At the same time as this, I was spending much energy learning about the anti-war movement of the
1960s. From a very young age, it seemed apparent that I was contrary and unwilling to accept things without
question. In this vein, I longed to be a part of something bigger that was fighting for social change. In my mind
though, this struggle had ended in the 60s and I had missed the opportunity. And so I would just read about it
and watch films and fantasize about what it would have been like to be there.

Fast forward to age 17, and I am sitting on a couch in the upper Midwest just before the Jewish High
Holidays. I am on the phone with my father who asks me what I am doing for the Holidays and suddenly I
wonder why I have so embraced this identity without question. It is a shock to my system, an epiphany that
rocks me to the core. My eyes become open to different things and I start to question what the Chassen leading
services at my family Shul is talking about when he says I should take care of my Jewish brothers and sisters.
I ask him, why do you speak only of our Jewish brothers and sisters? Why not take care of everyone? He tells
me, of course you care about everyone, but FIRST, you take care of your Jewish brothers and sisters. I suddenly
feel in a box with certain people chosen to be in and others left out. It is a realization that makes me extremely
uncomfortable. I begin a deep critical analysis that led me to stop identifying as Jewish, thinking it is possible
to pick and choose which parts of my identity I can embrace and which I can ignore when it. This is a personal
identification that lasted until years of solidarity work would prove otherwise. That realization comes later
though. For now, I am 17 and trying to walk away from the cultural upbringing that has shaped my lens of the
world and how I fit into it.

At the same time, I am slowly coming to realize that struggles for liberation and social justice did not die
in the 60s and that there were indeed ways to live out my ideas of being a part of a movement for these things.
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This process of politicization first leads me to environmental struggles in the US Pacific Northwest in which
mostly young white-skinned Earth First!ers are present. The struggles I become involved in at this time are
mainly environmentally focused, lacking a narrative or analysis of our whiteness, how it fit into the movement
we wanted to create, how it affected partnerships we should have been working to build and any type of
indigenous solidarity. It was a struggle for the Earth and people were seen as the oppressors no matter what the
identity, history or amount of power they held.

Over time, I came to hear of struggles such as the one at Big Mountain/Black Mesa, an indigenous
Dineh struggle to maintain land and livelihood. When I heard about this, it was in the context of Dineh
Grandmothers resisting relocation asking for outside supporters to come, stand with them, bear witness and herd
sheep. It was immediately something I wanted to support but it would take another year before I ended up at Big
Mountain/Black Mesa as a white-skinned supporter.

I was taken into the struggle at Big Mountain/Black Mesa by the white support group that functioned out
of Flagstaff, Arizona. This group worked with the Grandmothers and other Dineh resistors, helping to facilitate
white supports getting to the land and ensuring some level of cultural sensitivity training. I ended up spending
4 consecutive winters living with a Grandmother, herding sheep and acting as one of the white supporters
coordinating the white support group. This was my first experience in solidarity with such an intensely identitybased and indigenous struggle. At the same time, I was still not identifying as a white-skinned Jew born and
raised in the US. Again, I had not learned yet that one cannot walk away from their identity and how it shapes
our perception of the world and the worlds perception of us and so I was trying to do just thatrebel from an
identity I found oppressive as opposed to understanding I needed to embrace that identity and use it to dismantle
this system of identity-based privilege we live in. For now though, I was still trying to ignore those privileges
and not identity with my cultural upbringing while at the same time being heavily involved in an extremely
identity-based struggle. This of course brought me into a lot of internal conflict. I felt rootless, cultural-less, lost
and adrift in a world of those embracing their identity as a form of resistance. It was maddening. I stayed quiet a
lot. Listened. Moved through life, observing while intensely participating.

Some years later, as I discussed my own identity with a co-worker, I was challenged as a Jew to take
a stand on Palestine. My first reaction was, what the fuck is this person talking about? Having until then, as
a politicized person and a Jew by birth, recalled never even hearing the word Palestine. The way this person
challenged me though made me realize it was certainly something I needed to know about and have a stance on.
The challenge caused me to start rethinking parts of my life, language I had been raised with concerning Arabs
and their inherent hatred of me simply because I was a Jew. I remember being told as a teenager not to let my
grandmother know the last name of my sisters boyfriend, which was Abdullah.

This challenge also started me on a path of learning about myself, US foreign policy, military occupation
and my part in all of it. I started reading about checkpoints, roadblocks and curfew and I understood none of it.
I consider myself dumb by book, understanding knowledge and things of the world only when I can grasp them
in my hand and so partly out of naivet and partly out of desire to understand, I decided to go to Palestine and
see for myself what was happening and where I stood in all of it.

I did end up in Palestine, working with a Palestinian-led initiative that organizes outside supporters
coming to Palestine and standing alongside Palestinians in non-violent forms of resistance against Israels
occupation. As I write this, I have spent over 2.5 years living and working in Palestine, building relationships
with, organizing alongside and learning from Palestinians as someone in solidarity. Looking back, it amazes
me the million things I did not know or understand when I first chose to use my privilege to travel to Palestine.
Living and working in Palestine though was the impetus to reconnect with my Jewish identity, realizing that if I
did not embrace and understand that part of myself, I would be of no use to the people I was trying to support.

I only say all of the above because without that as a basis for the work I need to be a part of in the world,
how do I even know what the work is I need to do? Without understanding who I am and where I came from, I
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dont believe there is a way for me to be of use to anyone. I now am deeply invested in learning how to utilize
my whiteness and all the privilege it brings in order to dismantle the white supremacist world we live in. I
believe that in order to dismantle this system based on privilege, I must be willing and able to utilize my own
personal privilege against itself. To this end, I have been beaten by police in the US, I have been shot at and
beaten by Jewish Israeli soldiers and I have been imprisoned in both US and Israeli institutions. I have dedicated
my life to using my body and voice to call out injustices, racism and oppressions. At the same time, I realize this
is a lifelong process and at no time do I get to be an expert, at no time do I get to be above being challenged
and at no time to I get to think my work is done (unless of course the racist, classist system in which we live
falls).

I believe in order to be a true ally and in solidarity, it is imperative that I understand my identity and
have a deep connection with it. At the same time, I think it is important to understand that everyones histories
and personal identity are different and have different places in the world. My personal identity creates an
interesting and at times painful intersection of other and white. As a Jew, I am other, with a personal family
history of severe oppression (including horrendous acts of murder against it) and a culture different then the
majority of those in this Christian country around me, yet I have white skin in a world that privileges that skin
color. This causes me to need to learn about my whiteness in a different way then white, Euro-centric people
whose power and place in the system is historically and culturally quite different then mine. This does not mean
thought that I dont need to do the work to understand my white privilege and how to work toward dismantling
it.

In this day and age whiteness is different then it was 60 years ago and presumably it will continue to
change. My family went from being on the bottom of the latter and considered not white (even though their
skin color was as white as mine), to being a part of a community that holds severe world power. True, there is
still anti-Jewish sentiment in the world, but it exists in a much different way then previous to 60 years ago. My
family also went from being people escaping extreme and violent hatred and oppression to being colonizers the
minute they stepped foot on the land now widely called the United States. These are not parts of my personal
story that will change but at the same time I need to make sure, as a person who now holds enormous amounts
of privilege, that I take responsibility for my current place in the world. I can hold onto the stories of my people
as being a part of what has shaped my place in the world, but I must at the same time understand that my place
in the world is much different then the place my great-grandmother held when she escaped the Russian empire
for what she believed to be a safe-haven open to settlement.

I do not have control over the body, identity, or class I was born into, but I certainly have control
(and responsibility) over what I do with those things. How can I not be willing to challenge this system that
privileges me over others? How can I not be willing to directly challenge the comfort I have been given on
someone elses land? These are hard questions and hard challenges and ones that I think will not end in my life,
but the other option of not taking responsibility for my place in the world seems much more painful.
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Mirroring Colonial Power Structures in

Radical Organizing: Rape Culture as Colonization and
Community Accountability
Claire
Throughout my involvement with anarchist and anti-rape culture organizing I have come to see the fundamental
necessity of personal accountability to social privilege and power as essential to any attempt at relationship
building. So frequently do alliances and collective efforts divide, exclude and silence because of inability to
actively recognize and challenge how we engage in cycles of violence. Because of our inability to understand
personal roles of power and privilege within US colonial society and how deeply they affect us- when our
visions, desires and voices go unchecked, we often silence the voices and visions of others. Without working
to understand the ways in which we have been colonized and how colonial power structures have influenced
our own thinking, we often replicate the same oppressive power dynamics in our personal relations and
organizational methods. Personal accountability does not ever end and should be a fundamental tool in any
collaborative, collective, and individual effort.

My understanding of accountability comes out of my self-education around sexual violence and rape
culture. Being a part of US colonial society means living within a rape culture; this means that our society
encourages, condones, promotes and normalizes sexual violence (both mental and physical) as a tool of
patriarchal gender oppression. Rape culture and sexual violence are also successful tools in reinforcing other
forms of hierarchical oppressions, such as racism and white supremacy, classism and hetero-normativity. This
makes it an essential tool in maintaining the power structures of US society that are capitalist and colonialist
through its historical foundations, continuing infrastructural make-up, and through its manifested goals and
intentions.

My understanding of personal accountability and decolonizing education developed from the realization
that my mind, and the minds of everyone around me, have been heavily shaped by the realities and values of
rape culture. I began to see the influence of rape culture in every interaction. In any sort of relationship building,
it is pertinent to understand that rape culture and sexual violence are pervasive everywhere and affect all of us.
If we hope to build meaningful alliances and partnerships, we have to understand our own roles within rape
culture and colonial society, our abilities to perpetuate violence and the ways in which violence has been woven
into our thinking. If we truly wish to deconstruct oppressive colonialist power structures, then we have to
honestly expose to ourselves how we have been mapped within these constructs.
How Rape Culture is a tool of Colonialist and Capitalist Systems

Capitalist and colonialist powers are dependent upon oppressive systems of hierarchical value. They
work to ensure the power and privilege of some at the expense of the rest. Capitalism could not exist without
colonialist systems and structures that rank and oppress human life in terms of value, rendering most as
crucially exploitable and expendable in order to privilege the desires and power of few over the needs of
many. As Andrea Smith discusses in Conquest, our societal and governmental infrastructures were built on
the principle that indigenous peoples and their lands are violable (12). White settlers asserted that indigenous
peoples were savage, primitive, less than human, and thus claimed for themselves a righteous legitimacy to the
conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples and lands. These principles and beliefs remain firmly rooted
in the makeup of our colonialist society and government of today. The US as an imperial and colonial power
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is dependent on the continued understanding that the land we occupy today (speaking as a settler) remains
rightfully and justifiably ours. The genocide and ongoing displacement and oppression of indigenous peoples
are understood as legitimate and necessary in order to maintain our settler claim to this land.

Smith writes that the continued claim of the United States to land and power necessitates that indigenous
people must always be in a state of disappearance, or a permanent present absence in the US colonial
imagination in order for US colonial ownership to feign legitimacy (Conquest, 9). In order to maintain this
constant eradication of indigenous peoples, indigenous identity was, and continues to be, criminalized. This has
historically been practiced through methods such as the genocide and forced removal of indigenous peoples
from their homelands, placing bounties to encourage and condone mass murder of indigenous peoples, forced
assimilation and ethnic cleansing through boarding schools, and the forced sterilization of indigenous women.
Currently, the continued displacement and forced removal of indigenous peoples from their homelands,
the continued occupation of these homelands, the criminalization of indigenous cultural practices, targeted
harassment and violence by law enforcement, mass imprisonment of native peoples, and systematic sexual
assault of indigenous women are just some of the many ways that native identity continues to be criminalized
and eradicated today.

White supremacy, as another infrastructural anchor of colonialist and capitalist power, allows for
hierarchical rankings of human value so that certain lives become socially significant and meaningful, while
others are considered expendable and exploitable. US society ultimately serves to ensure the safety and
protection of white settlers. US society could not have been built without white supremacy in that it allowed for
the justification of the genocide of indigenous peoples as well as the continued denial of genocide having ever
occurred, and that it voraciously relied on the kidnapping and enslavement of people of color for the purpose
of building the US colonial empire. Colonial and capitalist powers remain dependent on white supremacist
hierarchies of human value in order to ensure an exploitable labor force. Furthermore, white supremacy creates
the understanding that non-white people and land are ultimately white settler property, or, that US society
functions and exists for the benefit of white settlers (not ignoring the role of hetero-normative, patriarchal
and class privilege as determining factors of beneficence). This includes the continued exploitation of people
of color through the prison-industrial-complex, the militarization of borders and criminalization of certain
ethnic groups. Colonialist and capitalist powers work together to create the over-representation of people of
color in prisons as colonialist power renders people of color as expendable property, thus creating a cheap and
exploitable labor force for the benefit of capitalism through the prison system. The prison-industrial-complex
also works to thwart the strength of organizing in communities of color as this ultimately threatens colonialist
infrastructure.

Sexual violence and rape culture are indispensable to the strength and function of US colonialist and
capitalist power in that they work to ensure all structural systems of oppression. Rape culture means that US
society is a culture in which sexual violence is encouraged, condoned and perpetuated as a tool of gender
oppression. Hetero-normativity means US society forces compliance within binary concepts of gender (either
male or female) and seeks to normalize patriarchal gender oppression. US colonialist rationality naturalizes
binary concepts of gender and patriarchal gender oppression. Smith shows us how colonizers used the
oppression of women and patriarchy as a tool in subjugating indigenous nations, Native peoples needed to
learn the value of hierarchy, the role of physical abuse in maintaining that hierarchy, and the importance of
women remaining submissive to menThus in order to colonize a people whose society was not hierarchical,
colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy (Conquest, 23). Through imposing the
values of hetero-normativity and hierarchical gender oppression, patriarchy is presented as natural and was a
successful tool in colonizing and instituting other hierarchical oppressions.

The way that patriarchy is enforced and maintained is through systematic gender oppression in the
mode of sexual abuse both physical and mental. Rape culture means the normalization and naturalization of
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systematic sexual violence and sexual abuse against women in society. Patriarchal rape culture means that
womens bodies and sexuality socially belong as objects and property to male desire. In rape culture, it is
socially perceived that womens bodies and sexuality are something men have a right and claim to, this opens
the space for systematic sexual violence physically, emotionally and psychologically. In patriarchal US society,
men are empowered to make the decisions and laws that effect and control womens bodies and lives while
womens voices are devalued and silenced. When women occupy positions of power within US colonial society,
the power structures and dynamics they are enacting are still within the constructs of patriarchal values, thus
they are continuing to engage in gender oppression. Rape culture means that women experience mental and
physical forms of sexual violence on a consistent, everyday basis and internalize these assaults, resulting in selfhatred and low self-esteem, insecurities, lack of confidence, and thus further silencing. Rape culture means that
women are frequently pressured, coerced and forced into sexual acts as womens sexuality is seen as property
and conquest. Rape culture means that victims and survivors of sexual violence are often considered responsible
and at fault for their own assaults and rapes. Rape culture is how it becomes socially accepted that women are
ultimately to blame for their own rapes and assaults because of their own behavior (they dressed a certain way,
theyre promiscuous, they were drunk, they didnt fight back, they didnt say no). Rape culture pressures the
silence of female victims and survivors because we are taught that womens bodies are meant to be violated
and therefore at fault. Rape culture also means that perpetrators of sexual violence are rarely held responsible
for their actions as the most common forms of sexual violence are normalized, such as date rape and domestic
violence.

Sexual violence cannot be understood only as a tool of patriarchy but also as a tool of white supremacy
and colonization. In mainstream US society, the rapes of some women matter while the rapes of others do not.
White supremacy and rape culture means that some perpetrators will be prosecuted and others will not. It means
that whom is raped by whom matters in deciding whether or not the act holds significance. Sexual violence is a
tool of colonial white supremacy in that it renders certain women as violable and certain men as those capable
of violating. Colonial society and rape culture make it so that women believe themselves to be in need of
protection from sexual violence and that protection is found through the institutions and authorities that make
up white supremacist, patriarchal, colonial power structures. Examples of this are the mass lynchings of black
men by white men for in some way interacting with white women.

Since the endurance of US colonial society is dependent upon the repression, criminalization and
eradication of indigenous cultures, sexual violence is an important tool in maintaining the permanent
present absence of native peoples and thus the continued legitimacy US settlers and colonial society claim to
indigenous land. Again referencing Smith, as US colonial society renders indigenous bodies and land as settler
property and as rightfully violable, indigenous peoples become constructed as naturally violable within US
colonial society (Conquest, 12). Due to this, indigenous women are much more likely to be targeted for sexual
violence than white women. The rapes and assaults of indigenous women are mostly ignored or condoned
by law enforcement and authorities. The perpetrators of these sexual assaults and rapes most likely face no
consequences. Indigenous women are subject to other systematic forms of sexual violence such as enforced,
mass sterilization by the state. Smith calls this systematic sexual violence against indigenous peoples a project
of colonial sexual violence which results in what she refers to as an internalized genocidal project through selfdestruction (Conquest, 12). The colonial tools of sexual violence and rape culture are used against indigenous
communities to inflict massive psychological damage and self-hatred, repressing indigenous sovereignty and
identity.
Gender Dynamics as Sexual Violence

When one experiences sexual violence, a culture of rape can become much more amplified and
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seemingly small interactions can become extended acts of sexual violence. When women experience sexual
violence and the society around them tells them that their bodies and sexuality are property, deserving of rape,
when society condones their sexual assaults, when they find themselves silenced and devalued- the ways in
which we have been colonized according to gender privilege and oppression become greater acts of violence
than they might seem. When someone experiences so much violent gender oppression, every-day patriarchal
gender dynamics become an extension of sexual violence. It is important to be accountable to the ways in
which one has been colonized according to gender privilege or gender oppression. Gender privilege means that
socialized males expect and take power in social situations. For example, it is commonplace that men interrupt
or ignore women when they speak. When we live in a society of rape culture and patriarchal gender oppression,
this seemingly small act becomes amplified and especially for women that have experienced systematic sexual
violence by men, this feels like a violent reminder that they are socially considered as devalued sexual property
to men.
Women as Perpetrators? - Replicating Oppressive Structures of Colonial Power

In this essay I have been referring to sexual violence and rape culture as patriarchal tools of gender
oppression and speaking as though sexual violence is only perpetrated by men against women. While
statistically, almost all perpetrators of sexual violence are men and most women have experienced some form
of sexual violence, women certainly can be and are perpetrators of sexual violence and large numbers of men
are survivors of sexual violence. Nor do I seek to imply that sexual violence is a hetero-normative act occurring
between only men and women (I do however want to stress, that due to patriarchal gender oppression and rape
culture, the ways that sexual violence affect men and women are very different). If women are perpetrators of
sexual violence, or if men rape other men, does that mean sexual violence is not a systematic tool of patriarchal
gender oppression?

Sexual violence is an enactment and reinforcement of colonial power, regardless of what form it takes.
Colonialism values conquest, domination, power, greed and taking by whatever force necessary. Colonialist
society is built on institutionalized hierarchies. Rape culture and sexual violence (as I hope Ive explained well
by now) are strong tools used in the maintenance of hierarchical oppression and privilege. By living within
colonialist society, our minds become colonized in the sense that we are raised to think and understand in terms
of colonial power structures and hierarchy. We are shaped by the privilege, or lack of privilege, we receive in
colonial society and learn to behave in accordance with these privileges or oppressions. We learn to expect,
demand and control, or we learn to be controlled. We learn that we matter or that we do not matter. Colonization
means that these understandings become so fundamental in the development of our minds that they become
natural to us. We learn to think in terms of hierarchy, power, domination and control. We learn to value power
as control, dominance and violence. We learn to desire power as something belonging to the individual and to
assert power over others in order to obtain more power.

Throughout the anti-rape organizing and educating I have been involved in, I have heard arguments
that sexual violence cannot be gendered and is not an issue relating to gender. Sexual violence, as I hope Ive
explained well, is actually heavily gendered and one cannot separate sexual violence from gender, just as one
cannot separate sexual violence from any colonial oppression. I want to focus on our abilities to perpetuate
cycles of violence and how we have been colonized to understand and mimic colonial structures of violence.

Sexual violence, no matter what form it takes, is a tool of colonial, patriarchal gender oppression and is a
manifestation of those structures of power seeking to validate themselves. This is why we cant hope for change
within the US system because US society has been built from and out of violent colonialist power structures;
its survival is dependent on the reinforcement and maintenance of these colonial power structures. US society
and government have to be completely dismantled in order to abolish colonial rule. No matter who is the
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perpetrator of sexual violence, it is a violent act that seeks to claim dominance, to conquer, to control and to
assert power. Power through conquest, claim and dominance are what embody, drive, and maintain colonization
and colonial rule. Even if the roles of oppressor and oppressed are reversed we are still enacting colonial
systems of power and thus reinforcing and validating them.
Importance of Personal and Community Accountability to
Rape Culture and Sexual Violence

Law enforcement and legal support surrounding sexual violence is often additionally traumatizing for
victims and survivors of sexual violence as it can be dehumanizing and distrusting of a survivors experience.
It is also very often dangerous particularly for women of color and transgendered people. Turning to the police
and state for undocumented women means they and their families face deportation. For many women of color
they can experience further physical and sexual violence by police and persons in positions of authority or even
imprisonment.

Legal and state responses to sexual violence offer no real solutions to rape culture because they are also
structures of colonial power and society; they do not provide any real methods of perpetrator accountability
or adequate survivor support, thus making no efforts to actually fight rape culture and end cycles of violence.
They fail to address how colonial systems of oppression intersect to feed and perpetuate rape culture or how
rape culture works to feed and perpetuate colonial systems of oppression. Yet state funded programs and law
enforcement are often the only place a survivor has to turn to in order to seek support and response. This
reinforces the strength of colonialist society and power because we are forced to depend on it yet at the same
time remaining stuck within its cycles of violent oppression.

Sexual violence is so commonplace within anarchist and radical communities that I have learned to
expect it. Ive learned to draw boundaries and know when to step back so that it doesnt continuously obsess,
crush and devastate me. What continues to astound me however, is the dominant apathetic attitude, inability and
even resistance to addressing rape culture seriously within the communities and scenes I know well. When I do
see response to sexual violence and rape culture, even when it is done with the best of intentions, it very often
ends up encouraging more violence, causing more trauma for survivors and perpetuating patriarchal oppression
in that the focus, positive or negative, is almost always on the perpetrator and silencing of the survivor. Of
course organizing around response to sexual violence will be fraught with mistakes, it is a continuous process of
learning and I am grateful to everyone who has made a sincere effort.

However, I want to point out that efforts to organize community response to sexual violence and rape
culture usually end up burning out or falling apart. This is because it is too much work for a small group
of people to take on by themselves. In order to really transform colonial systems of rape culture and sexual
violence there must be commitment to personal accountability by entire communities. While supporting
survivors and working with perpetrators is not something everyone is capable of doing and not something
everyone should be responsible for, I think these efforts fall apart because they can only sustain themselves if
the majority of a community is committed to fighting rape culture and healing sexual violence.

Within the communities I participate in, I am often told by friends and acquaintances that they prefer
to ignore sexual violence and rape culture because it involves too much difficult emotion and drama. The
ability to ignore sexual violence and rape culture is a privilege many do not share and one that is ultimately
oppressive to those whose daily worlds are violent realities of sexual violence and gender oppression. Ignoring
sexual violence and rape culture are oppressive in that this denies ones personal power roles within rape
culture and silences survivors of sexual violence by creating an atmosphere in which there will be no offered
support or response. It is important to validate and trust a survivors experience as rape culture means a survivor
is distrusted and blamed for their experience. Facts are not important and seeking them out means further
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traumatization as a survivor is already under attack from society for daring to open their mouth. Distrusting
a survivors experience even through passive avoidance means perpetuating rape culture and strengthening
oppressive systems of hetero-patriarchy.

Ignoring sexual violence and offering no structures of survivor support or perpetrator accountability
means that a survivor is forced to turn to law enforcement and legal systems which again, is particularly
dangerous for transgendered folks and women of color. This reinforces the strength of, and our dependence
on, colonial hetero-patriarchal systems because of our inability to take this issue seriously and work towards
real autonomous solutions. Ignoring sexual violence also condones rape and sexual assault because it sends
perpetrators the message that there will be no repercussions and that it is not to be taken seriously. There is no
pressure to take personal responsibility and hold oneself accountable so that cycles of violence are halted. We
need to recognize the way that our minds are constructed in terms of colonial mentality. Ignoring or denying the
existence and importance of rape culture only perpetuates, legitimates, and strengthens colonial power.

Taking personal accountability to rape culture and sexual violence means making the serious effort to
educate oneself on their own roles of privilege and power (or lack thereof) within colonial, hetero-patriarchal
rape culture. By being personally accountable through education and action we create spaces that are safe for
survivors of sexual violence in that we have taken the efforts to dismantle within ourselves and each other the
violent colonial mentalities and power dynamics that perpetuate rape culture and hetero-patriarchy. By taking
the steps to personally educate oneself and be accountable to ones privilege within US colonial society, we
break from our own abilities to perpetuate violent oppression and are able to be supportive and in solidarity with
the voices we have once silenced. This means understanding how rape culture exists, enacts and perpetuates
itself through our own attitudes, ideas and privileges or oppressions. This means identifying how spaces are or
become unsafe to survivors through our own mentalities that condone rape culture and working to change that.

Without serious commitment to personal accountability, we will continue to participate in and perpetuate
the oppressions we claim to be fighting against. Unless our communities take fighting rape culture and sexual
violence seriously and as impertinent in any attempt to organize, we will continue to see our efforts divide and
fail through silencing and alienation.

In past collective efforts, I have been told that issues of gender and sexism can be addressed after the
revolution, or that there are more immediate and pressing issues at hand. Then whose issues are these? Who is
revolution for? Who gets to participate and who is excluded? If anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-rape
work comes later- then what are we trying to change? While we have formed ourselves around goals and desires
for liberation, we mostly fail to understand the ways in which we have been shaped by privilege, how our goals
and desires are still very reflective of colonial society and how our inability to see the ways in which we access
privilege means inability to see how we engage in violent and oppressive power relations. Until we seriously
and honestly seek to understand how we engage with privilege and power, we will remain blind to the ways in
which violence occurs around us, within us and by us. Until we seriously address and take accountability to rape
culture and decolonization education, then we are only engaging in and perpetuating the same colonial power
structures we claim to fight and resist.
Work Referenced:
Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, South End Press, 2005.
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Shut the Fuck Up

(or, How to act better in meetings)
Dan Spalding
Even with my mask I often spoke the tyranny of power. My first duty was to cultivate a revolutionary silence.
-Subcomandante Marcos
An open letter to other men in the movement
Introduction
Being an activist these days means fighting for a thousand different things - indigenous rights, rainforests,
corporate accountability, etc. Despite this diversity of campaigns, there seems to be some agreement on the kind
of society we want to create. Its a society that isnt based on white supremacy, class exploitation, or patriarchy.

This essay is about how men act in meetings. Mostly its about how we act badly, but it includes
suggestions on how we can do better. Men in the movement reproduce patriarchy within the movement and
benefit from it. By patriarchy I mean a system of values, behaviors, and relationships that keeps men in power.
It relies on domination, claiming authority, and belligerence. By the movement I mean the anti-corporate
globalization movement in the US I am a part of.

I think people organizing for affordable housing, against police brutality, for the rights of immigrants
(for example) are also fighting the same system thats wringing the blood out of the bottom 99 percent of the
worlds population and the environment they live in. However, I dont know from my experience if the men
who organize around those issues act the way the men in the movement do.

Just to be clear, those men are almost always white and from middle-class or wealthier backgrounds. In
my experience, as someone who identifies as a man of color, men of color dominate meetings in basically the
exact same way. But I find that men who do not speak English fluently tend not to do so as much. I wish I could
think of more exceptions.
Who cares about meetings?

Good question. Most meetings of large-ish organizations (of more than 30 people or so) Ive been to
dont amount to too much. The real work - doing research, getting people involved, organizing protests and
actions, fundraising, media stuff - gets done by working groups or individuals. Meetings are just about a lot of
talking, right?

Well, yes and no. At worst meetings force a lot of people to get together and generally discuss
everything thats been done, everything thats going on, and everything that needs to be done. These meetings
tend to wander a lot. Responsibility is not clearly delegated, decisions arent made overtly, and the organization
isnt more focused afterwards than before. At the same time, theres heated arguments over seemingly trivial
things, or hurtful criticism of individuals. But those arguments and criticisms dont amount to too much in the
end.

But a good meeting is a different animal altogether. With good self-facilitation and a good facilitator
(or two, or three...), everyone contributes to the meeting, without anyone taking control over it. People make
constructive criticism, and try to incorporate concerns raised into their proposals. And since everyone gets to
contribute their ideas into the decision-making process, the decisions are not only the best possible ones - but
also the ones people are most invested in. Since everyone feels ownership over the decisions, people are more
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likely to take on responsibility for projects.

If youre serious about using consensus, you have to care about meetings. Thats the only place a
group can democratically decide what to do and how to do it. The alternative is an informal group of the most
influential and forceful members (who dominate discussion) making the big decisions.
Its not just how often you talk, but how and when

Consensus decision making is a model of the society we want to live in, and a tool we use to get there.
Men often dominate consensus at the expense of everyone else. Think about the man who...
* Speaks for a long time, loud, first and often
* Offers his opinion immediately whenever someone makes a proposal, asks a question, or if theres a lull in
discussion
* Speaks with too much authority: Actually, its like this
* Cant amend a proposal or idea he disagrees with, but trashes it instead
* Makes faces every time someone says something he disagrees with
* Rephrases everything a woman says, as in, I think what Mary was trying to say is...
*Makes a proposal, then responds to each and every question and criticism of it - thus speaking as often as
everyone else put together (Note: This man often ends up being the facilitator)

And dont get me started about the bad male facilitator who:
* Always puts himself first on stack, because he can

* Somehow never sees the women with their hands up, and never encourages people who havent spoken

Its rarely just one man who exhibits every problem trait. Instead its two or three competing to do all the
above. But the result is the same: everyone who cant (or wont) compete on these terms - talking long, loud,
first and often - gets drowned out.

This is a result of societys programming. Almost no men can actually live up to our cultures fucked up
standards of masculinity. And our society has standards for women that are equally ridiculous. In one way, we
both suffer equally. Thats why we all yearn and strive for a world where these standards - which serve to divide
us and reduce us and prop up those in control - are destroyed.

In another way these standards serve those who come closest to living up to them. Sure, we all lose
when a few men dominate a meeting. But its those men who get to make decisions, take credit for the work
everyone does, and come out feeling more inspired and confident.
But I cant be sexist - Im a hippie

Oh, but you can. The irony is that you can basically do all the things listed above, even if you dont fit
the stereotype of the big strapping man. Ive seen hippies, men who would be described as feminine, queer men,
and others who in many ways go against the grain not go against the grain at all when it comes to dominating
discussion. A hippie might speak slowly and use hippie slang, but still speak as the voice of authority, and cut
off the woman who was speaking before him. A man who some might call feminine can still make a face like he
smelled something when someone he doesnt respect says something he disagrees with, thus telling her to shut
up; he may also politely but consistently put himself on stack every time someone criticizes his proposal.
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So shut the fuck up already
Whats to be done? Ive come up with a little idea I like to call, Shut the fuck up. It goes as follows: Every
time someone...
* Says something you think is irrelevant,
* Asks a (seemingly) obvious question,
* Criticizes your proposal or makes a contradictory observation,
* Makes a proposal
* Asks a question, or
* Asks for more input because theres a brief lull in the discussion. . .

Shut the fuck up. Its a radical process, but I think youll like it.

Since my childhood, I was raised by my parents and by every teacher I ever had in school to demand as
much attention as possible. In class I spoke more often than almost anyone else I knew. Surprisingly enough,
some of my teachers were annoyed with me. But while they may have counseled me to raise my hand first,
they never asked me to speak less or listen more. As a result I probably got twice as much attention from my
teachers, measured in time spent with me, than most of the other kids I went to school with.

But a mere 15 years after I started learning to exhibit almost all the dominating male behavior I list
above, something happened. I was in a class with a friend of mine. Lets call her Anne, because thats her
name. Anne and I were in the same study group, and the night before she had gone over the exact question the
professor was now asking. However, Anne wasnt answering, even though the rest of the class was silent.

I dont know what struck me to actually stop and think instead of answering the question myself, as I
was wont to do. That incident got me thinking about who spoke most often in class, why, and what I could do.
The answers to the first two questions Ive basically given already. The third is a little trickier.
What else can we do?

Lucky for us, being a man gives us a lot of authority. I mean that in a good way, too. Much like people
of color are always assumed to be selfish or paranoid when they speak out against racial profiling, women are
often assumed to be bitchy when they call out patriarchal behavior.

What does that mean for us? First, we shut the fuck up. This was easy for me in school - I just made a
rule that I never spoke more than twice in a 50 minute class. Surprise! Almost every time I would have spoken,
someone else eventually said the exact same thing, or something smarter. It was frustrating when it was another
obnoxious man doing the answering, but a lot of times it wasnt one of the two guys in class who spoke most
often.

The problem is that the classroom is designed to have one person in charge, and it aint the student.
While you could point out problem behavior in class, theres not a lot of space for it - its not expected or
encouraged, and would probably be dismissed by the professor.

The beauty of consensus is the facilitation. Not only can we facilitate ourselves - and we should - but we
can facilitate each other. This is mainly the job of the person chosen to be the facilitator. But when the facilitator
is ignoring problem behavior - or exhibiting it - its easy for other people in the group to guerrilla facilitate.

Sometimes its as easy as pointing out the people who have their hands up, but are somehow missed
by the facilitator, or by suggesting straw polls or go rounds or other tools that get everyone involved. But its
usually not that easy. The worse the pattern of behavior in the group, the more natural the fucked-upedness
will seem. And youll often be given the evil eye by the people youre calling out, if not a verbal backlash. And
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finally, its obviously not the job of the people most trampled on by patriarchal behavior to always be calling it
out. Thats where we come in. We are, at least at first, given the most respect when we call out bad behavior.

The problem is doing the calling out in a constructive way. Its all too easy to call people out in a hurtful
and authoritarian fashion - thus entertaining everyone with your unintended irony, but also acting the exact way
you dont want others to. When you call people out in a way thats hurtful instead of constructive, it still tends
to keep the quietest people at a meeting from participating.
The solution

So call people out, but try not to be too personal about it. Unless its outrageous, wait until the person
is finished, and then make your process point about how people should stick to stack, or consider not talking if
theyve just spoken, or whatever. And if it seems someones pissed off at your calling them out (and white men
make it real easy for you to tell if theyre pissed off), make the effort to talk to him after the meeting is over. It
usually doesnt take much to smooth ruffled feathers.

Unfortunately, it also doesnt take much for those same people to do the exact same thing the next
meeting. So while part of the answer is self-facilitation and facilitating others, another part is also giving
everyone the skills and confidence they need to assert their place in the meeting. This means having regular
workshops, for new and experienced activists, on how consensus is supposed to work. It also means going
through the formal process of consensus and explaining it during meetings. You can do it quickly, especially
after the first few times. But when people assume that everyone is familiar with the process, those who are
least confident (but still have good ideas) will be the first to drop out of discussions. Meanwhile, other people
who think they know the process but dont tend to hold things up. Ill let you guess what I think the gender
breakdown of those groups is.

Another key ingredient is talking to individuals outside of meetings. Talking honestly - I know you care
about the group, but in meetings it seems like you talk down to anyone who disagrees with you, and you cut
people off a lot, and that makes it really hard for other people to participate - is a big part of it. And as with any
interaction, you have to keep an open mind to hear their perspective. Ideally, you could resolve things at this
level and not have to bring things up before the group.

But its still a good idea to come up with a structure to address the way people act badly in meetings, for
people to regularly check in with how they feel the process is going. It also makes it easier for people who
wouldnt normally criticize others to do so constructively. The structure could mean that once every two months
the group has a process meeting, where the focus is on how people act in meetings, working groups, etc. Its
often easier and safer for people to call out problem behavior, and easier and safer for the culprits to own up
to it and ask for constructive criticism.

Finally, it means constantly thinking about how we, as men, tend to dominate and control the world
around us. To me this is most apparent (at least in other people) in meetings. To me, thats also where its easiest
to address. This is a continuous process. We have to always read about this, talk about it, inquire into how others
address it, come up with creative and successful solutions, and apply them. But no matter where we take it, I
think this struggle always starts with shutting the fuck up.

As men, were encouraged to dominate conversation without even thinking about it. Its too easy for
us to do really good work - fighting genetic engineering, tearing down the prison industrial complex, freeing
Mumia - and still act exactly like the frat boy next door. We have to confront each other and ourselves so that
domination stops seeming natural, and so we can start doing something about it. So the next time you dont
think about how youre talking, please think about how youre talking.
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Epilogue

This essay came out of my frustration with the male domination in meetings in this movement and the
absence of mens efforts to change it. It also came out of my need for self-reflection. This will ideally lead not
just to all men acting exactly like I think they should, but also a lasting dialog on how we behave in meetings
and what we can do about it. If you have any thoughts on what Ive written, please contact me and tell me what
you think: [email protected]. This isnt a declaration of war; its just a starting point.

Time for me to shut the fuck up.
Dan Spalding
Oakland, May 2001
(Thanks to everyone who helped with this piece)
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Unlearning: Thoughts on Allyship

Lindsey
One night UM had a movie screening at my house. The film was about the 1990 Kanesatake/Oka crisis in
Quebec, and afterwards we attempted to have a discussion about the failings of the so-called white allies in the
film. We had been talking about heteropatriarchy and group dynamics for a few weeks at that point. I cannot
remember everything that was said during the discussion, but I remember the bodily sensations of anger that
I felt that night. My heart was racing and my legs were completely numb. I felt a throbbing in my chest that
I knew wouldnt go away until I spoke up. The men in the room were cutting each other off, dominating the
discussion, and raising their voices to emphasize whatever point. Im sure it was only a few individuals, but I
experienced it as a whole group of privileged people who were taking up all the space in the room: my living
room, in my feminist queer house that had been hijacked by domineering straight men.

When I snapped and called them out on being sexist, I wasnt looking for a response or an apology.
I especially wasnt looking for the defensiveness and denial that were offered up by men in the group. The
conversation went nowhere for me, and when it finally ended, I went to my backyard with some of the other
female-bodied people in the group to scream out my frustration and chain-smoke Bali Shag.

The night should have mercifully ended then, but it didnt. When I came back inside, a few men were
lingering and wanted to talk with me about what had happened. One man congratulated me on my courage
for speaking up. Another wanted to bare his soul to me about his process of unlearning sexism. Someone else
wanted me to make a coffee date with him to talk it over later. I was exhausted, disappointed, and completely
pissed off, and all I wanted was for everyone to get the fuck out of my house. Not only did I have to call out
patriarchy in my own home, I then had to listen to men process their feelings about it. All during a conversation
about radical allyship. Where were my allies that night?

That was months ago, and things are much better now. The men in UM have been working on
accountability and patriarchy, and weve come a long way from that evening in my living room. Im not
sharing this story to call them out again in a more public setting, but because I learned a lot that evening about
how (not) to be an ally. Whether we seek to be anti-racist white people, feminist men, anti-colonial settlers or
any other privileged person standing in solidarity, I think there are many ways that our good intentions often end
up recreating the same systems of dominance that we seek to challenge. I dont know what it means to be an
ally. In my own process I am just beginning to see all the ways that I dont live up to my intentions. As we have
said time and again in UM, allies cannot be self-defined, they have to be claimed by the people they seek to ally
with. There are many men in UM whom I now consider my allies around issues of heteropatriarchy, because
they have done the work to challenge themselves and their social conditioning. I am trying to do the same in my
life, and this essay is an attempt to put forward some of the concepts Ive been working through.

The most basic thing that I know about allyship is that it is hard work. I need to uproot, examine,
and transform all the shit that has been forced into me by this society... and I do so reluctantly. I was raised
as a white supremacist and taught by my family to look down on poor people. By second grade I knew that
indigenous people were backwards and thus deserving of genocide. In a million other ways I have been taught
to disregard the voices of people who are socially positioned as less privileged than I. This includes most people
in the world. Though I try to question and challenge my oppressive social education, I have a long way to go
before anyone claims me as an ally. Sometimes it feels overwhelming to confront a lifetime of indoctrination
and a couple hundred years of Euroamerican colonial history; but Ive always liked a challenge. And I dont see
another option. I do not seek to be an ally because of my deep commitment to human equality. I seek to be an
ally because I am trying to save my life.

Claiming my entirely selfish motivations for solidarity politics has been an important part of my
process. Im not sure, but I dont think that anyone can make a lifetime commitment based on altruism alone.
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And a lifetime commitment is what is required. I do the personal work of challenging my racism and privilege
because I am determined to see the destruction of white supremacy in my lifetime. This system has twisted my
psychology and damaged my soul. For myself as a white person, I seek decolonization.

When I learned about racism as a kid, I was taught that there were bad white people called Racists,
who did mean and nasty things to black people (and only black people). Most of these bad people had died 200
years ago, but a few of them were still around and they all lived in the southern United States. If I wanted to
be a good person, then I should travel to Georgia and save a black person from an evil Racist. Then everyone
around me would congratulate me for my brave and noble deeds. Not surprisingly, Ive come to realize that this
isnt the most helpful way to think about racism or solidarity.

Last winter I attended a workshop for white people called Whites Confronting Racism. In the workshop,
I learned that this myth I was taught as a child is called the victim-perpetrator-rescuer framework. This
framework serves to reinforce the disempowerment of the victim of oppression while simultaneously
empowering and glorifying the rescuer. The rescuer and perpetrator are the only two people with agency,
which effectively recreates the systems of power that we seek to dismantle. It is more helpful for me to think
of the target-agent-ally frame, wherein it is recognized that oppression exists everywhere all the time in
our world, sort of like pollution, and in any given situation it is channeled through a particular agent towards
a particular target. This agent can be either an institution or an individual. The target is not a helpless victim,
rather they posses the power to respond to the agent,or not, and to form horizontal relationships with an ally
who can stand with them. The ally can use their privilege as a member of a dominant social group to support the
target, in whichever ways the target sees fit. Rather than an agent of oppression, an ally works to be an agent of
social change. Its more complicated that what I was taught as a child, but it makes a lot more sense to me than
nightmares of cartoonishly evil southern Racists.

In UM we have talked a lot about cultural and spiritual appropriation as a form of racism. Growing
up as a white kid too close to Berkeley, California, I embarrassingly admit that I once considered attending a
sweat lodge and growing dreadlocks. Allies should not romanticize marginalized identities, nor seek to join
the ranks of the oppressed. Although Im trying to stay away from should statements, I like that one a lot.
Its a good reminder for myself, since it is something that I often find myself doing. I daydream about being
a Zapatista, or going to Lower Sioux to show off as an anti-colonial white person who gets it. My romantic
ideas of people who struggle limit my ability to form relationships with real people who are not simply onedimensional embodiments of the revolution. Instead of fantasizing about how cool Id be if I just wasnt white,
I am trying to develop a healthy relationship with my settler identity. In the same workshop where I learned
about the target-agent-ally frame, I also was introduced to cultural sharing. It sounds like a pre-school
activity, but in fact it is a really effective tool to step away from appropriation and guilt. Basically, each time
we met someone shared the story of their racial/ethnic family identity. Weve expanded on this more in UM to
try to uncover positive settler identities in which we can ground our politics. Ward Churchill has great things
to say about the importance of understanding where you come from, and I think it is especially important for
anti-racist white people to do this work so that we are not tempted to identify with the more authentic cultural
other.

Living in the Twin Cities during the Republican National Convention has taught me more than I wish
to know about surveillance, infiltration, and informants. I think another essential, and essentially selfish, aspect
of allyship is that it keeps us safer. Dealing with internal oppression is a vulnerable and intensely personal
process. When we engage this process with people in our lives, and in particular people with whom we do
our political work, we cultivate trust and accountable relationships. The strength of our relationships is what
protects us from state repression and allows us to build dynamic and powerful movements of resistance.

Looking back at that evening in my living room, I realize that the reason I got so angry was because
I expected something better. I expected a male-bodied person in the room to call out the dynamics so that I
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wouldnt have to. I expected that I wouldnt be asked to counsel or support people after I put myself out there
by speaking up. I expected my emotional boundaries and space to be respected. If the situation were different,
and I was in a place of relative privilege in a group where oppression was being enacted, I dont know if I could
have done any better than the men of UM that night. I wish I could say with certainty that I would have done
things differently, but I would be lying. I fuck up all the time and regularly disappoint myself and the people
I seek to ally with. I want to hold myself and the people I work with to a higher standard of accountability.
I believe that if we cannot change ourselves and our relationships, there is no hope of us ever recreating the
world. And since nothing short of complete social transformation is my goal, I must start with myself.

To close, Id like to share a quote. There is a poster on my wall that reads: We have internalized modes
of domination, which we unwittingly use in our daily interactions with each other, from being raised in a racist,
capitalist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist society that teaches us how to exercise power over each other in order to
get what we want. UNLEARNING. I spent twenty years unquestioningly accepting the modes of domination
that were taught to me. I suppose it will take me the rest of my life to unlearn them.
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From a Male-bodied Settler Moving Towards

Allyship With Dakota Decolonization and
Female and Male-Bodied Settlers
rivers
NOTE: We recognize that the use of the term male- bodied to refer to people assigned male sex at birth and/or socialized
as males, in this article, is a problematic use of the term, and carries transphobic implications. Though male-bodied is an
appropriate term to refer to transgender and non-transgender people who self-identify as having male bodies, here it is used
in a way that implies that a male assigned person will necessarily have a male body. This is not so.
Some examples: It has been pointed out by transgender people in and out of UM that female-bodied is not an
appropriate way to refer to people who were female- assigned at birth- they may be men and call their bodies male. Maleassigned people may identify as women, men, 2spirit, genderqueer or any other creative term theyve concocted to name their
reality! For example male-bodied is not appropriate language for a transgender woman unless this is her claimed identity.
So, transgender people, regardless of their genitalia or anything else, determine for themselves, how their body is to be sexed,
gendered, and referred to. This is the practice of gender self - determination.
Though we hoped to change the language of this piece to make these distinctions, using and defining terms such as: female
- identified, male - assigned, female - socialized, the author of this article is currently in jail, and we found the changes
to be too nuanced and complicated to edit without their input. From trans and non-trans members of UM, or sincere
apologies. Feedback Welcome!
AN OVERLY WORDY NOTE ON THE LIMITATIONS OF WORDS
This is not an attempt to create a new language to be espoused by the same dead politics we have heard
hovering like flies over our awakening selves since we first rose from this nightmare. There have been
no continued successes and perhaps there never shall be, but that only serves to define our challenge: to
consistently check ourselves and each other. The tendency towards failure lingers about us like a metallic fog.
We choke on expectation, dreaming not, but seeing yet to be apparitions walking in place of living creatures. If
we cannot imagine full-hearted people living free in their traditional homeland, we sure as hell will never see it
happen. While we engage in this medium of meter and measure, let us fill up our lives with color and clamor.
This essay is my mirror upon which I reflect my actions, a tool. These withersome words only go as far as I
stand up to fucked up oppressive behavior, my on-going history of oppressive privilege, and stand with people
as they fight for their lives. It is not what we say but how we live that will break this spell of complacency
and oppression. Let our way of life sing songs around any attempt to name ideas. Do not linger here too long,
there are places you must go, and many who would see you there now. This is to say, be patient and slow, these
systems of domination have generations of our ancestors under their feet. Tomorrow waits forever.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN ALLY AS A MALE-BODIED PERSON?

I ask myself this question as I sit and talk about solidarity and decolonization with a diverse group of
settlers. A female-bodied person voices an issue of hers with the way folks have handled a situation. I hear a
male-bodied friend respond in a way that is attempting to clarify where he was coming from. It clicks for me
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in this moment. Allyship can be a process of one person or group explicitly working to understand another
group or persons struggle towards liberation, and, aiding in that process in whatever ways the oppressed see
fit. In general it may be positive to explain where we were coming from when our actions or words put another
off, but from what my friend said, it really didnt feel like that was what she was looking for. In this situation,
though my male-bodied friend may have done something that frustrated or offended her, an explanation is not
what is needed. Perhaps she just wanted to be heard, or maybe she wanted to identify something that needs to
be worked on but does not want to be a part of that process. I share my thoughts with the group, acknowledging
his intention to help and trying not to speak for my female-bodied friend. I attempt to speak for myself. In this
way I am trying to be an ally to both of my friends; I am helping one identify something he needs to work on
and supporting the other by naming patriarchal behavior when I see it. Being an ally as a male-bodied person
means fighting patriarchy and hetero-sexism in ourselves and as we find it in our lives. It means stepping back
in our relationship to others, learning about their oppression and listening to how they choose to approach
confronting it. We cannot assume that folks want to work on our shit with us, this assumption is yet another
manifestation of patriarchy in that it is spreading our responsibilities onto others. Male-bodied people have
the most responsibility when it comes to privilege work. To be a compassionately supportive friend, to be an
ally, we must first accept this responsibility. We must take the lead in instigating work against our privileges,
deconstructing our oppressive behaviors, and take direction from others in how to aid in their liberation,
especially in relation to their experience of our privilege.
PASSING PRIVILEGE

In dealing with privilege it is important to discuss how we are perceived, how we perceive ourselves,
and how our expression of our identity matches how we are identified. Passing privilege can be the ability to
pass as an identity that carries more privileges than another identity you carry. Passing privilege also involves
the overlapping of your identity with how you are perceived. It is a privilege to be identified as how you identify
yourself. Many people struggle daily with being identified as someone they are not. An example would be a fair
skinned indigenous person being identified as a settler. The issue of passing applies to many sets of privileges
including settler, gender, class, race and ethnicity. In this essay I have used the physical terms male and femalebodied instead of gendered ones because I have been approaching these issues of privilege from a perspective
that is male-bodied yet not male identified. Often our perceived bodied types are associated with assumptions
about genders and their subsequent privileges. This is problematic. I also want to acknowledge that this binary
of male and female does not encompass all body types and that we should not confine each other to this either,
or way of thinking. It is my hope that in our interactions we learn from each other how we identify and from
there work to understand how our identities relate. Around group work and confronting privilege we must be
accountable to our experienced and perceived identities. Though I do not identify as male I must be accountable
to my male privilege because I have been raised as such, as well as because most of society would name me as
male whether I choose it or not. I operate from a place that acknowledges the privilege any person sees me as
carrying as what I must confront in my relationship to that person, and that while I may not choose an identity, I
may carry its privileges and the responsibilities that follow.
WHY IS ALL OF THIS IMPORTANT? WHY SHOULD WE BE WORKING TOWARDS ALLYSHIP?

This is basically asking why is it important to help each other, and my answer is pretty simple: because
the dominant way of life is so incredibly unhealthy, because mutual aid is essential to creating better life for
all living beings on this planet. But that may be over simplifying it. As Andrea Smith has said, the issues of
colonial, race and gender oppression cannot be separated. As male-bodied people we must strive to break
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cycles of objectification, confront the history of oppressive masculinity, and identify the ties between our
privilege and colonialism. Abusive gender dynamics are a tool of colonialism and their perpetuation is a
manifestation of colonization. Through building communicative, accountable relationships focused on liberation
we can redefine ourselves outside of our histories and turn our privileges into weapons wielded by those
previously oppressed by them. If those we seek to support do not feel respected or heard by us, then how are
we aiding in their struggle towards liberation? Allyship asks if what we are doing for others is actually helping
them. It demands accountability and puts the steering of support in the hands of those receiving. The fact
that one cannot claim allyship until they are claimed by those with whom they seek to be in solidarity makes
the relationship based on mutual recognition. Allyship is the approach those of us working on solidarity with
Dakota decolonization choose in our path towards liberation. As it has been said, if we do not learn how to and
begin standing up for each other there will be no one to stand up for us. Oppression is not hierarchical and will
not diminish on its own. Our health and lives depend on our breaking these cycles of colonialism.
GENDER OPPRESSION IS COLONIALISM

Gender oppression has been identified by female-bodied indigenous people as a large aspect of how
colonialism manifests in their lives. To work towards solidarity with decolonization we must understand
this statement. The sexualization of indigenous peoples, the sexual nature of violence towards them, and the
disproportionately high percentage of violence towards female-bodied indigenous people are all examples of
this. Our work is to acknowledge our role in colonialism and to take responsibility for that role. As heteropatriarchy is a tool of colonialism an essential aspect of this is confronting our histories of gender and sexual
violence. If we do not fight gendered violence we perpetuate the idea that gender and colonial oppression are
separable and not intricately interwoven. From the moment white colonizers set foot on this continent they have
objectified and subjugated female-bodied and indigenous people, fracturing the communities and beliefs that are
the strengths of a healthy culture.
ON BEING AN ALLY TO FEMALE-BODIED FOLK AS WELL AS OTHER DUDES

As I have come to understand the tools of colonization, I have realized the specific position a white,
male-bodied settler is in. We must learn to take on gender oppression as actively as colonial oppression, and
with a similar orientation. Male-bodied folks must deconstruct the masculine socialized embodiment of gender
oppression while taking direction from female-bodied people to assist in their own liberation. To confront
our colonialist mentalities we must unwind our gender socialization and racist heritage, and in doing so be in
active pursuit of allyship with both male and female-bodied settlers. It is necessary for male-bodied people to
work to understand how our perceived identities are affecting others, how our privileges are inhibiting those
with different sets of privileges. No matter how much we may have worked on our shit, how far we feel we
have come, we can not suppose that our practice of confronting our privilege is complete, nor can we make
an assumption that those non-male-bodied people we are around feel they can trust us. This applies to white
and settler privilege as well. To be able to work towards a common goal with anyone but other like-privileged
people, we have to actively work to understand how our privilege is present in our work and interactions. In this
sense, being an ally means actively pursuing trust through vulnerability, honesty and a willingness to validate
and learn from others, specifically with different, less privileged identities. The emphasis on this being active
is intentional and important. To truly be an ally means that we are working on our shit and we exhibit it, not
waiting until we are called out or until we are presented with an opportunity to deal with shit. It is not the
job of those whom are affected by our privilege to instigate our growth. It is our responsibility to confront our
inherited fucked up behavior, or privilege, with others sharing our privilege. It is a perpetuation of unhealthy
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power dynamics and simply not okay to expect abuse to be called out only by one experiencing the abuse. It is
the individual, or group whose behavior is abusive or damaging who is responsible, not just for changing their
behavior but for recognizing how the autonomy, health and safety of others is being negated by their actions.
As we work towards becoming allies to indigenous struggles for decolonization we identify accountability as
integral to liberation. When we are accountable to each other we step out of the systems of oppression, creating
the space to build healthy liberated lives. This accountability must be pervasive in our lives. For accountability
and confronting our privilege to become a permeating aspect of our lives, we must work with and support each
other. This is where being an ally to other like-privileged people comes in.
MALE-BODIED SUPPORT OF MALE-BODIED FOLKS

It is interesting to note that a basic aspect of male-bodied accountability, connection to and support from
other male-bodied people, something that seems so simple, is largely absent in dominant western culture. We
are not taught to be open with other male-bodied people, let alone vulnerable. Compassionately calling each
other out for exhibiting or perpetuating oppressive mentalities is perhaps the most important thing we can do
to break out of our histories. We have a lot to learn together as there are generations of abuse to unwind, and
few healthy models to learn from. To be an ally to other like-privileged people involves both challenging each
other as well as listening to and supporting one another as we deal with our failures. Together we can create
a momentum and a healthy expectation towards being accountable. And with accountability comes trust,
and with trust we can confront the larger impersonal manifestations of colonialism. In our organizing around
Dakota solidarity we have formed a mens group specifically situated within an anti-colonial framework.
All the male-bodied people in the larger group Unsettling Minnesota (UM) meet separately to discuss our
male privilege. We talk about how it plays out in UM and elsewhere in our lives, and support each other as we
acknowledge our patriarchal behavior. Sometimes we challenge each other questioning our approach, words
and actions, and sometimes we get called out by female-bodied members of UM and bring it back to the mens
group to process. It has been really helpful in crafting appropriate responses to awkward interactions to hear
other male-bodied perspectives. Coming together to understand specific interactions has been really helpful and
enabled us to address them in constructive ways, avoiding reactionary responses or patriarchal positioning. We
have also shared our histories: stories about our acculturation, parents and sexuality. We try to balance being
a support group for each other and an accountability sub-group of UM. Over the months I have grown close
to some men that I originally felt very critical of, replacing ingrained distrust with appreciation through direct
communication. It has been difficult to maintain focus and momentum and at times we have failed our purpose
of creating active confrontation with patriarchy within ourselves and our communities.

It is not always easy to challenge ourselves or our friends, but more often than not it results in growth.
Having rooted aspects of our identity questioned in a passionate way can cut really deep. It is a product of our
privilege to not feel uncomfortable. The more privilege we carry the less likely we are to have experienced
feeling personally attacked. It is important to acknowledge those feelings when they come up, to let them in.
The uncomfortable feelings, and the little bit of hurt accompanying them, are smaller and softer versions of the
everyday pain and violence so many others experience. It is our privilege that allows this uncomfortable pain
to be so hard for us. We are not forced to deal with everyday verbal abuse or the threat of physical violence
non-white, settler or male-bodied people face. We can learn to be allies in solidarity struggle only by sincere
personal reflection and speaking up when we see unhealthy interactions and behaviors. Our voices will grow
when used, and if we are to be allies in any struggle, if we hope to exhibit true solidarity we must speak up and
act. Interrupting sexism is our responsibility, it should be expected of us. Often we shy away from expectations,
afraid of being boxed or of feeling pressured to do something we do not want to do, but I believe we can choose
what expectations we want to carry and shape them to fit our desired growth. It is important to say here that
while we should be expected to speak up and name patriarchy and hetero-sexism, we may not know what to
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actually say and that is okay. A huge first step is simply naming uncomfortable dynamics, what exactly they are
and how to deal with them will come as we unlearn.
ACTION AND SOLIDARITY

Solidarity is one of the foundations of most radical ideologies and liberation struggles. It has become
clear that revolutionary solidarity can look many ways. In the practice of solidarity with a revolutionary
indigenous struggle, action must be determined through communication between settler and indigenous groups.
We must take direction from our indigenous friends because it is not our place to say what they need from us, let
alone for themselves. It only serves to reproduce our histories as colonial patriarchs to act on behalf of anyone
or without their consent. Settlers cannot tell indigenous people how to live, heal or fight; this simply positions
them back on top as the ones with the power. Essentially, this is the same as killing someones family, looting
and burning their house and neighborhood, putting them in prison for years and then upon their release telling
them how to get their life back. This is only to say we must work with an anti-colonial framework, consciously
aware of our settler and gender privilege as we act in solidarity. This type of action is not the glorified Action
of a battlefield, but a persistent, determined kind that can reach the foundation of oppression. It is important for
all radicals, especially white, male-bodied folks, to take a critical look at what we mean by action. What are
the histories surrounding our approach and how are we perpetuating them? It is truly possible for us to create
a life where to be male-bodied would mean being accountable, compassionate and trustworthy. It is for us to
create through our actions, through the way we live. If we desire the end of colonization we must energetically
engage in a personal struggle of accountability, otherwise we are vessels of oppression wrapped in liberatory
rhetoric. To seek to directly understand how our actions help and support those we attempt to express solidarity
for means acknowledging that getting out in the streets and marching with signs might not feel as meaningful to
them as confronting manifestations of oppression in everyday interactions. It means that we must be able to hear
and to communicate effectively to female-bodied, non-white, and/or indigenous people. It also means that if we
are asked to take risks we understand why we are asked to do so and maintain an anti-colonial perspective in
our approach. The tools of colonization must not be our tools of liberation.

Representation and appropriation are two such tools of oppression and are often found within even the
most healthy radical circles. Saying we support decolonization struggles, and are in solidarity with indigenous
peoples without restructuring our lives around an anti-colonial framework is a perpetuation of colonialist
mentalities. If we let words represent our beliefs instead of exhibiting our beliefs in our way of life we are
representing ourselves, and replacing life with the expression of life. We must not become billboards of our
beliefs, but them embodied. If we focus on solidarity and an anti-colonialist perspective, instead of focusing on
redefining our way of life around these concepts, we are appropriating them. It has been said that solidarity is a
weapon, that solidarity means attack. For solidarity to be a weapon we must express it conflictually, manifesting
in it a challenge to this destructive culture. If solidarity means attack, we must define what we are attacking. Let
our solidarity be aimed at all manifestations of oppression, from the military and the economic arms of the state,
to the colonialist framework that dominates our way of life.
WHAT WE MUST DO

The process of becoming an ally to indigenous people fighting for decolonization differs according
to ones identity, and perceived identity. What it takes for a perceived white male to be trusted and accepted
as an ally is different than a female or non-white male. Western civilizations manifestation of colonization
is uniquely tied to the privilege carried by white males. The history of complacency, cowardice, betrayal,
dishonesty, aggression, rape, murder and genocide is one that every male-bodied person must accept and
actively confront if they hope to create an alternate world. For the land we continue to pillage and scar, for
indigenous whose way of life we continue to deny, for our female-bodied friends fighting for a life free of
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sexual and gender violence, for a life without degradation or objectification, and for ourselves, male-bodied
creatures who desire a more healthy way of living, we must act. We must act with respect, communication,
and a creative drive that comes from within. If we do not define and design this action ourselves, if we relegate
responsibility of instigation to those who are affected by our privilege, we are simply adding to the burden
of those who deal with this shit every day. It is my hope to be a part of a male-bodied momentum actively
confronting male-bodied privilege, sexism, colonialism and hetero-patriarchy with each other. A momentum
amongst men in which we talk and share and call each other out and are so much more the better for it.

This is one aspect of my process of unlearning. As I come to understand my settler privilege and
history of benefiting from colonization, I also come face to face with my racism tendencies and am forced to
see my hetero-patriarchal upraising. While this may not be a direct dialogue with you, this is an expression of
vulnerability and I expect what I have written to be challenged. Writing an essay does not make me any closer
to being an ally to those I care about, but how I go about sharing my ideas can be one step towards mutual
liberation. I will move forward with the uncomfortable and towards my fear, listening to others and reaching
out to those I share privilege with. I do not know if I will live up to my beliefs, I do not know how to live up to
the responsibility that comes with such a history of genocide and oppression, but I will live trying. As a second
growth redwood once said to me as I sat high in its arms refusing to let it be cut, Cut me down if you dare, I do
not live like you and until you take my life I will be here. Living.
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Anti Classism

1. Dont assume that it is a working class/working poor/poor persons job to educate you about class
issues. Read up on class struggles.

2. Understand that knowledge from books is never as valid as knowledge based on personal life
experiences.

3. Understand that a middle class/upper-middle class/rich position is privileged and not normative or
average.

4. Dont assume that it is a working class/working poor/poor persons responsibility to tell you their life
story. Never force discourse.

5. Never use a working class/working poor/poor persons experience to further your political agenda,
especially if your political platform is not designed to specifically address class issues.

6. Understand how the amount of money you have affects every aspect of your life. With organizations,
dont assume that everyone can contribute the same amount of money.

7. Understand how language can be exclusive. Understand that education and high brow language are
often inaccessible to working class/working poor/poor people, but realize that class is not a defining marker of
intelligence and never talk down to the working class/working poor/poor.

8. Understand anger and allow space for discourse about your specific privilege and/or moneyed
privilege in general.

9. Design your specific political arguments with a class analysis. Ask yourself, how would this work for
non-rich people?

10. Understand that you are part of the class structure (that you have a class position), but that your
position is privileged.

11. Never whine about being middle class.

12. Recognize how classism interacts with and is complicated by other systems of oppression-racism,
ableism, oppression of parents, etc.

13. Recognize that the decision by many people in (usually white) subcultures to choose being poor
or working class is a lifestyle choice, and is very different from actually being poor or working class. Your
privileged background affects your present status (whats in your head, how safe or comfortable you feel at any
given time/situation, skills and behaviors privileged folks hold, etc.).

14. Engage in anti-classist struggles (and dont just focus on queer poor or working class people). Seek
to build cross-class alliances.

15. Share money if you can.

16. Do not appropriate class struggles for your own uses.

17. Investigate how your organizations are classist, how you are classist.

18. Make meetings and events accessible (consider where you have them, when you have them, child
care, etc.)

19. Understand that the right to have/adopt and parent/care for children should not be dependent upon
class position or income, that society and communities have an obligation to provide for families.

20. Recognize that class does not equal income. Education, geography, job, and many other factors
influence class status.
From http://www.geocities.com/gainesvilleavengers/anticlassism.htm
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What You Can Do About Classism

Class Action
From inside a house of privilege, it is easy to believe, just by looking around you, that pretty much everyone
has the same privileges you do. It is also easy to shut out those noises from the street that speak about others
and their different experiences. Three presumptions about the dominant cultureinnocence, worthiness and
competence perpetuate privileges for this cultural group, which often go unnoticed by members of the
culture.
The First Presumption: Innocence
The Second Presumption: Worthiness
The Third Presumption: Competence
What Dominant Groups Can Do About Classism

A major feature of the classist mindset is the stereotype that suggests that poor and working class
people are unintelligent, inarticulate, and overly emotional. A good ally (a dominant group member willing
to partner to eliminate classism) will contradict these messages by soliciting the knowledge and histories of
impoverished and working class people (members of the subordinated groups).

Dominant group allies can also engage subordinated group members by being a thoughtful, considerate
listener. When subordinated group members talk about their experiences, it is most helpful for an ally to resist
becoming defensive and expressing their own guilt. It is also extremely helpful for dominant group members to
refrain from criticizing how the message is being presented. Some ways of becoming an ally include:
Claim your identity. Learn all you can about your history as a dominant group member.
Learn the history and experience of all working and impoverished people (particularly people living in
your
neighborhood or community).
Raise your children to be anti-classist rather than merely being non-classist in their own behavior.
This means becoming active allies with subordinated group members to improve the quality of life for
all.
Give yourself and your children exposure and experience of the language and culture of working
peoples.
Listen with compassion when a member of a subordinated group relays experiences and feelings. Ask
for clarification when needed and respond.
What Subordinated Group Members Can Do About Classism

For some subordinated group members, distrust, despair, and anger are common responses to the
oppression they experience. (It is the test of a true ally to remain undeterred when these flare up and to
refrain from withdrawing support at such points). When subordinated group members begin to believe the
stereotypical views and bias of the dominant group about themselves, it internalizes the oppression. To begin
to undo the damage caused by classism, it is useful for subordinated group members to:
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Examine their feelings about money in terms savings, earning, and credit.
Examine their feelings about the ways you relate to material gain and consumerism.
Examine their feelings about education, its role in developing identity, self-efficacy, and the capacity to
partner across the various dimensions of difference.
Examine your feelings and ideas about culturally-installed privilege, power, and influence of various
groups and the struggle for significance.
Claim their identity. Learn all they can about their history and the history and experience of all
working and poor peoples. Raise their children to be anti-classist rather than merely being non-classist
in their own behavior.
Work on issues that will benefit their communities. Consider remaining in or returning to their
communities. (If you live and work in dominant group environments, look for working-class allies to
help you survive with your humor and wits intact.)

The recognition of classism by the dominant and subordinated groups is the first step for creating
change. Working together, all people can help to make progress towards a class-free society.
Acting as Allies vs. Holding on to Privilege:
Characteristics of Allies and Ways to Take Responsibility
Assume classism is everywhere.
Notice who is at the center of attention and who has power.
Listen openly with respect.
Actively pursue a process of self-education. Learn about the history and culture of poor and workingclass people.
Acknowledge and take responsibility for your own socialization, prejudices, and privileges.
Be willing to examine and relinquish your own benefits and privileges.
Identify your own self-interest in acting as an ally around issues of class.
Make friends with people who are different class-wise.
Know resources about and for target groups.
Educate others.
Take a public stand against classism, discrimination and prejudice.
Interrupt prejudice and take action against classism even when poor and working class people are not
present.
Risk discomfort.
Do not be self-righteous with others (especially other professional middle class or owning class people).
Challenge the internalized oppression of people of poor and working class people.
Have a vision of a healthy multicultural less classist society.
Support the leadership of poor and working-class people.
Ways to Maintain Benefits/Privileges and Avoid Responsibility
Denial I didnt do ....
Minimization It was only a little...
Blame If , than I wouldnt have...
Redefinition It was really mutual
Unintentionally Things got out of hand, I didnt mean to...
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Its Over Now Lets forget about the past, Ill never do it again...
Its Only a Few Most , would never...
Counterattacking But really controls everything...
Competing Victimization You think you have it bad, well...
What Class-Privileged People Can Do
to Become Better at Cross-Class Collaboration
WHAT CLASS-PRIVILEGED PEOPLE CAN DO TO BECOME BETTER AT CROSSCLASS COLLABORATION
Put relationships first

Have a little humility
Talk less, listen more
Use your privilege Dont let guilt make you foolish
Let go of control
Hang in
Recognize working-class peoples constraints
Support working-class issues
Share resources and control
Watch your language
Class Action www.classism.org

PO Box 350 Hadley, MA 01035
The last part taken from Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle Class Activists, by Betsy
Leondar-Wright.
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Cultural Appropriation: Beginning Reflections

from a Settler Standpoint
Courtney
When I was in high school I wore my hair in dreadlocks. I made hemp jewelry, smoked marijuana and listened
to reggae. Around me my peers used phrases like yah mon! and proclaimed their love for Bob Marley and
the rasta life. We thought our flagging of the red, yellow, and green was advocating a culture of love, perhaps
exposing a lifestyle different from the stoic and unexpressive up north mentality that seems to pervade
northern and rural Minnesota. We were truly appreciating the culture of love and warmth that had come from
Jamaica; we were honoring its traditions.

Right?

Mmmmm.. lets just explore that.

We were descendents of settlers, most of us. European, Scandinavian, white. Our romanticized version
of rasta life was rooted in a longing for more holistic living, for more authentic life. There is nothing wrong
with that desire and there is nothing wrong with appreciating another cultures music, you might be thinking,
and you would be right. Cross-cultural sharing happens, especially in this globalized world today. However,
what we were (ignorantly) doing - and what so many of in modern western culture continue to do - is take
(and benefit) of anothers culture (in the form of practices, customs or traditions, even dress) whilst the people
from whom we take continue to suffer from dominant systems of oppression and injustice. It is this unequal
balance of power and privilege that greys the areas between what is organic cross-cultural sharing and what is a
perpetuation of cultural genocide, appropriation, and extension of rape culture.

Andrea Smith, in her book Conquest, writes about relationship. As a persyn who carries privilege in the
dominant systems of white supremacy and colonizer society I have a lot of interest in making sure that I am
accountable to that privilege. I want to see justice and I want to be proactive in creating it; in order to do so I
look at relationships. Smith outlines viewing relationships in the context of who is getting fucked over by who.
In another essay, one by Denise Breton on restorative justice, we learn to look at relationships not as just persyn
to persyn but as one people to another. Both these concepts make a lot of sense and inform the way I need to
view cultural appropriation. When thinking of cultural appropriation in the context of relationships we can see
that the taking of customs and traditions of non-dominant peoples by people of the dominant culture is one more
way in which harm is inflicted in a relationship that is already out of balance. Perpetuation of violence, theft,
and exploitation are all at work when we take from cultures that are not ours. It is even more detrimental
when there is unequal power balance to begin with.

I think of this perpetuation of harmful and out of balance power relations in the way that I relate to
the landbase I reside on. For instance, I like foraging and I love herbalism. I like to go to the woods, identify
what plants I can, and work with them. Sometimes I harvest them, a pretty natural thing to do. After delving
more deeply into the history (and therefore present-day effects) of colonization, however, I can no longer do
this without keeping in mind the people who were displaced from this landbase that I now live on. Because of
a system from which I benefit, these people are displaced. My logic then draws me to the obvious conclusion
that it is not right, just or fair for me to be take what is theirs. I have to consider their well-being. I consider
this when I think of how many whites I know that go wild ricing each year. I wonder, how many indigenous
people have the same access or capacity to go ricing as whites and I think that we with our privilege ought to be
working to make sure the indigenous have that access. How can we justify taking their food supply, then?

This is especially true since the coming of Europeans was not by invite far from it; it was based
on conquest, violence, and domination. I am made up largely of European descent and so I do not view my
presence here on this land in Minnesota as a right or legitimate. Though I persynally have committed no crime I
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am here because of conquest. In that truth, I recognize a responsibility to actively work for justice for the people
whos land I am inhabiting because my presence here is due to the displacement of the people who were here
before me.

Since the coming of whites, with our histories and legacies of imperialism, harm has been inflicted
almost beyond belief to the land and to the people who were part of the intact ecosystem (ecoculture?) before
we came. In order to perceive justice the history of this must, at the very least, be recognized as it carries
tremendous weight in present reality today. So if you are thinking, yes okay, harms committed, years ago, what
does that have to do with me?, I ask the consideration of what I have said here.

This taking, at the expense of some and the benefit of others, happens all over the board. For example,
we see it with blues music what came from the blood, sweat and tears of the experience of blacks on this
part of the continent turned into profit and fame for those already privileged, upholding a system of white
supremacy. Blacks in this country continue to suffer from disproportionate poverty and systematic and
institutionalized criminalization while whites gain the pleasure of blues music and the profits from it. This is
one example and certainly there are many ways of viewing Elvis or the Rolling Stones. My intention in stating
this example is to illustrate a pattern and to emphasize how continuation of this pattern supports a grand system
of violence and exploitation.

Now, circling back to the beginning. In the first paragraph, I describe my friends and mine appropriation
of Rasta culture. We were explorative and curious and we were also inspired by a lack of depth or authenticity
in the culture from which wed sprung. We sought something that western imperialist culture can not offer. The
thirst for something more meaningful is a natural response to a world that cultivates deception, destruction, and
spiritual debt. It is beneficial to the health of our selves, our communities, our planet, and beyond to recognize
where there is deficiency. The next good step, then, is to act consciously and conscientiously. More authentic
life does not come from stealing traditions from anothers culture; this only perpetuates harm. If we want
tradition we need to trace our own roots, back to our own indigenous ancestry, a long (but rewarding) process,
for sure. Authenticity comes from acknowledging where harm has occurred and seeking to restore balance. We
are, as the Unsettling Minnesota points of unity say, intimately positioned to do this work. If I want to forage
food and herb from this land, then I must work for justice for the people who were not separate from it until
genocide occurred. The people who were here before the settlers and colonizers came can not be left exempt
from the broader picture of caring for the earth and should be included in every vision we have regarding our
lifestyles, where we plant our feet, and what ways we choose to express our\ spirituality.

I want to see us claim responsibility for whatever acts of cultural appropriation we partake in and to be
honest with ourselves about what we do that is appropriation and therefore inappropriate. I want us to be able to
see with clarity how acts of appropriation are personal investments in the continuation of a system I (and you?)
seek to dismantle. From here we can work to create a world based on justice, to restore balance and to live a
good life.
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Understanding Colonizer Status

Waziyatawin
Colonial relations do not stem from individual good will or actions; they exist before his arrival or his birth,
and whether he accepts or rejects them matters little.
-Albert Memmi
Colonization v. Oppression

Many oppressed people around the world identify with the oppression experienced by colonized people.
Often, if they live in a colonized society, the poor, oppressed, disenfranchised, and marginalized individuals
or classes have difficulty identifying with the colonizers and thus seek to identify with the colonized. Because
they live in a society in which colonization is ongoing, they begin to see themselves as colonized.

This discussion is designed to help differentiate between oppression and colonization, and to clearly
demarcate colonization as a distinct historical, political, social, and economic relationship between the colonizer
and the colonized. In our volume For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (Santa Fe: School of
Advanced Research Press, 2005), Michael Yellow Bird and I offered this definition:
Colonization refers to both the formal and informal methods (behaviors, ideologies, institutions,
policies, and economies) that maintain the subjugation or exploitation of Indigenous Peoples, lands and
resources.

In the context of the United States, everyone is part of this colonial society. By definition, however,
Indigenous Peoples are the only people identifiable as colonized. Because every bit of land and every natural
resource claimed by the United States was taken at Indigenous expense, anyone who occupies that land and
benefits from our resources is experiencing colonial privilege. Every non-Indigenous person in the country
continues to benefit from Indigenous loss. In Minnesota, for example, all Minnesotans continue to benefit
from the genocide perpetrated against Dakota people and the ethnic cleansing of our people. Occupation of
Dakota homeland, especially while the vast majority of Dakota people still live in exile, places all occupants in
the colonizer class. No matter the extent of oppression faced by various settler groups, being a settler means
belonging to the class of colonizers.

It may be helpful to develop your own definition of oppression and clearly distinguish how that
definition differs from your understanding of colonization.
Read: Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi offers one of the clearest explanations of the relationship between the colonizer and
the colonized in his classic work that is still relevant in the 21st century colonial context. Understanding the
desire of many colonizers to distinguish themselves from the brutality of colonization, Memmi imagines an
intermediary category in the African colonial context that he calls the colonial. A colonial, he states, is
a European living in a colony but having no privileges, whose living conditions are not higher than those of
a colonized person of equivalent economic and social status. (10) Many oppressed or marginalized people
would choose to embrace this identity because they envision the distinction between themselves and the
colonial elites as both fundamental and immense. While the chasm between powerful and wealthy colonizers
(such as corporate heads and politicians) and the poor, working-classes, for example, is certainly great, this
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still does not alter the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Thus, Memmi explains, The
colonial does not exist, because it is not up to the European in the colonies to remain a colonial, even if he had
so intended. Whether he expressly wishes it or not, he is received as a privileged person by the institutions,
customs and people. (17) All colonizers, by continuing their occupation of another Peoples homeland, remain
colonizers, no matter their intent.

Memmi describes two kinds of colonizers: self-rejecting and self-accepting(read pages 19-76). Selfrejecting colonizers live in moral torment as they recognize the injustice of colonialism and do not want to
participate in the subjugation of other human beings. They can return to their country of origin and relieve
themselves of their guilt, or they can stay in the colony and continue to live a life fraught with contradictions.
This is a difficult path. Memmi would even say this path is impossible to sustain. Drawing on his experience
with leftist, self-rejecting colonizers, Memmi describes the point of divergence between colonizers and the
colonized, But now he [the leftist] discovers that there is no connection between the liberation of the colonized
and the application of a left-wing program. And that, in fact, he is perhaps aiding the birth of a social order in
which there is no room for a leftist as such, at least in the near future. (34)

Memmi refers to the self-accepting colonizer as a colonialist. A colonialist is a colonizer who agrees to
be a colonizer. About the colonialist Memmi tells us, By making his position explicit, he seeks to legitimize
colonization. This is a more logical attitude, materially more coherent than the tormented dance of the colonizer
who refuses and continues to live in the colony. (45) In the United States, nearly everyone has agreed to be a
colonizer. Every day they engage in activities that continue to justify the theft of Indigenous lands, the killing
and subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, and the ruthless exploitation of Indigenous resources. From birth, they
begin teaching their children myths regarding the righteousness of the existing social order. That message is
reinforced throughout their lives. It is hard work maintaining such lies, so whenever the colonized threaten to
disrupt their myth-making, they are quickly silenced, suppressed, and further subjugated. The actions of the
colonialist are predictable and consistent.

Non-Dakota allies are essentially choosing the path of a self-rejecting colonizer. If you support Dakota
liberation, what are the implications of Dakota liberation for you? What is your vision of the future? If you are
an anarchist, for example, what is your anarchist vision of the future? How might this differ from our vision
of Dakota liberation? If we realize Dakota liberation, what will your role be? Many self-rejecting colonizers
maintain fantasies, at least for a while, about their incorporation into Indigenous societies post-liberation. These
fantasies need to be shed quickly. Most colonizers will not be incorporated into our cultures post-liberation.
Can you accept this?
Disagreements with Memmi

While I agree with Memmis articulation of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, I
also believe there is an important role that the self-rejecting colonizer can play in our struggle. Indeed, I think
ally support of Dakota liberation will help facilitate the liberation of everyone from a perverse society. Not only
do I believe that we need non-Dakota allies in our struggle, I also believe it is possible to have colonizer allies,
including those who are willing to kill or die for our struggle.

Because of our numerical minority status, if we sought armed revolution by ourselves (without white
allies), we would likely face complete extermination. We need dedicated allies who will stand on the front lines
with us, or who are on the frontlines of solidarity actions to support us. Memmi would say these white allies do
not exist. What do you think? What is your level of commitment?

Memmi argues that for decolonization to occur, the colonizers must leave. In most decolonization
struggles, the colonized push the colonizers to go home. This is not the position I advocate, but certainly some
Dakota people will express such sentiments. How will you respond to this?
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More Questions for Consideration
If you are a colonizer rejecting colonizer status, are you were willing to do whatever was necessary to
assist in our liberation struggle, including killing, dying, or life-imprisonment
Are you willing to work to challenge the status quo rather than maintain it?
Are you willing to take on a lifetime of ambiguity, uncertainty, moral torment that is the life of a
colonizer who rejects colonizer status?
Are you willing to constantly engage in critical self-reflection and routinely have your white colonizer
programming challenged?
About Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation is an issue that we must engage with all potential non-Indigenous allies. When
colonizers appropriate aspects of our culture, this is just another part of a long colonial history. Colonizing
society has worked systematically, over the centuries, to strip our cultures from us. Most Dakota people today
are prevented, still, from living as Dakota people within our homeland. All aspects of our lives are subject to
colonial regulation. That is, we are not in control of caring for our land base, establishing our own economy,
educating our children, governing our people, or practicing our own spirituality (we are still denied access to
sacred sites, lands, and waters, that are central to our spiritual traditions). Consequently, we grieve the losses
we have suffered and continue to suffer. Loss of culture is tied to feelings of shame and guilt (for not practicing
our culture), as well as pain. Most of us do not have the privilege of learning or practicing Dakota ways of
being because we are so busy trying to survive any way we can. Many of us have low expectations for our lives
and for our future. Most of our communities were also heavily Christianized. Missionaries and government
workers were so successful at eradicating our spirituality that throughout much of the 20th century, most of
our ceremonies ceased to be practiced in Minnesota. At Upper Sioux, where I come from, we have had no
traditional spiritual leadership since 1862. Even today, we do not have a spiritual leader in our community. We
do not have a sundance. Our spirituality remains inaccessible to most of our community members because our
people do not know where or how to begin practicing the traditions that were stripped from us. Further, many
of our people feel unworthy to practice them. We are working hard to revive the spirituality, but we still have a
long way to go.

What does it mean, then, to see white people practicing aspects of our culture? What does it mean when
white colonizers practice aspects of our culture while that privilege is still denied to us, or remains inaccessible
for a variety of reasons? It is deeply offensive to most of us. White people coming to our ceremonies do
not carry the traumatic history that we do. Instead, they come with a sense of entitlement. They consider
themselves cultural ambassadors and under the guise of creating peace between all peoples, they believe it is
righteous to exploit our most sacred teachings. When Indigenous people object to their theft of our traditions,
they dismiss those objections as hateful, angry, and un-spiritual. Yet, those individuals have appropriated
our inheritance. They are practicing what has been denied our ancestors and what our children have yet to
recover. It is just another assault on our spirit. This kind of violence through appropriation can extend to other
cultural practices as well. For example, if colonizers are practicing sugar-bushing or wild-ricing within Dakota
homeland while most of our people live in exile, they become just the latest wave of colonizers exploiting
Indigenous resources at Indigenous expense. Dakota people will respond to such appropriation with anger,
resentment, and hurt. This is not a good way to build solidarity with the Indigenous struggle.

Does this mean that others should never engage Indigenous ways of being? Not necessarily. If we are
struggling for Indigenous liberation on Indigenous lands, all people are going to have to practice Indigenous
ways of being in some form. We will all need to engage in sustainable living practices and Indigenous cultures,
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including Dakota culture, offer excellent models for all people. That does not mean former-colonizers can
appropriate our spirituality and ceremonial life, but it will mean they need to embrace Indigenous values such as
balance and reciprocity.

In the meantime, it is far more appropriate for colonizers to work to ensure that Dakota people are able
to practice Dakota ways of being. If you believe sugar-bushing and wild-ricing are important, than help Dakota
people recover lands so that we can engage that practice. Perhaps, we can eventually engage such activities
together.
Points to Remember for Indigenous Solidarity Activists
The movement for Indigenous liberation is a radical political struggle
Being an ally does not mean signing up for Indigenous spirituality
We need strong, solid individuals who are not floundering with their own spiritual struggles
This is not a struggle for those people who believe its trendy to support Indigenous causeswe are in
it for the long haul
You can find Indigenous individuals who will support any position you want them to supportthat is a
direct result of the colonial experience
Those indigenous individuals who encourage non-Indigenous participation in ceremonies are often
(not always) those who are attempting to curry favor with white women, or white people for their own
purposes
Because this is a political struggle, it is essential to work in solidarity with critically minded and
politically engaged Indigenous individuals
Remember that decolonization is a process for both the colonizer and the colonized.
The Big Picture

In the end, we must all recognize that we are full of contradictions, colonizer and colonized alike. Even
those of us who have a greater critical consciousness are tormented by the contradictions and compromises with
which we must live. In the end, we all have considerable work to do.

Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, in their latest collaboration, What We Leave Behind, ask us a
fundamental question regarding our role in the well-being of the planet. They ask, Will your legacy be a world
who is healthier, stronger, more resilient, more diverse, than had you never lived? If not, then the world would
have been better off without you. If not, then the world would have been better off had you never been born.
(191)
If we wrestle with this question, we quickly come to the conclusion that the vast majority of us would not leave
a positive legacy if we left the world today, whether we are colonizers or colonized. That means that we all
have significant work to do to defend the planet from further destruction.

As Indigenous Peoples, for thousands of years we have been the first defenders of our homelands. We
must resume that role. Those who presume to be our allies, must join us.
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Part 3
ORGANIZING
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Un-Settling Settler Desires

Scott Morgensen

My presentation to the Dakota Decolonization class echoed my broader teaching and writing by
centering the principles of Indigenous feminist thought and its ties to women of color and Third World
feminism. Andrea Smith in her book Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005) writes
that colonization and heteropatriarchy inherently interlink, so that opposition to one requires opposition to the
other. Her Indigenous feminist argument links to the principle of intersectionality in women of color and Third
World feminisms, which appears in the Combahee River Collectives A Black Feminist Statement (1977) in
the claim that all the major systems of oppression are interlocking.

I learned to commit to these principles by investigating and challenging the power and privilege that
structure my life as a white, educationally-privileged, US American male, non-transgender and (temporarily)
able-bodied. My lifelong experience as a queer person who has suffered from heteropatriarchy did teach me
about oppression and resistance, as did my familys struggles with work and income. But given my social
locations, those experiences were not sufficient to teach me that colonization is the condition of heteropatriarchy
and capitalism in the U.S., or that all the major systems of oppression intersect. Learning this required
being challenged by Indigenous and women of color and Third World feminists to study how colonization,
whiteness and racism, capitalism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy interlink in the world and in my life. Such an
understanding contextualizes all my words about settlers and settlement.

My writing critically investigates the desires of settlers to feel connected to Indigenous land and culture.
In her contribution to this sourcebook, Waziyatawin discusses Albert Memmis distinction of the colonizer
and the colonized. I intend my use of the term settler to be compatible with Memmis term colonizer and
with its discussion by Waziyatawin. Settler is a way to describe colonizers that highlights their desires to be
emplaced on Indigenous land. The settler desires I study are not tied to any particular politics. Among settlers,
conservatives, liberals, and radicals (to name only a few) share similar desires that simply express in
varied ways. For instance, settler radicals, including anarchists, have proven capable of forming movements
that profess to be anticolonial even as they claim Indigenous land and culture as their own. I recognize among
settler radicals a difference between those who pursue a politics that tries to sustain their ties to Indigenous land
and culture, and those who question any desire to possess them. I promote the latter in this essay as a way to
radicalize settlers to challenge settler colonialism and support Indigenous decolonization.

I argue that critical reflection on settler desires for Indigenous land and culture will be crucial to
any effort by settlers to ally with Indigenous decolonization struggles. I invite settlers to ask: How do their
desires for Indigenous land and culture express colonization and contradict efforts to support Indigenous
decolonization? How can settlers question their desires for Indigenous land and culture as a basis of committing
to decolonization? Settlers can study every attachment they have felt to Indigenous land and ask how those
relate to colonization. Historically, a desire to live on Indigenous land and to feel connected to it--bodily,
emotionally, spiritually--has been the normative formation of settlers. Settler radicals who commit to Indigenous
decolonization must act differently. Is it possible, at once, for settlers to wish to live on or feel linked to
Indigenous land, and to act in support of decolonization? Should settler radicals first commit to be willing
to no longer live on Indigenous land or have any connection to it, as part of fully committing to work for
decolonization? Note that my questions do not dictate answers to how settlers lives will appear after pursuing
such work. I merely insist that asking such questions define how settlers begin such work, so that they inform
what comes after. How can settler radicals commit to be ready to no longer live on Indigenous land, or to have
any connection to it as part of joining work for decolonization? How would settler radicalism appear differently
if this question were central to it?

If settler radicals challenge their desires to live on Indigenous land, they also will challenge their desires
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to study, practice, or feel in any way linked to Indigenous culture. I am thinking here of Andrea Smiths critique
in Conquest of spiritual appropriation as a form of colonial and sexual violence. I also think of Waziyatawins
statement to the Dakota Decolonization class of the relationship between Indigenous land and spirituality, which
makes decolonization of land necessary to the practice of Indigenous spirituality. With these claims in mind,
settler radicals must ask how their feelings of attachment to Indigenous land and culture enact appropriation and
violence. Settlers are supposed to be people who connect to Indigenous land--the land where they were raised,
or that they inherit after settling it--by studying Indigenous history and culture and linking it to their lives.
Historically, non-Natives became settlers by adapting Indigenous dwelling sites, travel routes, place names,
modes of gathering or cultivating food, and spiritual knowledges and practices.1 These acts are part of the
normative function of conquest and settlement. Thus, decolonization does not follow if settlers simply study and
emulate the lives of Indigenous people on Indigenous land.

Settler radicals desperately need to investigate this truth. It is relevant in particular to those for whom
anarchism links them to communalism and counterculturism, such as in rural communes, permaculture,
squatting, hoboing, foraging, and neo-pagan, earth-based, and New Age spirituality. These alternative
settler cultures formed by occupying and traversing stolen Indigenous land and often by practicing cultural
and spiritual appropriation. Their participants have imagined that they act anti-colonially by appreciating
Indigenous culture or pursuing what they imagine to be Indigenous ways of life. But using these methods to try
to be intimate with Indigenous land and culture expresses settler desires without necessarily contradicting them.
Critiquing and separating from these practices may be necessary for settlers to commit to work for Indigenous
decolonization.

This is a hard lesson for settler radicals to learn if they felt led to support Indigenous people by
participating in alternative settler cultures. They must ask, then, if their interest to support Indigenous people
arose not from an investment in decolonization, but in recolonization. Did they emulate, or impersonate
Indigenous culture in order to gain the trust or affection of Indigenous people; in hopes, then, that they would
gain access to the Indigenous culture or land that they, as settlers, actually desire? Its twisted, but true: settler
radicals may seek solidarity with Indigenous people by pursuing settler desires to possess Indigenous land and
culture for themselves. If this is so, their supposedly alternative cultures present no alternative to the settler
cultures that Indigenous decolonization will disrupt. All must be questioned if settlers are to commit to the work
of Indigenous decolonization.

I write these brief thoughts in order to introduce and invite broader conversations whose complexity my
words here have not begun to fulfill. My statements and questions mean not to limit conversation but to open
it. I have asked settler radicals to continually pursue critical reflection that will un-settle their senses of self and
relationship to place. I am playing here on multiple meanings in the word unsettle, notably its correlation with
the word displace. Certainly, in this context, unsettling suggests the work of displacing settlers from their
possession of Indigenous land. The word reminds settler radicals to divest of their desires to occupy Indigenous
land in order to work for decolonization. But unsettling also can invoke the qualities that settlers try to avoid
feeling, such as uncertainty, discomfort, and--in an emotive sense--displacement. Colonization is an ongoing
process making settlers desire the certainty and comfort of emplacement. Such feelings are incompatible with
the commitment to work for Indigenous decolonization. Embracing uncertainty and discomfort--getting used
to these feelings, and learning to live well amidst them--will be the productive and enlivening result of settlers
displacing their centrality on stolen land and committing to work for Indigenous decolonization.
Among the wide array of writing on these histories by scholars in Native Studies, my words here refer in particular to Vince
Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) and to Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (1998).
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Indigenous feminism without apology

Andrea Smith
We often hear the mantra in indigenous communities that Native women arent feminists. Supposedly, feminism
is not needed because Native women were treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native woman
who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being white.

However, when I started interviewing Native women organizers as part of a research project, I was
surprised by how many community-based activists were describing themselves as feminists without apology.
They were arguing that feminism is actually an indigenous concept that has been co-opted by white women.

The fact that Native societies were egalitarian 500 years ago is not stopping women from being hit
or abused now. For instance, in my years of anti-violence organizing, I would hear, We cant worry about
domestic violence; we must worry about survival issues first. But since Native women are the women most
likely to be killed by domestic violence, they are clearly not surviving. So when we talk about survival of our
nations, who are we including?

These Native feminists are challenging not only patriarchy within Native communities, but also white
supremacy and colonialism within mainstream white feminism. That is, theyre challenging why it is that white
women get to define what feminism is.
DECENTERING WHITE FEMINISM

The feminist movement is generally periodized into the so-called first, second and third waves of
feminism. In the United States, the first wave is characterized by the suffragette movement; the second wave is
characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women, abortion rights politics, and the fight
for the Equal Rights Amendments. Suddenly, during the third wave of feminism, women of colour make an
appearance to transform feminism into a multicultural movement.

This periodization situates white middle-class women as the central historical agents to which women of
colour attach themselves. However, if we were to recognize the agency of indigenous women in an account of
feminist history, we might begin with 1492 when Native women collectively resisted colonization. This would
allow us to see that there are multiple feminist histories emerging from multiple communities of colour which
intersect at points and diverge in others. This would not negate the contributions made by white feminists, but
would de-center them from our historicizing and analysis.

Indigenous feminism thus centers anti-colonial practice within its organizing. This is critical today when
you have mainstream feminist groups supporting, for example, the US bombing of Afghanistan with the claim
that this bombing will free women from the Taliban (apparently bombing women somehow liberates them).
CHALLENGING THE STATE

Indigenous feminists are also challenging how we conceptualize indigenous sovereignty it is not an
add-on to the heteronormative and patriarchal nationstate. Rather it challenges the nationstate system itself.
Charles Colson, prominent Christian Right activist and founder of Prison Fellowship, explains quite clearly the
relationship between heteronormativity and the nation-state. In his view, samesex marriage leads directly to
terrorism; the attack on the natural moral order of the heterosexual family is like handing moral weapons of
mass destruction to those who use Americas decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide
bombers.

Similarly, the Christian Right World magazine opined that feminism contributed to the Abu Ghraib
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scandal by promoting women in the military. When women do not know their assigned role in the gender
hierarchy, they become disoriented and abuse prisoners.

Implicit in this is analysis the understanding that heteropatriarchy is essential for the building of US
empire. Patriarchy is the logic that naturalizes social hierarchy. Just as men are supposed to naturally dominate
women on the basis of biology, so too should the social elites of a society naturally rule everyone else through a
nation-state form of governance that is constructed through domination, violence, and control.

As Ann Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to argue that the goal of Christian
Right politics is to create a theocracy in the US. Rather, Christian Right politics work through the private family
(which is coded as white, patriarchal, and middle-class) to create a Christian America. She notes that the
investment in the private family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of social connection.

For example, more investment in the suburban private family means less funding for urban areas and
Native reservations. The resulting social decay is then construed to be caused by deviance from the Christian
family ideal rather than political and economic forces. As former head of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed
states: The only true solution to crime is to restore the family, and Family break-up causes poverty.

Unfortunately, as Navajo feminist scholar Jennifer Denetdale points out, the Native response to a
heteronormative white, Christian America has often been an equally heteronormative Native nationalism. In
her critique of the Navajo tribal councils passage of a ban on same-sex marriage, Denetdale argues that Native
nations are furthering a Christian Right agenda in the name of Indian tradition.

This trend is equally apparent within racial justice struggles in other communities of colour. As
Cathy Cohen contends, heteronormative sovereignty or racial justice struggles will effectively maintain
rather than challenge colonialism and white supremacy because they are premised on a politics of secondary
marginalization. The most elite class will further their aspirations on the backs of those most marginalized
within the community.

Through this process of secondary marginalization, the national or racial justice struggle either implicitly
or explicitly takes on a nation-state model as the end point of its struggle a model in which the elites govern
the rest through violence and domination, and exclude those who are not members of the nation.
NATIONAL LIBERATION

Grassroots Native women, along with Native scholars such as Taiaiake Alfred and Craig Womack,
are developing other models of nationhood. These articulations counter the frequent accusations that nationbuilding projects necessarily lead to a narrow identity politics based on ethnic cleansing and intolerance. This
requires that a clear distinction be drawn between the project of national liberation, and that of nation-state
building.

Progressive activists and scholars, while prepared to make critiques of the US and Canadian
governments, are often not prepared to question their legitimacy. A case in point is the strategy of many racial
justice organizations in the US or Canada, who have rallied against the increase in hate crimes since 9/11 under
the banner, Were American [or Canadian] too.

This allegiance to America or Canada legitimizes the genocide and colonization of Native peoples
upon which these nation-states are founded. By making anti-colonial struggle central to feminist politics, Native
women place in question the appropriate form of governance for the world in general.
In questioning the nation-state, we can begin to imagine a world that we would actually want to live in. Such a
political project is particularly important for colonized peoples seeking national liberation outside the nationstate.

Whereas nation-states are governed through domination and coercion, indigenous sovereignty and
nationhood is predicated on interrelatedness and responsibility.
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As Sharon Venne explains, Our spirituality and our responsibilities define our duties. We understand the
concept of sovereignty as woven through a fabric that encompasses our spirituality and responsibility. This is
a cyclical view of sovereignty, incorporating it into our traditional philosophy and view of our responsibilities.
It differs greatly from the concept of Western sovereignty which is based upon absolute power. For us absolute
power is in the Creator and the natural order of all living things; not only in human beings Our sovereignty is
related to our connections to the earth and is inherent.
REVOLUTION

A Native feminist politics seeks to do more than simply elevate Native womens status it seeks to
transform the world through indigenous forms of governance that can be beneficial to everyone.

At the 2005 World Liberation Theology Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, indigenous peoples from
Bolivia stated that they know another world is possible because they see that world whenever they do their
ceremonies. Native ceremonies can be a place where the present, past and future become copresent. This is what
Native Hawaiian scholar Manu Meyer calls a racial remembering of the future.

Prior to colonization, Native communities were not structured on the basis of hierarchy, oppression or
patriarchy. We will not recreate these communities as they existed prior to colonization. Our understanding
that a society without structures of oppression was possible in the past tells us that our current political and
economic system is anything but natural and inevitable. If we lived differently before, we can live differently in
the future.

Native feminism is not simply an insular or exclusivist identity politics as it is often accused of being.
Rather, it is framework that understands indigenous womens struggles part of a global movement for liberation.
As one activist stated: You cant win a revolution on your own. And we are about nothing short of a revolution.
Anything else is simply not worth our time.
Andrea Smith is Cherokee and a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
and co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and the Boarding School Healing Project.
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Talking to Settlers About Unsettling

Rita
People listen to people they trust. Start with people who trust you. Build relationships with those you
want to influence.
Come up with a short, concise position statement, slogan and/or story that communicates the essence of
this issue for you. Practice it on friends, until you can communicate clearly and in a good tone.
Challenge yourself to push your own boundaries by engaging unsettling conversation in spaces you
maybe havent in the past. Try experimenting with your language and approach to learn how to reach
people from different positions.
Share your own histories and stories, and work on how you can push yourself to claim your privileges
consciously, intentionally, and in way thats encourages others to see how much empowerment there is
to be found in challenging oppression in ourselves. Vulnerability and accountability tend to be socially
contagious.
We can rarely talk people into changing their minds; but we can LISTEN to them while they think
through things. A non-judgmental listener can help a person think out loud about - and reexamine their
views. This leads to fresh thinking.

Example: Person A brought up the issue of gay marriage to person B sitting next to her on a plane. He
voiced STRONG anti-gay marriage views. She then asked him an illuminating question: Have you ever been
in a relationship that someone close to you was strongly opposed to? The (white) man then told the story about
dating a Black woman in high school. His parents were deathly against this relationship, and forbade him to
continue it. He talked about how hard that was on him. Then he said, No wonder gay marriage bothers me! It
does not make sense to dictate who someone can have a relationship with. Im changing my mind. I support gay
marriage!
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Brainstorm: the Beginnings

of Unsettling Minnesota
5.5.09
An Offering: Working Proposal for Building Non-Native Solidarity with Dakota Decolonization Struggles
through:
1) Education and outreach for non-native/settler/white people

- local communities first, starting with our own friends and communities

- create public points of unity on what an ally is, how you become an ally

- make this class ongoing

- film screenings

- create lit, zines, class debrief, solidarity manual

- create workshops on decolonization

- truth telling and anti-colonial campaigns, actions
2) Building an infrastructure for incorporating new non-native activists into ally work both consistently and
around specific struggles
- we could help build and solidify a curriculum for future classes, help facilitate those classes, both in
class and structurally.
- we could create infrastructure in the form of: phone, email, literature, class schedule,and points of
unity.
- the phone number would be one folks could call to interact with someone directly, to get plugged in to
what other potential allies are doing, to get help around solidarity work etc.
- the email would function similarly as a connection to interested new non-native activists.
- literature would be available both on-going and for specific events, perhaps detailing what our vision
of solidarity work is, how folks can get involved, basic internal questions.
- a class/event schedule could be made and kept accessible for plugging in to.
- points of unity could be created to be presented to new non-native activists interested in ally work, both
as we meet them everyday and at specific events.
3) Providing a coordinator(s) bridge to facilitate communication between Dakota and non-native support
- we would ask scott and autumn and their dakota friends to choose/acknowledge a point person(s) to
be direct communication links in coordinating solidarity work. this is with the acknowledgment that the
best individual(s) would be those scott/autumn/friends feel most comfortable with, as the best support
we can be involves their being able to communicate.
- we would deal with whatever potential problems arose around the designated point people as our shit
to work on.
4) Working to move resources to Dakota decolonization struggles, and to offer material support
5) Engaging in ongoing internal/self-education around decolonization and solidarity
- create separate spaces out of meetings for ongoing internal education
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- guest speakers
- homework
- book club
- every meeting starts with Occupation Report
- workshops within the group on whiteness, non-native ethnic and cultural reclamation, finding our
roots sort of thing
- create a group intake learning process
6) Preparing ourselves for action & being available on call whether or not Dakota people choose to use us as a
resource.
7) Continuing internal work to understand and challenge gender oppression and all forms of social hierarchy as
a necessary part of any and all efforts for decolonization

-We will have oppression vibe checks as a place to bring up in group/world oppression issues

-There will be/is a mens group
8) Meeting every Tuesday at 7pm
- Possible locations: sisters camelot, common roots, teachers collective, walker church, powderhorn
community center
- We need to discuss meeting structure
- Have working groups with (bi) monthly large group meetings but have one month of weekly meetings
while we figure all this out
- Have separate spaces to discuss internal/external decolonization struggles
Scott and Autumns Immediate Suggestions:
- figure out who you are: cluster of groups, network, collective?
- create a map
- create a resource manual or zine
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Decolonizing Restorative Justice

Denise C. Breton
When I first heard about restorative justice, I remember feeling liberated and inspired by a movement that
advocates responses to harm other than inflicting more harm. What a concept! It gave me hope that the untold
harms in this world could be addressed in healing waysways that addressed why harms were happening in
the first place. We could put our energies and resources into repairing whatever needed mending and changing
whatever was generating hurt.

If, for example, a square peg was not fitting into a round hole, hitting it harder, denigrating square-ness,
or locking the peg in a drawer for a few years was not going to solve the problem. According to restorative
justice, harms alert us that we need to look deeper into our relationships and how we are going about life. If
we respond to harms in a good and open way, they can help us live better with a greater understanding of those
around us and the nature of our worlds. Because there is no part of our lives where conflicts, hurts, and harms
do not arise, restorative justice can be revolutionary to virtually everything we do. The concept seemed so
simple yet so profound.

Restorative justice still gives me hope, but I have had more time to think about it, and I have since been
on the 2004 Dakota Commemorative March. I still think restorative justice holds huge promise for helping us
learn how to coexist as people, but I think the very essence of restorative justice as a philosophy and way of life
calls us to expand our focus to include more than person-to-person harms. What about our historyhow we got
to where we are as Peoples? How did we end up with this round pegs only pegboard, and at what cost?

These are the more fundamental questionsthose that make us look at the roots of harms. As we do, we
are challenged to apply what restorative justice practitioners have learned about healing harms between people
to healing harms between Peoples. This is the direction restorative must go, I believe, or it will fall short of
fulfilling its promise. Indeed, it will risk joining the other side and becoming part of the institutions that not only
deny the greatest causes of suffering but also actively perpetuate harm.

For those new to the concept, restorative justice is about intervening on painful plotlines and exploring
how to shift those plots, so that peoples lives can move in more healing directions. It is about responding to
harms not with knee-jerk forced removals to detentions, suspensions, jails, or prisons but with concerted efforts
to work things out and make things right. At its core, restorative justice is about coexistence: How can we make
coexistence worknot when things are easy but when they are hard? Precisely when hurts occur and where
harms exist, restorative justice poses the questions:

What happened?
Who was hurt?
Who caused the hurt?
What amends could and should be made now?
And what might it take for those harmed to feel whole?

When all those affected, including communities, come together to address these questions in
open, honest, and heartfelt ways, healing generally follows. With time, effort, and resolve, people change,
relationships blossom, and communities grow. Possibilities open for addressing harms that before seemed
impossible.

Central to the restorative justice process is listening. It begins with listening to others and hearing stories
different from our own. Before long, we start listening to ourselves in different ways as well. By creating spaces
for people to share their stories, restorative justice processes bring to light how the individual and the collective
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overlap. Interconnected as we are, we each face realities not of our making but which affect us nonetheless. As
we reflect on the larger contexts of harms, we inevitably ask: How did we arrive at a point where harms like this
happenedand will happen again if we do not change?

Initiated in the 1970s with victim-offender mediation programs, restorative justice is basically new to
the dominant societys criminal justice system, yet its core concepts are ancient. Many Indigenous Peoples
teachings and traditions distill generations of experiences about coexistence as a way of life and therefore
about how to mend relations when they break down. For people living in closely knit communities, reacting
to the surface event of harm without addressing the dynamics that led to it is neither logical nor practical. The
realities of connectedness suggest that hurt is not an isolated event; it comes from somewhere, and because of
connectedness, it affects many if not all people in the community.

In fact, those most affected serve to protect the wellbeing of the community, much as the canaries who
died in the mines warned the miners of bad air: one persons harmful act or another persons suffering signals
something out of balance that could be harming everyone. If a member of a community is behaving hurtfully to
others, the rest of the community needs to ask why. Where is the urge to harm coming from? To effectively heal
a hurt, those involved need to consider how it arose, and to do that, the whole community needs to participate in
some way. The goal is not retribution but to repair broken relationships for the good of all. When harms occur,
the most practical question is: What does it take for the community to come together and feel whole, so that the
community and everyone in it are stronger, healthier, and less susceptible to similar harms in the future?

There are no set ways to do this; those affected must simply come together and decide how they want
to work things out. Some Indigenous traditions do not rule out taking a life in extreme cases, such as murder,
though banishment is more common. If killing the perpetrator of harm is chosen, though, it is generally not done
to punish or deter. Other reasons are given, such as to appease the aggrieved so that retributive violence does
not escalate, or to make it possible for the soul of the murdered to work things out with the soul of the murderer
by sending the latter to the life beyond. The aim is healing, repair, restitution, and making whole, so that the
community heals.

The Dakota linguist and scholar Ella C. Deloria provided an example of this determinedly reparative
approach from her People, the Yankton Dakota. In her article Some Notes on the Yankton, published in
Museum News of the Dakota Museum, University of South Dakota (Vermillion, South Dakota), March-April,
1967, Ms. Deloria shares her notes from a 1936 interview with Simon Antelope (the full text is reproduced on
the Web site of Living Justice Press). Mr. Antelope was well into his seventies at the time and considered a man
of standing in the Yankton Band of the Dakota. Mr. Antelope explained four methods that a Dakota community
might use to respond to murder, and any of these methods was considered effective for community healing.

The first option was for a relative of the murdered person to kill the murderer: a life for a life. This
option ended the matter.

The second option was to convene a council, and the most peaceful men would approach the murderer
and the one who had been appointed to avenge the death to see if peace could be made. The whole community
would contribute fine gifts for this process, because it was in everyones best interests that peace be restored.
When the two antagonists accepted peace, the gifts were divided equally between them.

The third option was considered the most powerful and by far the most exemplary response, though it
was the most difficult to do. It was for the family of the murdered person to adopt the murderer as a relative to
take the place of the one killed. If this path was chosen, the murderer was not treated as a despised slave to the
family but was given the finest gifts and treated with all the kindness and respect that the dead relative would
have received. By so doing, both the family of the murdered person and the murderer would spend the rest of
their lives committed to healing a harm that might otherwise have divided the community. Such a man usually
made a far better relative than many a natural relative, Mr. Antelope observed, because he was bought at a
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high price.

Putting the murderer through ordeals of physical endurance was a fourth possibility. If the person failed
the test, he was killed instantly by the arrows of onlookers related to the person who was murdered. If he
passed, he was either taken in as a relative by the kin of the murdered or allowed to go free, exonerated.

The challenge for restorative justice today, I believe, is to apply this determinedly reparative, healing
approach to addressing harms between Peoplesharms that go back generations. Yet the choice to engage in
this process remains a hard sell, and many objections are raised to dismiss it:
All this awful stuff happened in the past. I didnt personally do it. Why should I pay for what my great,
great, great, great uncle did or didnt door for people Im not related to at all? People are just using
the past to avoid taking responsibility for their lives now. My grandfather came here with two pennies
in his pocket and built a good life; why cant others do the same? We should put the past behind us
and start freshlets make it a clean slate. Were all equal now. In fact, people of color get favored
over the rest of us. Does the past really affect us all that much? Even if we wanted to, fixing the past is
impossible, so why waste our time trying? Our ancestors won, and yours lost. Thats just the way it is.
Get over it! Move on! Stop whining and blaming others for your problems! Pull yourself up by your
bootstraps! Blend in! Get with the program! In any case, how do we know youre not exaggerating?
Our historians dont tell us about these terrible events. Stories of atrocities arent in our written records.
When Columbus landed, there probably werent more than one or two million Indians here anyway. I
cant help it if their immune systems couldnt handle European diseases. Whatever happened, its no
ones fault; its just progress. If it hadnt been us, it would have been someone else. Lets focus on todays
harms; wed be lucky to put those right. You cant go forward by looking back. Face it: youre better off
now than your ancestors were before we came. Youve got TVs, computers, cars, music, refrigerators,
cell phonestons of stuff you didnt have. And look at TV sitcoms and all the news anchor people of
color: theres no racism anymore. We like everyone. I do anyway. Some of my best friends . . .

These reactions defend the status quo, and they keep how we got to where we are off the collective radar.
Our time frame extends no more than a few decades into the past and into the future. If it were comparable to
how we live personally, it would be like refusing to think one minute ahead or behind now. How could we
sustain relationships or any serious endeavor? How could we learn to act responsibly? To offset this collective
Attention Deficit Disorder, I imagine how I would feel if I were watching a movie about our history on this
land:
The scene opens on a People who are human in every wayfamilies, desires, differences, good years
and hard years, close relations with some neighbors, more difficult relations with others. Over countless
generations, they have worked out respectful relationships with all the beings who people the land.
Indeed, as a People, their traditions teach them from their earliest moments of life how to be a good
relative to each other and that all beings are their relatives. Respect and being generous out of gratitude
for the generosity that sustains them are values that pervade their way of life. They are raised to be
mindful of how we are all related, not because they have always done this perfectly, but precisely
because they remember times in their history when they have forgotten to do this and have lived in
unbalanced, disrespectful, or ungenerous ways. The costs, first paid by others, came back on them and
proved too great. Having learned through hard experiences how to be a good relative, they have lived as
a People on the land since time immemorial, and their ancestors are buried there.

Then the scene shifts. One day, a different sort of People arrives. At first, they seem friendly, but
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it quickly becomes clear that the Newcomers are there because they want what the Original People seem
to have, namely, not only the land but also control of everything within the land. It is also clear that the
Newcomers do not place much value on being a good relative. Seeing the Newcomers hit and yell at
their children, saying spare the rod, spoil the child, the Original People wonder why the Newcomers
dont like their own offspring. It worries them, because if people treat their own so harshly, why would
they treat others better? When these children grow up, where in their lives would they have learned how
to treat others with respect, integrity, and kindness?

As the film moves on, the Original Peoples worst fears come true. The Newcomers, now Settlers,
become insatiable about claiming land without regard for those who live there and taking resources
without noticing how it upsets the Natural World. They seem to stop at nothing to gain control of the
place where the Original People have lived for generations. Inequitable agreements wildly favoring
the Settlers are made under fraudulent and deceitful circumstances, and even then, the Settlers ignore
the meager terms afforded the Original People. The Settlers give the Original People gifts of blankets
infected with smallpox, so that huge numbers of them get sick and die. Dispossessed of their lands and
livelihood, betrayed by governments that ignore their commitments, homeless and starvingwe know
what happens next.

But the conflict between the two Peoples simply provides a pretext for the Settlers original
agenda to go into full swing: to exterminate the Original People, either by killing them outright, causing
their death through starvation, disease, exposure, or torture, or forcibly removing them beyond their
borders. The genocide that follows, openly mandated by the Settlers governor and executed by every
crime against humanity, is perpetrated not by a few in government divorced from the will of the citizens
but as a direct response to the will of the Settlers, so that the Settlers and their descendants can live
where the Original People have lived. In fact, the Settler population actively carries out genocide
against the Original People, murdering men, women, and children, even babies to collect a bounty,
which for a single murder amounts to a years income.

As I watch this movie, I wonder how on earth it is going to work out. Its as if I am watching The
Godfather, only its much worsemore like Schindlers List without a Schindler. Depressing as it is, I decide to
fast forward.

A century and a half later, the Settlers have now become firmly entrenched as the Colonizers, the
ones who hold the power, call the shots, arrange things for their own benefit, and dont consider the cost
to others. At any point, they could have changed their relationship with the Original People, but they
havent and have no thought of doing so. In fact, having done everything they could to kill the Original
People or to drive them away, the Colonizers have achieved their goal of never having to think about the
Original People. Colonizer life goes on as if the Original People never existed on the land.

True, the land retains many of the place names used by the Original People, but many counties,
roads, and public facilities are now named after the most virulent Settler leaders of genocide. Colonizer
children born only decades after the holocaust have been taught nothing about what happened or how
they came to live on the land. They encounter very few if any of the lands Original People as they go
about their daily lives. The region becomes known as the whitest state in the Union, yet no one asks
how this came to be so. Instead of explaining the infamous history, schools, museums, clergy, books,
magazines, and newspapers promote a story that celebrates the Settlers occupation, while dismissing
the Original Peopletheir language, traditions, knowledge, relationship with the land, even their
competence as humansas minor footnotes buried in the past.

Not surprisingly, the Colonizers live well: they are mostly landowners, they have nice homes by
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and large, most of them do not worry about food, they have good jobs, their children enjoy promising
futures, and they have full representation in their colonial governments. They are told and believe that
they live in a just, fair, and equitable society. They assume that when conflicts occur, everyone involved
will receive due process. The law of the land is assumed to be basically good, and the system is
trustworthy and reliable. Though injustices occur, the Colonizers are raised to believe that these are the
exception rather than the rule.

True, there are problems, yet the problems these descendants face as a People are those they
themselves have created, and in large part because they have not questioned the means that were used
to get them where they are. Might makes right has continued as an unfortunate but inevitable way
to conduct business and government. The Colonizers spend most of their waking hours in institutions
that are authoritarian, hierarchical, competitive, and driven by money. Being a good relative is
not a value in this environment; instead, doing what it takes to succeed and maximize profits are the
priorities. Not only does the Natural World suffer as a result, but also the ruthlessness once reserved for
the Original People overshadows the Colonizers working relations. Though the Colonizers have been
raised to accept this way of life, many are unhappy. Heart attacks most commonly occur on Monday
mornings. Addictions are epidemic, as is the use of antidepressant drugs. Many of their children are
unhappy as well. Staggering numbers of them must be medicated in order to attend school, and some
become vandalistic, violent, or suicidal.

Nonetheless, the Colonizers view themselves as good people, and they consider their society the
pinnacle of human evolution. They view themselves as superior humans living in a superior culture.
Their ethic is to get an education, work hard, go to church, and be conscientious in childrearing, even
questioning their ancestors harsh treatment of children. Some volunteer to help the needy through their
religious institutions, while others are active in civic and political life. Precisely because their schools
and institutions still promote win-lose ethics and competition as the way to find ones place in the world,
the Colonizers feel they have earned whatever they have and that they deserve a good life. Their selfimage is that of a wholesome, dedicated, God-fearing, and generally righteous People. They have no
sense that the good life they enjoy came through the suffering and genocide of their neighborsindeed,
of those whose ancestral lands they inhabit. Neither do they realize how profoundly their genocidal
history shapes their society as well as their character as a People.
As I sit and watch this familiar self-characterization, it is hard to view the movies Colonizers as they obviously
view themselves, and it is clear how much the Colonizers self-image and way of life depend on keeping their
history of genocide off screen. In fact, when a few of the Colonizer characters learn a little of the history, they
go through a predictable sequence of mental and emotional turmoil. The ones who persevere through the stages
of denial, defensiveness, self-justification, and anger find themselves plunging into identity crises: self-doubt,
shame, guilt, grief, loss of the otherwise solid sense of themselves as good people, depression, and despair about
what to do.

As a movie-goer, I think about what I would want the good citizens to do. What would feel satisfying
to me as their response to this history? What would I like to see happen? And how would I feel if the movie
ended here?

When the scene shifts to the descendants of the Original People, I see how differently they live:
Two hundred years after the Newcomers arrived, many Original People do their best to maintain their
traditions, for it is through them that they have maintained the will and the means to survive. Being a
good relative has not been forgotten, and its attending values of respect, honor, and generosity continue
to be taught to their children through practice more than words. A sense of community and identity as
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Original People remains.

Yet despite the positive force of their traditions and values, these descendants struggle under
the realities of multigenerational trauma created by the core conflicts between the Original People and
Colonizer society, which remain unresolved centuries later. The crimes of genocide and massive land
theft have been made invisible. In fact, they continue, but under bureaucratic, corporate, economic,
social, political, legal, or institutional guises. For the Colonizers, it is as if the deeds of genocide never
happened; for the Original People, they never stopped happening.

As a result, the Original People do not share the Colonizers belief that the prevailing colonial
order is just, good, or reliable. Due process is not something they experience, either as victims or
offenders or as a People. Quite the opposite. Against their will, they have been forced to live under the
constant threat of annihilation, since the Colonizers have never questioned their states official policy of
genocide. It is as if post-WWII Jews had to live in a place called Hitler County, and when they went to
some of the finest restaurants where the monied and powerful go, they saw pictures of Hitler hanging on
the walls; how safe would the Jews feel? Would they feel that the society was committed to their safety
and wellbeing or to reversing the genocidal policies of the past?

So, too, the Original People find no grounds for regarding any aspect of Colonizer society as
trustworthy. For example, when a group of them broke into a Colonizer headquarters a few decades ago,
they discovered that the health care provided by the Colonizers had been routinely sterilizing their
women without their knowledge or consent. Billions of dollars that treaties guaranteed them in payment
for access to resources on their lands have somehow mysteriously disappeared. Through centuries of
such experiences, the Original People have come to realize that no aspect of Colonizer society can be
trusted to defend or promote their best interests. Instead, every aspect encroaches, invades, threatens,
undermines, and altogether works to destroy the Original Peopleboth as people and as a People.

Those who venture into Colonizer society to make a living find that what it takes to become
a successful person in Colonizer societywillingness to win at all costs, willingness to embrace
Colonizer language and self-promotional ways, willingness to swallow racist treatment, willingness to
disregard community good or respect for the Natural World in order to achieve material gaingoes
against Original People teachings. Original People face a dilemma: to survive well in Colonizer
society, they are pressured to go against who they are as Original People, yet to do so intensifies their
genocide.

As if this dilemma were not challenge enough, the racism that was used to justify the
extermination of Original People persists, so that Original People descendants are largely excluded
from getting good jobs, obtaining loans or mortgages, or gaining opportunities for their children. They
remain the degraded Other, those People. This makes it exceedingly difficult for them to break
the cycles of poverty that began when the Settlers invaded and destroyed their means of livelihood.
Denied their traditional ways and unable to afford good Colonizer food or medical care, their health
deteriorates.

Retraumatized daily by having to cope with a society whose values are so antithetical to those of
their ancestors, many seek to anesthetize their trauma of dislocation through addictions. Suicide rates
are high, especially among young people. Confronted daily with messages that denigrate, marginalize,
and dehumanize who they are as a People, the descendants of the Original People manifest a range
of behaviors. Some are unhealthy and damagingviolence under intoxication, property violations, or
domestic abusethough nothing of the order of the organized crimes against humanity that the Settlers
and now Colonizers have perpetrated.

Other behaviors are clear assertions of identity and sovereignty as Original People but
which Colonizer authorities (teachers, bosses, police, administrators, and government officials) find
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threatening. A young boy, for example, writes Original People Pride on his notebook, whereupon
a Colonizer teacher thinks he must belong to a gang and interprets the students subsequent conduct
through this filter. Teens weaned on Settler-Colonizer racism pick fights with the boy for being proud
of his People, yet he is the one labeled a troublemaker by the school authorities. He no longer enjoys
school, and so truancy goes on his record. Before long, his parents are charged with neglect, and the
authorities use their institutional might to forcibly remove the son from his parents home. He grows
into adulthood in a Colonizer boarding school, juvenile facility, or foster home far away from his family
and community. He is told that his forced removal is for his own good. Given such opportunities,
Colonizers expect him to make good, and so when grief overcomes him to a paralyzing degree, some
of the Colonizers conclude that he is from an ungrateful, lazy, no-good People.

As an adult, it does not take much for this man to find himself in court. Continuing the original
policy of forcibly removing those who do not conform to Settler society, the Colonizers systematically
remove large numbers of Original People, especially men, to prisons. Some go for life because they
cannot afford adequate legal representation. This solution of forced removal fits with the Colonizers
historical response to conflicts with the Original People. The Colonizers law enforcement system uses
force, intimidation, punishment, and imprisonment to maintain control. Instead of facing the history, the
Settler descendants continue to define the problem in ways that blame the Original People. Those
people have a problem; we have nothing to do with it. The ones in prison are just bad apples who
need to be locked up. After all, look at the successful Original People! Hard feelings are planted to
divide Original People against each other, while the Colonizers role remains unnamed.

All this is supported by the Colonizers origin storythe story told to new generations about how
the Settlers came to this land. The story describes the Settler population and culture as superior and
the Original People as quaint, savage, and destined to go extinct. Why be concerned with the plight of
those who cant make it? The best we can do is put them in prison where theyre fed and have a place
to sleepbut cant reproduce.

Watching this movie is incredibly painfulcertainly for the descendants of original peoples but
for many colonizers like myself as well. Even for colonizers who have known only the colonizer narrative,
witnessing this origin story told to include the experiences of the Original People can be unsettling.

Of course, I know this is one of many movies I could watch. I could, for example, watch a movie about
a time and place several millennia earlier where my ancestors were the original people and faced a similar
invasion and colonization. In that story, the physical differences between the settlers and the original people
were not so marked, and so assimilation and hence loss of culture occurred more completely as the centuries
passed. Even so, millennia later, vestiges of my original-people ancestors teachings and traditions remain.

I could also watch a movie about the traumas my ancestors suffered in Europe as a result of their
colonizationthe social, economic, and political traumas that drove them to find new homes, to treat their
children as they did, and presumably to behave so savagely to the original peoples when they came here. By
the time they arrived, my settler ancestors were apparently unable to conceive of coexistence as an option.
Whereas Native Peoples largely operate from a me and my relatives paradigmand relatives includes all
of creationmy ancestors largely operated from a me and not-me or us and not-us paradigm. Everything
that was not me or not us was viewed as a threat. Given this outlook, they evidently had no knowledge or
experience of what it means to work out relationships with those who seem different but whose needs are much
the same. They assumed coexistence was impossible: one people or the other could survive but not both. Not
me and not us had to go.

Participating in the Dakota Commemorative March was like seeing the Original PeopleColonizer
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movie for a week, only I was in the movie and living it, and I still am. Its a painful movie to live in, to be sure,
but it keeps me focused on harms that, from a restorative justice perspective, I and my fellow colonizers need
to address if we care about our dignity and self-respect. Whether I personally committed these crimes or not, I
benefit from them. They were planned and executed precisely so that I could live here now in the whitest state
in the country, Minnesota. And I perpetuate these crimes by continuing in the colonizer habits that have been
my way of life since birth.

Colonizer habits include ignoring the history, acting like it never happened, not holding myself and
my People accountable for immense harms done, and escaping to a comfortable, consensual, racial amnesia.
These habits reinforce the biggest colonizer habit, which is to regard the land I live on as legally, legitimately
mine. After all, everything that happened was done for land. The Dakota had it, and the Settlers wanted it. Once
they exterminated the Dakota to get it, the Minnesota colonizers finished the job by passing laws that made the
whole land-grab through genocide seem legitimate, lawful. The land is now legally ours: this is the epitome of
colonizer thinking.

Participating in the March is about breaking these habits. If I am here, how I came to be here matters.
The history directly affects me, and on more levels than I ever realized. Most fundamentally, I live on this
landland gained through mass murder. Yet not only do I benefit materially from being a descendant of the
People who did these things, but also I am shaped by my Peoples collective character, which has been formed
through this history.

My Euroamerican history tells me, for example, that if my position affords me the power to harm
another for my own benefit and to get away with it, then I should do this, and I should never question whether
I did something wrong, much less worry about making it right. If this were not so, Congress and corporations
would not behave as they do. Corporate ravaging and preemptive wars to conquer other Peoples and to
control their lands and resources are not an aberration in American history; they are how Native Peoples have
experienced us from the start. These classic colonizer habits are programmed into me, and even if I work every
day to question and challenge this internal programming, its ways of hooking me are continually reinforced by
the colonizer society, which is everywhere now.

Yet once I have seen the movie and lived in it, I can no longer escape asking myself if this is the kind of
person I want to be. Is this a kind of People in whom I can take pride? The movie is still playing, and, although
I am not its director, I have some say in how it goes. Keeping the painful movie in view helps me to remember
the programming, to name it for what it is, and to attend to its dismantling. I no longer see myself or my fellow
colonizers only as we see ourselves but also in the light that our People-to-People history sheds. I need the pain
to help me do my work and not get lost in the mesmeric forgetting, which every nuance of my programming
would have me do.

To be clear, it is not that I enjoy the pain of putting my hand on a hot burner; it is rather that the pain
reminds me to pull my hand away. The burner in this analogy is not the Dakota People or even the history; it
is the settler-colonizer programming that set horrific cycles of pain in motion and then tried to build a good
society on this foundation.

The pain is also useful, insofar as it marks the first movements toward learning what it means to be
a good relative. I cant imagine healing a relationship thats been so broken by so many for so long without
experiencing pain in the process. If I believe in the restorative justice processif we as a people want to find
our way to being a good relative to those whose ancestral homeland we inhabitwe have to be willing to feel
the pain of whats been done and our ongoing roles in it.

As useful as the pain can be, though, it is also good to be living in a movie whose plot we can alter.
Obviously, there are some things about this movie that we cannot change. We cannot change that genocide
happened, for example, but we can change denial of this fact. We can begin to acknowledge the magnitude of
harm and its ongoing effects. We can acknowledge who did what to whom, and then we can work to heal these
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harms in whatever ways are possibleand much is possible. We can begin to intentionally imagine coexistence
in ways our colonizer programming has kept off-screen.

Minnesotas colonizer society has responded to this history and its effects mainly through social service
programs or, if those dont work, through the criminal justice system, i.e., imprisoning Native people. Yet
neither of these responses addresses the roots of harm. Quite the opposite, they keep the movies plot going in
its original genocidal direction, because the aim of both institutionssocial services and criminal justiceis
forced assimilation into colonizer society. They are not designed to honor the Dakota People or to rectify
longstanding harms against them.

Restorative justice could offer a more appropriate response, because it would require acknowledging
that at the root of these harms lies a criminal actindeed, immense crimes against humanity. The issue between
Minnesotas colonizer population and the Dakota People is a criminal issue first. All the social, economic, and
political issues that Native people face today follow from this central truth: crimes have occurred that have
never been rectified or brought to justice.

As with any victimoffender situation, restorative justice processes begin when the perpetrators of
harm acknowledge guilt and take responsibility. Acknowledging the crime and rectifying its effects are central
to helping both the victim and the offender recover and be able to live good lives. Only when the crime is
addressed to the victims satisfaction can the victim and the offender begin to explore whether or not they are
able to be in a good relationship with each other.

If, however, the crime is not even acknowledged much less repaired, victims are continually revictimized. In fact, they are often blamed for the harm, as if they deserved to suffer or as if it were their fault;
they are blamed for failing to bounce back; or they are blamed for the dismal condition that the crime left
them in. The assumption is always that something is wrong with the victim. In the meantime, the offenders not
only go scot-free with the booty but also continue to harm their victims by not holding themselves accountable
for the ongoing suffering they are causing.

If the restorative justice movement fails to address the People-to-People issues and the crimes embedded
in our history, it will risk losing credibility in this country, as it seems to have already done in Canada. Many
First Nations now reject restorative justice, and precisely on these grounds. The core vision of going to the
roots of harm and doing what it takes to make things right is experienced as empty rhetoric, invoked only when
colonial power structures deem it advantageous to do so. Instead of working toward wholeness for Peoples,
restorative justice functions as another tool of colonizer institutions, whose goal is not healing but for one
People to conquer and dominate another. Restorative justice is simply used to make the violence of the criminal
justice systemthe colonizers control-by-fear deviceseem more humane. Instead of addressing the wider
contexts that generate harms, the focus stays on trying to fix person-to-person conflicts. Individuals, families, or
communities are viewed as the problem, while the larger reasons that individuals, families, or communities
have problems remain invisible.

This does not mean that we as individualscolonizers or original peopleshould not be held
accountable for the harms we do. Yet here in Minnesota, we colonizers have not been held accountable at all
for state-sanctioned, citizen-supported crimes against humanityand yet we describe ourselves as international
leaders in restorative justice. How could Dakota peopleor anyone else who knows the historytake
restorative justice seriously if we diligently hold this or that offender accountable for drug possession or stealing
a car while we fail to hold ourselves accountable for genocide that we committed so we could steal an entire
states worth of land? If we were to apply our own laws about murder and stolen property to this case, we would
have to rule that every time we sell a house in Minnesota, we commit a felony, and every Minnesota realtor
should be imprisoned for dealing in stolen property gained through murder.

Restorative justice does not have to be hijacked into being an accomplice to colonization, for its roots
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are not there. If restorative justice embarks on People-to-People healing, the systemic issues causing suffering
to Native Peoples will begin to be addressed and rectified. Together as Peoples, we can acknowledge the
massive harms done, name racism as it operates to hurt Native Peoples, arrange land return, honor the inherent
sovereignty and self-determination of Native Peoples, make restitution and reparations, find and return the
billions of dollars in missing trust funds, respectfully cease behaviors that denigrate Native Peoples (such as
using them as sports mascots), and teach everyone the full history of this land.

Such efforts would help heal our People-to-People relationships by grounding them in economic, social,
political, and basic human justice. It may take decades or even centuries to rectify harms of this magnitude.
But with this work, it is reasonable to postulate that many if not most person-to-person harms done by Native
peoplecommitted largely against themselves or each other, not against colonizerswould likely disappear. It
is also reasonable to postulate that both Peoples would benefit by taking the journey to coexistence.

Indeed, this is another reason why I hope that restorative justice will embark on People-to-People
healing. A core tenet of restorative justicesomething practitioners have come to believe because of extensive
experience in this workis that holding the perpetrators of harm accountable is essential not only for fairness
but also for their healing and transformation. When offenders experience accountability, they are transformed.

In restorative justice, being held accountable is not about punishment or revenge. It is about connecting
and becoming more realconnecting with more of reality than the narrow sphere in which inflicting harm made
sense. To start, it means becoming acquainted with the effects of their harms, which usually involves listening to
victims. Offenders meet the human faces of their harms. They hear the pain in the voices of their victims as they
tell their stories. Harm is not abstract or over there; the person who has suffered is sitting in the same room
and telling the offender face to face how life has changed as a result of the crime.

Being held accountable leads to honest soul-searching: Why did I do this? What was I thinking or
feeling, and where did these thoughts and feelings come from? Restorative accountability does not lead to selfrejection but to self-compassion and ultimately to self-acceptance. If anything, running away from harms we
have committed or denying that we did them constitutes self-rejection, because it rejects our reality and prevents
us from confronting who we are, as if we could not handle facing ourselves.

Being held accountable also means finding out from those harmed what restitution they need and
working to provide it. Offenders step up to the plate of doing whatever they can to put things right, no matter
how long it takes. Making restitution affirms the offenders competence and establishes their dignity and selfrespect. It feels good to own up to a harm and to work to make it right, just as it feels demeaning not to do so.

Another reason that holding perpetrators accountable transforms them is that, through the process,
people who obviously felt isolated now learn to build connections. The process forms relationships, and
offenders experience something of what it means to be related. Even though the process is filled with pain
and remorse, it is still transforming, suggesting that even the slightest experience of being related can bring
profound change.

Transformation is certainly what we colonizers need as a People, and we would be among the first to be
blessed by the process of making things right. Holding ourselves accountable for the massive crimes embedded
in our history and recurring in our present would help us become the kind of People we aspire to be but are
not. By making ourselves come to terms with other Peoples realities, we could discover coexistencea way
of being that depends not on conquest and oppression but on respect, honesty, integrity, and mutual good.
Embracing our accountability could also effect a healing in our collective psyche of traumas going back
millenniatraumas that conditioned us to think in me vs. not-me terms. Instead of engaging in Darwinian,
colonizer struggles for survival, we could learn how to be a good relative, and we could discover that it is a
better, happier, and more sustainable way to live.
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Can restorative justice play a significant role in effecting this level of transformation? Yes, but only if we
are serious about decolonizing. What does this mean? This is a huge question, and I can only begin to respond
by trying to set the restorative justice compass in a decolonizing direction. To start, restorative justice must
set its sights on undoing colonization, since this is the core injustice, the root crime that must be addressed. To
address the crime of colonization, decolonizing restorative justice means raising the questions that restorative
justice typically poses but raising them on the level of Peoplesthe level on which the crime of colonization
has occurred:
What happened in our history on this land?
Who as a People was hurt and continues to be hurt?
Who as a People caused the hurt and continues to benefit from it?
What People-to-People amends could and should be made now?
And what might it take for the Dakota People to be made whole?

Those of us who are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of colonization in Minnesota must be involved in
addressing these questions, but we are not the ones to determine the answers. We must listen to what the Dakota
People have to say. In the process, we have to give up the power advantages as well as the presumptions of
superiority that we have taken on ourselves as colonizers and instead humbly and sincerely work to make things
right as equals with those of the Dakota Nation.

Certainly, decolonizing restorative justice means not using restorative justice to reinforce colonization.
For example, restorative justice must not be used as a better way to enforce assimilation or to perpetuate the
criminal justice system. White supremacy and colonizer hegemony must be challenged. Our premise must be
that the State of Minnesota is not the government of the Dakota People; it is their oppressorthe might makes
right regime of the occupiers. Therefore, the restorative justice agenda here is not to make Dakota people more
comfortable in the State of Minnesota or more willing to live under its rule; it is to establish a healthy nation-tonation, People-to-People relationship that enables us to coexist respectfully as equals, as we do with Canada or
France.

To get there, some serious amends must be made, and the process of making these amends is how
respect is built on both sides. Indeed, everything we have learned about restorative justice says that we simply
have to do the work that the healing process requiresand we discover what is required as we engage in it. If
we commit to engaging in this process not as colonizers but as decolonizers, the restorative justice work is not
something we do to Dakota people; it is something we do with the Dakota People.

In 2004, I was invited to participate in the Dakota Commemorative March. Whether I will do so again in
2006, 2008, 2010, or 2012 will depend on the Dakota: What contribution, if any, can colonizers make by being
present? In restorative justice, the victims of harm get to say what feels healing and what doesnt. Certainly the
perpetrators and beneficiaries of harm are in no position to decide on these matters.

During the March, I saw the look on the faces of the Dakota, especially the Elders, when they saw
meblonde as can be, clearly not raised among them. I saw the effects of lifetimes of suffering at the hands of
my fellow colonizersnearly boiling water poured on childrens hands in boarding schools as punishment for
speaking their language, beatings and sexual abuse in schools, rapes and murders never even investigated much
less brought to justice, children stolen from their parents, continually dehumanizing stereotypes and messages
about them in colonizer society, exclusion from economic opportunities, yet complete denial that injustices had
ever been done. Though not ungracious, the Dakota Elders did not come up to me, shake my hand, and say how
glad they were to see me there. How could they?

Restorative justice does involve bringing together victims and offenders, but only after considerable
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preparation has been done on both sides. Forcing those harmed to come together with those who have benefited
from those harms prematurely could do greater damage, especially during times when the victims of harms
want nothing more than to be left alone to grieve their loss. As for us colonizers, we are far from doing our
preparation for such a meeting. Most of us have not seen the moviewe live oblivious to the immensity of
harms doneso we are not even considering what preparation on our part would be necessary.

Whatever my personal participation in future Marches might be, I am profoundly grateful that I could
be there in 2004. The experience is one I will never forget, and it has changed me far beyond what I could
ever imagine that sitting in a car for seven days could do. Participating in the March has been a life-altering
experience.

During the March, I felt that this was the most important place for me to be, and the rest of the world
with all its busy-ness did not matter as much. The March seemed to occur outside of time. I suppose I felt this
way because the March lifted me out of my everyday routine and gave me at weeklong look at how we got to
where we are. Holding a space for considering our course as Peoples is bound to be intense, and even when the
conversations were light and joking, the deeper issues were always there.

My participation turned out to be a balance between being present and not being present, not at least
in the sense of actually walking. I drove a support car and, as the week went along, I was able to play Lakota
music for the marchers through a speaker horn propped outside my cars sunroof. Marchers threw their coats
and bottles of water in the car as the days warmed, and sometimes those whose feet hurt too much or who had
developed an injury would ride a few miles. I was grateful that it worked out this way. I could bear witness to
the history and support the marchers without intruding on their experience. It is ironic that, as much as I love to
walk and walk an hour everyday when Im at home, I went on a 150-mile march and ended up walking no more
than two or three miles.

Though I live within driving distance of the March route, staying overnight in the church basements,
gymnasiums, and community centers was a very important part of the process. Sometimes the organizers
arranged evening sessions when people were invited to share their thoughts and reflections about the day. Other
times, we just had dinner and hung out. Different families and communities prepared feasts for us. The evenings
gave us a chance to get to know each other and to reflect on the March. These times moved us to deeper places,
so that by the next morning, something had shifted. The comments people made the night before stayed with me
the next day, and I could tell from others comments that they were experiencing the same.

Because I was driving behind the marchers and listening to Lakota music (on top volume, so the
marchers could hear it), I had plenty of time to think about the people in front of meto wonder what they
were feeling as we went along and what their ancestors felt 150 years earlier as they walked this route. I came
to know everyones walk, their hats and coats, and their back views very well. I could see relationships forming
and friendships growing. I noticed which Marchers enjoyed visiting with others and which preferred to walk in
silence. Though I had to keep my concentration sharp because so many children were around, my experience
was nonetheless very meditative. I was largely alone with my thoughts from sun up to sun down for the week.
I have so many memories. For example, I remember all of us waiting along the shoulder of a busy highway for
the police to come and help us cross the road. We were stopped a long time. The Lakota music was going, and
traffic was speeding by on my left, so fast that my car shook. When I looked out into the trees in a marshy area
to my right, though, it was as if I went back in time and could feel those who walked there before usstarving,
sick, cold, wet, afraid, exhausted, grieving, yet persevering to save their children. I felt as if we were in two
worlds at once, and somehow the world on our right seemed more real, more compelling. I didnt want to look
to the left, and it felt jarring to do so.

I also remember a night in a parking lot. We were carrying our things into a church basement for the
night. My friend, Lakota, stopped and began singing Kola Weksuye, I remember my friend. It was a clear,
cold November night. He couldnt finish the song.
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This parking lot was in New Ulmperhaps the most terrible town for the original Marchers to pass
through. Settlers had been killed by the Dakota warriors whose families were starving, and the surviving
townspeople were full of revenge. It was here that white women grabbed Dakota babies and killed them before
their mothers eyes. It was also here that settlers poured boiling water on the Dakota women and children, until
their skin peeled off.

During our evening meeting, Dr. Chris Mato Nunpa, his daughter Dr. Waziyatawin Angela Wilson,
her daughter, Autumn Wilson, Leo Omani, and Dr. Edward C. Valandra spoke about the history and what
had happened in New Ulm. Some townspeople had been invited to this meeting. After the speakers, Dr. Mato
Nunpa opened the microphone, and a white townswoman came forward. She invited the marchers to engage in
reconciliation by agreeing to listen to some of the colonizers stories and their accounts of settler losses during
that time.

I did not sleep well that night. What the woman said made me angry, and I was mad at myself as well for
not speaking up. It sounded as if she said, We suffered too, you know, so that makes it all equal. Yes, the loss
of loved ones is always profound, but there is nothing remotely equal about what the Dakota experienced and
what white settlers experienced, evidenced by the enormous differences in the lives of the two Peoples today.
Whereas the settlers invaded someone elses territory and knew full well the risks of living here, the Dakota
suffered invasion and occupation, theft of their homelands, fraud of every ilk, violations of treaties, betrayals,
sadistic and genocidal cruelty from soldiers and civilians alike, Governor Alexander Ramseys statewide official
policy of extermination, a harsh Minnesota winter in a concentration camp, and forced removal from their
ancestral home. Yet this white-privileged colonizer had the gall to say what she did to the Dakota Marchers in
the church basement.

I dont know the woman or her character, but her words provided a clear case of colonizer thinking,
cloaked in the rhetoric of reconciliation. Not once did she speak to the injustices that the Dakota speakers had
raised. Not once did she acknowledge the crimes that enabled her to stand there on Dakota homeland. She came
across to meand, I later learned, to other Marchers as wellas condescending, self-justifying, self-righteous,
self-servingly selective in the telling of history, unremorseful of the harms that her forebears had committed,
and entirely unwilling to acknowledge the settlers dishonest and downright inhuman conduct, which is what
caused the 1862 War in the first place. If anyone, her own forebears are to blame for the settlers deaths in New
Ulm and Henderson, yet she failed to connect these dots. In her view, reconciliation evidently meant exchanging
isolated stories of personal pain without regard to the actual context of historical events, not to mention their
multigenerational consequences. I felt ashamed, and as I said, ashamed of myself for not speaking up.

As in this case, being with the Dakota during the week inevitably made me see white colonizers
differently, including myself. I was aware of my legacy as a colonizer, and I could observe in myself how
this has shaped me much more starkly than when I am among other whites. Being in situations that make my
programming more visible to me helps me, because I know that racist, colonizer programming is lethal stuff,
and that I have been conditioned by it since birth. Among other things, the March was a weeklong meditation on
this programming: what it has done, what it continues to do, and how I personally figure in all of this.

Stopping every mile to put stakes in the ground to honor those who died during the 1862 Death March
was inevitably powerful. When a marcher realized that a stake being put into the ground bore the name of
an ancestor, history ceased to be abstract or remote. I will always remember the moment when Waziyatawin
Angela Wilson realized that her ancestors name was written on a stakeher great, great, great grandmother
who had been killed by a soldier. She could not speak for her tears, so her father stepped in to continue telling
their ancestors story for her. I remember every detail of that stopher face, her voice, her fathers face and
words, her children coming to comfort her, the place where we were, the time of day, where people were
standing, and the deep silence that followed her fathers words, because so many people were weeping. I also
remember how hard it was to leave that place, how slowly we moved away.
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Spending much of the week on dirt roads and along rivers gave me a different sense of the land as well. I
gradually stopped seeing the land the way it is now with houses, telephone poles, roads, and SUVs scattered all
over it, and I began to reflect on how it was before the white settlers came.

I also began to sense something about the relationship that the Dakota People have with their homeland
and realized that their relationship is not diminished by white occupancy, which felt increasingly transient and
ephemeral to me. The reason, as far as I could tell, is that the Dakota continue to have an intimate relationship
with their homeland. In spite of dislocation and genocide, this has not changed.

Observing the depth and quality of this relationship, I also realized how profoundly we colonizers lack
anything comparable with the land on which we live. Pondering this during the week, it seemed to me that,
because we have not sought to be good relatives to either the Dakota People or the land, we continue here as
intruders, false notes, no matter how long weve been here. It is not that we could not be here in a good way
in principle. Rather, what makes our presence false is how we came herethat it was and remains so wrong.
Those in restorative justice often repeat a saying that they have heard from Native practitioners: You cannot get
to a good place in a bad way. Given our history in Minnesota, how can we be here in a good way now? How
could such profound violations of both the Dakota People and the land give us a sense of place or belonging? I
imagined another movie:
A large and closely-knit family lives in a beautiful home that has been in the family for generations, in
fact, as long as anyone can remember. The home is well loved, tended, and cared for, and the people are
happy. They also take care of the land around the home and have worked out respectful relations with
plants and animals. Then one day, some gangsters arrive and gun everyone down. After the gangsters
throw the dead bodies of the family members into a ditch, they move in, as they continue their violent
way of life. They cut down all the trees around and kill the animals, and when they still need wood for
fire, they pull off a piece of floor or the mantle. They dont honor the land or take care of the house; they
just use things, consuming them as they go.

As colonizers, we would naturally say this movie image is overdrawn, since we dont like seeing
ourselves as rapacious gangsters, but I doubt the Dakota would agree. Aside from the question of whose home it
is in this scenario, who has a relationship to the place? Could the gangsters claim to have the same relationship
to the home that the family had? If the gangsters wanted to have that same kind of relationship, what would they
have to do to get it? What process would they have to go through in order to change their way of being there?

As I pondered such things on the March, I realized that being deeply connected to a place develops over
generations. Moreover, it develops as people live in a place in a good way, that is, with integrity and respect
in every direction of their lives. Being a good relative to all beings is evidently how we come to belong in a
place. We belong because we honor our relationships to all the beings therewe respect all our relations. If
we fail to do this, we will always be occupierspeople who do not belong.

I saw this depth of relatedness communicated by the Marchers not only in words but also in movements,
gestures, tones of voice, and ways of interacting. Being respectful of place, land, and all our relations seemed
a natural way to be. Indeed, the March itself is an example of this. The March has to do with healing a terrible
trauma that affected both the land and those who lived there. Planning the event and taking the time to do it
respect the land by maintaining a relationship of integrity. If a people and their homeland share a deep wound,
it is respectful to acknowledge that wound and work to heal it, just as it would be disrespectful to ignore that
wound, causing it to continue unhealed. Among the Indigenous Peoples of the world, the Dakota would not
be alone in saying that the land remembers. My Celtic ancestors said the same, as do many other Indigenous
Peoples of Europe.

For those of us who are colonizers now, though, such values have not guided our relationship with this
land or how we came here. We do not think in terms of having a relationship with the land that needs time
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and tending, neither would it occur to us to respect the land as we would our own mothers. We do not think
that committing crimes on the land will damage our relationship to the place. For us, land is a commodity, an
object of ownership, an inert thing that we possess, dominate, and exploit for profit. Indeed, our Bible tells us to
subdue the earth and to have dominionover every living thing that moves upon the earth (Genesis 1:28).
Clearly, land falls in the not me, not us (not human) category, so it would never occur to us to regard the
land as our relative. To use theological terms, we would not consider having an IThou relationship with the
land of Minnesota.

The Dakota, by contrast, refer to their homeland as Kunsi Maka, Grandmother Earth, one who has
personality and who gives life. The desire to be in good relationship with her is as natural and important as
being in a good way with our own mothers, and acting badly in her presence is like acting shamefully in front
of our mothers. To be driven from their homeland is to be forcibly separated from familyfrom their most
beloved relative who gives them life as a Peopleand to return to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors on the
body of Kunsi Maka is a profoundly spiritual and emotional experience. To begin to appreciate the power and
depth of this relationship in even the smallest way and then to juxtapose this awareness with a knowledge of the
historythat all the horrific things done to the Dakota were done precisely to separate them from their beloved
relative, their homelandthis is what I as a colonizer experienced on the March.

Obviously, writing this article brings the March experience back to me in spades, yet I have to say that
not all of it is profound or wrenching. I also remember the foot rubs, the joking around, the morning meetings
in the ladies room, the speculations about various sounds in the night, the eternal quest for coffee, the moments
of rest before and after meals, the stories about blisters and aching feet and muscles, the evening rituals of
setting up camp and the morning rituals dismantling itrituals such as hauling mattresses, sleeping bags, and
luggageand the feeling of being so tired at the end of the day in a way that felt so good.

I am grateful beyond words that the March is now a part of my life. Through that experience, I have
become grateful to know who I am as a colonizer, because only then can I begin my life as a decolonizer. From
a sense of despair, I once said to my friend, This being white will be the death of me. Without missing a beat,
he replied, No, it will be your renewal.
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Colonialism on the Ground

Waziyatawin
At one time our ancestors would have had difficulty imagining living in a state of unfreedom. Now we have
difficulty imagining living in a state of freedom. This is perhaps the most profound impact of colonialism in
our lives. It reveals a limitation in thinking so severe that it prevents us from reclaiming our inherent rights as
Indigenous Peoples of this land, even in our dreams.

Colonialism is the massive fog that has clouded our imaginations regarding who we could be, excised
our memories of who we once were, and numbed our understanding of our current existence. Colonialism is the
force that disallows us from recognizing its confines while at the same time limiting our vision of possibilities.
Colonialism is the farce that compels us to feel gratitude for small concessions while our fundamental freedoms
are denied. Colonialism has set the parameters of our imaginations to constrain our vision of what is possible.

To be sure, the brand of colonialism in the United States today differs from the brands of earlier times
when imperial forces from Europe established colonies in the New World as a means of expanding the wealth
and power of their nations while also battling with competing imperial nations over pieces of the global pie.
Thus, in the United States American schools teach our children that the colonial era ended when the United
States gained its freedom from Great Britain. However, this denial of itself is simply one of colonialisms
myths. This denial is so extreme that even today the United States government insists on the language of
possessions rather than colonies to identify its holdings outside the contiguous land base it claims in North
America, despite the fact that many of them fit classic definitions of colonies precisely because they have not
been absorbed into the state. But, the interest in domination and control over territories was established even
before the entity of the United States was born. As American colonies gained their independence from their
Mother Country, they sought to further expand their wealth and influence through the continuing invasion and
acquisition of other Peoples lands and resources and the subjugation of the Original Peoples. The shedding of
the constraints of their Mother Country simply facilitated and hastened that project. The United States soundly
expanded its empire and is now so deeply entrenched in its colonial acquisitions that to anyone but the most
conscientious observer, those roots have been lost in obscurity.

The hope, perhaps, is that Indigenous Peoples will eventually be incorporated into the lowest rungs
of society enough to forget our colonized status. When we have forgotten, the United States and its citizens
are ameliorated of wrongdoing and there will be no need for restitution for the crime against humanity that is
colonialism. Indigenous Peoples, therefore, must be conscientious observers because the colonizing society will
exercise all means to compel our historical amnesia.

For Indigenous Peoples U.S. colonialism meant the invasion and subsequent large-scale theft of our
lands and continuing domination over the meager lands we retained. It meant the systematic interference in
Indigenous ways of being and assaults on all aspects of Indigenous life including our physical bodies, our
means of sustenance, our spirituality, our languages, our gender relations, and our kinship, economic, and
educational systems as well as both natural and human laws.

In America, the process of destroying indigeneity was dramatically accelerated by the monumental
loss of life that occurred as a consequence of exposure to new diseases. While colonizer scholars and popular
culture suggest that loss of life due to disease was either inevitable or unavoidable, this too is a colonial myth.
The reality is that Europeans and later European Americans understood that their presence in the Americas
triggered pandemics that were devastating Indigenous populations. Yet, they chose to keep coming because
they held no regard for the lives of Indigenous Peoples and massive die-offs of the populations clearly served
their colonial interests. Not only were they unrepentant about their participation in our microbial slaughter,
they were often celebratory. Thus when our populations were already severely weakened, the process of
colonization was implemented much more effectively.
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To understand the process phase of colonialism, that is colonization, it might be useful to articulate the
general chain of events in the American context. Many of the colonial tactics were borrowed from previous
colonial powers, or have since been replicated by global colonial powers, precisely because they work so
effectively. Explorers and traders were typically the forerunners of American empire, seeking opportunities
for exploitation and gauging the extent of Indigenous resistance. Soldiers and military forts came next with
the purpose of establishing American supremacy in a region, not just to subdue Indigenous populations but
also to contest other colonial interests. This was important for initially securing economic preeminence, often
manifested in the form of the fur trade. White invaders intent on settling Indigenous lands soon followed
the forts and soldiery and they paved the way for missionaries to implement their own imperialist agenda.
Under the guise of saving souls and civilizing Indigenous people, missionaries implemented what we would
characterize today as policies of ethnocide. Settlers then clamored for title to Indigenous lands, pressuring an
eager and supportive U.S. government to formalize and legalize their usurpation of Indigenous lands and the
subjugation of Indigenous Peoples. Missionaries, Indian agents, traders, settlers, and the U.S. government
then all worked together to launch systematic and profound attacks on Indigenous bodies and ways of being,
dividing us and crushing us into submission. All segments of our populations were subject to colonial violence
and brutality, including the children who bore the brunt of colonizer indoctrination and manipulation in the
genocidal boarding schools.
Divide and conquer techniques are the hallmark of colonial manipulation. Those indigenous individuals
considered the friendliest to colonizer interests (that is, who offered the least amount of resistance) were
singled out for special favors and rewards until they were firmly co-opted to do the colonizers bidding. Those
who resisted colonizer interests most vehemently were targeted for particularly oppressive punishments. The
collaborators are often distinguished in written records as the friendly or good Indians, while those who
continued to resist co-optation were quickly identified as the savage or hostile Indians. The leaders,
thinkers, peacemakers, warriors, spiritual leaders, healers and teachers who did not fall in line with the emerging
order were isolated, dehumanized and diminished. Thus, colonizers ably and superbly fostered resentments
between the two groups, pitting them against one another and always calling on the favorite friendlies to
monitor their colonized cohort and enforce the colonial system. These divisions severely eroded the unity in
Indigenous societies that were often simultaneously devastated from disease, warfare, forced removals, loss of
homelands, mass killings, and policies of ethnic cleansing. The tremendous harm caused by generations of
factionalism as a direct consequence of colonialism cannot be overstated as it has greatly affected the capacity
of Indigenous Peoples to mobilize broadly for significant change.

Even today, those who attempt to restore Indigenous ways of being in the modern world are dismissed
by colonizers and their colonized puppets as angry, unrealistic, nave, less sophisticated, or even less intelligent
than those mimicking the values and ideals of the dominant society. The friendly Indians invested in
whatever small perks they gain from the colonial system are deeply devoted to maintaining the existing system
and they defend its justness at every turn. Or, they have individually reaped substantial prestige and power
from toting the colonizers party line and as a consequence turn their back on the suffering of their Indigenous
communities while at the same time applauding the amazing resiliency of the People. They see no need to
seriously challenge the existing system because having bought into the American dream they are well on their
way to achieving it. They actively participate in the blind march toward progress, regardless of how that
march continues to devastate the People, their homelands, or their relationship with the rest of the universe.
Some of them talk about tweaking the existing system, maybe passing better legislation on this issue over here,
or developing a more strategic economic plan over there, and they have abandoned the struggle for liberation.
They, in fact, do not want liberation because it might affect their comfortable status. And, because these
friendlies offer no threat to the existing power structure, they become the favored pets, routinely lauded by the
colonizers for their superior intelligence, insight, and commitment to the well-being of their People. They are
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paraded in front of colonizer audiences as Indian models of success.

Still others live in daily fear. They, too, have abandoned the struggle for liberation because they see no
way out of this overwhelming oppression. Having grown accustomed to living as subjugated people, they might
reap only mild benefits from the colonial system while injustices occur all around them, yet they are afraid of
what might happen if they were to engage in resistance. For them, liberation is simply not conceivable, and
they believe that if the colonized can never win freedom, then we must simply try to negotiate the best scraps
we can while we numb ourselves with chemicals, feed our addictions, and entertain ourselves with material
goods and Hollywood entertainment. For if we challenge colonialism, even those small privileges might be
taken away from us and we might face increased harassment and assaults, we might be the ones carted off to
colonial prisons, and we might be the ones who have our children taken away. These fears are not unjustified.
They can keep us immobilized from enacting transformative change. Rather than challenge the colonial system,
we live according to its values. We become low-level enforcers of its rules, replicating colonial injustice in our
own communities, afraid to even imagine a different reality.

Our current reality as colonized Peoples echoes the reality of colonized Peoples around the world.
However, in the United States, with the advent of casino gaming and other forms of economic development
among some Indigenous populations, it is easy to be seduced into believing that things really are better. For
example, many contemporary historians and scholars of Indigenous Peoples highlight Indigenous agency
and resiliency in their analysis of our reality. They describe the historical experiences of Indigenous Peoples
as processes of cultural transformation or of evolutionary and dynamic change. They celebrate Indigenous
projects and plans. All of this, on the surface, seems to make sense. But, the question is, better relative to
what?

For example, if visitors came to my home community, they would be inundated with positive messages
about all the good projects happening on our reservation. They would receive a tour of our casino, of the recent
housing development and the plans for the new community center. They would be shown our water tower
and the water treatment system as well as our tribal courthouse. These visitors might be invited to our annual
wacipi (powwow) held in August of every year. And, they would be told about our strong youth program, the
language and culture classes offered, our community garden, the tribal police patrolling our reservation lands,
and the chemical dependency support system we have in place. Indeed, these projects and activities inspire a
sense of accomplishment and progress in all of our community members.

Yet, these projects, however worthy of celebration, do not tell the full story. If a broader view of history
is employed to examine our current status, a different picture emerges with a more painful significance and
legacy. If we delve more deeply, we learn that the reason we need a casino is because in the nineteenth century
the invaders stripped our People of our homeland and with it our entire means of subsistence. Settler society
systematically destroyed the life of abundance and sustainability that we knew for thousands of years so that
they could exploit and destroy the resources in our lands while denying most of us even the right of occupancy.
Since we were dispossessed from our original land base and colonizer society killed many Indigenous animals
and plants to near extinction and devastated our homeland environments, our People have experienced lives of
exceptional poverty.

For example, at one time our People maintained a highly evolved and spiritually fulfilling relationship
with the buffalo and we depended on them as a major source of our basic needs including food, clothing, and
shelter. But today, even after obtaining a new means of economic subsistence (at least partial subsistence) that
helps put food on the table, our casino remains a poor substitute for the buffalo while also fostering a new set
of addictions and a compromising of Dakota values (anti-materialism, reciprocity, respectful kinship relations).
It in no way can satisfactorily replace our former relationship with the buffalo or the kind of engagement we
previously had with our homeland. In pre-colonized time we sustained ourselves in accordance with natural
laws, each generation possessing extraordinary capacities for economic self-sufficiency and self-determination,
while now we have a gaming operation that helps sustain the community, but at a heavy social and spiritual
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cost that does not induce the same sense of individual or collective self-sufficiency and self-determination.
Furthermore, we also know that relying on gaming for our well-being places us in a precarious position because
colonizing society could strip it from us at any time. A larger scope of comparison from the self-determination
that existed in pre-colonial days to the costly compromise with oppressive external authorities for limited
economic gain that occurs today in the context of gaming, indicates that progress has not been achieved, at least
if progress is intended to indicate some kind of improvement. Instead, we cannot help but look at this loss of
complete economic self-determination as simply another manifestation of colonialism. Are our lives better as
a consequence of gaming? The significant question is, better than what?

Similarly, our water tower is necessary today because it provides the community with clean water that is
distributed to all the reservation households. That is extremely important. In light of the desecration to the river
that runs through our reservation where our ancestors drew their water, however, it seems a small consolation.
Our river is now so toxic that we cannot even swim in its waters because the poisons, stemming largely from
corporate run-off and farm pesticides and fertilizers, will leach through our skin. The fish and other beings who
inhabit the river are currently threatened and they too have become toxic. They, in turn, threaten all the wildlife
in the region who rely on them for subsistence, including us as Indigenous People. While we, at least, have the
capacity to severely limit our fish consumption, other beings who rely on fish cannot do the same and they too
become poisoned as a consequence. Now our man-made water tower sits atop a bluff beside a river from which
we can no longer drink or eat. Is this better?

As for some of the other institutions we have in place modeled on the U.S. (in)justice system, we are
merely replicating internally colonizer ways that have harmed generations of our People. We have become
invested in punishment as a response to crimes, rather than community healing. At the same time the support
systems we had in place prior to colonization to sanction appropriate behavior are either severely damaged or
non-existent.

The processes of invasion, conquest, land theft and colonization do not just contribute to harmful
behaviors within our communitiesthey cause them. When settler society denies our people our lands and
ways of life that sustained us and nourished us physically, emotionally and spiritually, the population suffers.
When people are routinely dehumanized, we forget how to interact humanely.

The attacks on Indigeneity in the U.S. have not only been systematic, the government has also doggedly
sustained them in various forms over centuries, many of them until the present day. Hence, it was not only
one generation of Indigenous Peoples that suffered from boarding school abuses and the ethnocide perpetrated
in those schools, it was multiple generations. It was not only one generation of Indigenous Peoples that was
subjected to relentless religious imperialism, it was multiple generations. It was not only one generation that
suffered from various crimes against humanity, it was multiple generations. For instance, Indigenous Peoples
generally acknowledge the harms resulting from the federally-mandated and government and church run
boarding schools (such as the practices of severe corporal punishment as well as physical and sexual abuse), but
we have not learned how to effectively heal from those generational traumas that are now perpetuated in our
families and communities, nor have we been able to stop the cycles of abuse and chemical dependency from
afflicting our populations. Even today, there is a palpable sense of desperation in most of our communities. We
have accepted trauma as a way of life and we continue to harm ourselves and others. All of this occurs in the
context of a brutal and ongoing colonization. Yet, settler society has never rectified most of the crimes against
humanity they perpetrated against our ancestors and ourselves and most of the losses we have sustained acutely
affect our populations today. Rather than addressing the monumental crimes against humanity inflicted on
Indigenous Peoples throughout the country, the U.S. criminal (in)justice system chooses instead to incarcerate
our people in response to relatively milder crimes, in punishment for the consequences of their colonization of
our Peoples.
The U.S. (in)justice system is now the predominant channel through which we help to funnel the dejected from
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our communities and it is the system that relentlessly continues to wrest our people away. The vast majority of
our Indigenous brothers and sisters who end up doing time in the criminal (in)justice system are also victims
of horrendous abuses which are colonialisms legacy, including structural racism and a constant degradation of
personhood. In addition, most never had adequate legal representation, they typically have harsher sentences
than their non-Indigenous peers, and they are subject to brutal and inhumane prison conditions in which
indigeneity is constantly attacked and dehumanization is routine.

Yet, there is little resistance to colonialism in many of our communities and we continue to exhibit
harmful behaviors to others and ourselves. Many of those harmful behaviors begin early and colonizer society
criminalizes them. Our severe social problems are a reflection of our state of colonization. What Indigenous
family is not affected by chemical dependency? By some form of violence? What community is not plagued
by high rates of addictions, depression, suicide, incarceration, and early mortality? Our communities have
normalized pain and suffering to such an extent that many of our people do not know or can even envision a life
different from the one we have experienced and seen modeled for us. Many of our people contemplate suicide
as children and then slowly enact lifestyles that facilitate an early death, either through violence, accidents,
or compromised health. How many of our people have been killed or injured in car accidents or ended up
incarcerated because of violent crimes perpetrated under the influence of drugs or alcohol? The latest harmful
drug to sweep through our community is crystal meth and it is devastating the lives of our young people. The
reality is that well people do not use crystal meth. Well people do not feed their addictions. Well people do
not commit suicide. Still, these behaviors are not the consequences of weak or inferior individuals. These
behaviors are a direct outcome of a colonization process that sinks people into a state of despair and does not
offer any recognizable alternatives.

Against this overwhelming backdrop, if we attempt to identify progress in the community, what could
possibly qualify? Suddenly the chemical dependency or addiction treatment programs we now offer can offer
only a small bit of hope in the face of a devastating social reality.

This is in severe conflict with Indigenous ways of being prior to colonization. From the time children
were born, they were embraced by a whole nurturing community deeply invested in producing individuals who
would be healthy, contributing members of society. Amidst constant love and compassion, our ancestors raised
children with strict teachings about how to be a good relative, and what was acceptable behavior according
to the communal ethic. Our communities praised the positive behaviors and publicly celebrated individuals
during rites of passage as well as for actions that benefited the community. If, after years of this upbringing,
individuals still perpetrated a terrible crime, their behavior would be considered so aberrant, they would likely
face harsh consequences such as death or banishment as a way to restore balance and peace to the community.
Today, we employ similarly harsh consequences, not as a way to restore balance and peace, but as a means of
punishment, without providing the years of communal support, teaching, and nurturing. Consequently, after
incarceration, many of our people return home only to repeat offenses. This does nothing to help heal our
communities. Meanwhile, settler society locks away our relatives in white colonial institutionsindividuals
with tremendous gifts and strengths to potentially offer our communitiesoften for years at a time.

Similarly, the corresponding cultural programs in my community, while worthwhile and important,
are also responses to tremendous devastation wrought from colonialism. We now have an annual wacipi
(powwow) when dancing and singing at one time accompanied part of our daily existence. When our dances
were outlawed and Indian agents jailed practitioners of heathen rituals, we eliminated our practice of them,
practiced them in secrecy, or learned to adjust our traditions to colonial regulations. We learned how to cloak
our traditions in monikers of settler society. We now have a grand entry in which we carry the American
flag, the ultimate icon of our own subjugation, out of apparent respect for our veterans who fought to enforce
American interests throughout the world, thereby expanding the American empire. And, because we could not
have our traditional dances frequently under colonial rule, we learned to concentrate them into one weekend a
year. Thus, even this celebration of culture is marred with colonial compromises.
196

One of the starkest examples of the misplaced argument for Indigenous resiliency occurs in the area of
language. Our high school age youth are offered the opportunity to take our language in the local high school
and there is an occasional class offered to other interested community members. These classes are absolutely
essential today and they are worthy of celebration. However, before any of us can get carried away with a
celebration based on some notion of progress, we have to remember that the urgency regarding intensive
language programming today exists because most of our languages are hanging on the edge of extinction. If
we do not take drastic and immediate steps to revive our languages, we will lose them. This, too, is not a
coincidence, but is a direct consequence of the U.S. governments policy of cultural genocide perpetrated
against Indigenous children through brutal boarding schools and reservation day schools. Thus, to anyone
committed to Indigenous languages, there is a mixture of excitement about the growing language movements
in our communities coupled with a sense of sheer panic about the losses our cultures have sustained. At the
end of 2007 we buried three fluent speaking Dakota elders in Minnesota and we can count on two hands all
the fluent Dakota speakers remaining on our Minnesota reservations. What does this say about our agency?
About our resiliency? For those Indigenous Peoples who already lost their languages, do they maintain a
sense of resiliency and agency? Or, are they mourning their tremendous loss and grieving as a people? If
the latter is true, it suggests a rejection of the notion of mere cultural change (as opposed to cultural loss) and
challenges the notion of vibrancy and agency. It suggests instead that the forces of colonialism were historically
so brutal and effective that some of our people and traditions have not been able to survive them. Not because
we are weak, not because we are inferior, but because the power of colonialism has been, in some instances, too
devastating to overcome.

Thus, Indigenous projects and activities that have come to symbolize progress in some academic
circles may only be seen as such by examining ourselves through an elitist and very narrow scope of history.
If we take a broad view of history, the argument of any notion of progress, agency or resiliency becomes
impossible because we ultimately have to account for the loss of Indigenous self-determination and the violent,
unremitting assaults on our bodies, lands, and spirits. It is not acceptable for colonialisms apologists, both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to high-jack the framing of our experiences.

Ah, but some might argue that Indigenous Peoples in the United States are sovereign nations and are
already self-determined. By what standards? Every system and institution that we bump up against on a
daily basis is not of our making, but has been imposed under colonial rule. The economic system, land tenure
system, educational system, social welfare system, governmental structure, religious institutions are all colonial
institutions that continue to oppress Indigenous Peoples and deny Indigenous liberation. Even freedoms
that theoretically apply to all American citizens, such as religious freedom, are routinely denied to Indigenous
Peoples. We do not even have control over the protection of our ancestors remains. Certainly, the fundamental
freedoms that are necessary for Indigenous ways of being, such as access to homeland, clean air and water,
are not part of our reality. What, in our lives, do we have complete control over? While we, along with other
anti-statist communities, occasionally experience what Hakim Bey identifies as Temporary Autonomous
Zones (created as an alternative to the existing hegemonic order), we have yet to produce lasting Indigenous
communities in the U.S. that operate fully outside of a colonial existence. Instead, we create spaces where
our ways of being are practiced and nurtured, where we attempt to liberate ourselves from the oppression that
surrounds our daily existence, where it is good to be Indigenous. We make them last as long as we can, but
because they, as of yet, cannot be sustained, we are forced to return to the real world that smothers with an
oppressive weight not all of us can bear to carry. Self-determination is an impossibility under colonial rule.

Meaningful change will require dramatic action on our part that can move us beyond colonial
interference. If we as Indigenous Peoples in the United States ever want a liberated future for our future
generations or ourselves, we have to work toward decolonization. Decolonization is the intelligent, calculated,
and active resistance to the forces of colonialism that perpetuate the subjugation and/or exploitation of our
197
minds, bodies, and lands, and it is engaged for the ultimate purpose of overturning the colonial structure and
realizing Indigenous liberation.1 A growing awareness of colonialism inexorably leads to a simultaneous
dissatisfaction with the situation and a growing unrest. This, in turn, has the potential to lead to revolutionary
praxis. Thus, recognition of this colonial reality is the first step toward our liberation. We cannot resist what
we cannot identify and name. Then we need to begin to imagine an alternative reality. Our colonizers have
told us that we must accept the way things are because we cannot change them. That is, we must accept our
own subjugation and their domination as a natural and inevitable state. Decolonization is a rejection of that
logic. It therefore requires opening up the mind to new visions of what is possible. If we were not subject to
the authority or presence of the United States government and its citizens what would we want our lives to look
like? The struggle for decolonization requires us to identify clearly our objectives as Indigenous Peoples and
to critically question whether those objectives are constrained by the parameters of thought set by colonialism,
or whether they traverse those parameters and reflect our desires as free, Indigenous Peoples of the land. If this
critical interrogation of our own vision does not occur, even upon overturning colonialism we would run the risk
of replicating colonial institutions and systems among our own populations.

Lest critics insist that a recognition of colonialism means condemning Indigenous Peoples to a
perpetual state of victimage, let me state now that this position does not deny Indigenous capacity for action
and resistance, but only that our actions are often violently limited within a colonial structure. One of the
criticisms frequently hurled at decolonization theorists is that decolonization research, analysis, and activism
and its accompanying focus on colonization, means an acceptance and advocacy of victimage, that when we
attribute our social problems to external colonial forces we are denying Indigenous agency. I think just the
opposite is true. While employing colonialism as an intellectual framework acknowledges the horrendous
injustices perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples and the limited choices our peoples faced as a consequence,
this is not inappropriate, nor is it overstated. When the loss of Indigenous life in the Americas weighs in
minimally at 95% and the ensuing land theft, loss of resources, means of subsistence and attempts at cultural
eradication are considered, to focus solely on the agency of the less than 5% who survived and are facing severe
social problems seems disingenuous at best. An analysis of colonialism allows us to make sense of our current
condition, strategically develop more effective means of resistance, recover the pre-colonial traditions that
strengthen us as Indigenous Peoples, and connect with the struggles of colonized peoples throughout the world
to transform the world. When colonialism is removed from the analysis, we have little alternative other than
to simply blame ourselves for the current social ills. This blaming the victim strategy only increases violence
against our own people.

Predictably, those who most fiercely deny the effects of colonialism are often the ones who advocate the
most strongly for working within the existing system. They reject dreams of liberation and defeatist rhetoric
characterizes their position. It includes such sentiments as The world is not going to change, or We have
to accept the way things are and do what we can within the existing system. Ironically, this position denies
the profound nature and propensity of human agency and relegates the results of human activity to negligible
proportions. This is what decolonization advocates cannot accept. Instead, we put our faith and actions toward
making revolutionary change, looking to the highest potential of human agency.

There was a time when my ancestors did not need to have strategies to resist forces of colonialism.
When they did, the processes of invasion, military conquest and subjugation were unleashed so abruptly,
impromptu strategies were courageously, but unsuccessfully attempted. None of them prevented the total
onslaught of colonial violence that ensued. Through time and processes of complete and humiliating
subjugation that affected every aspect of the lives of subsequent generations, resistance weakened into
complacency. Of course, not all Indigenous people chose this path and instead stayed the course of spirited
resistance, but today they represent the exceptions rather than the rule. The vast majority found it easier to
1
Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird, eds., For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (Santa
Fe: School of American Research Press, 2005), 2.
198

attempt to negotiate petty benefits from the colonial system while maintaining low visibility and small dreams.

Today, however, we have reached an era in which the existing system is on the verge of collapse, with
colonizer and colonized alike resting near a precipitous edge. We can either succumb to the ongoing discourse
of complacency propagated by the colonizing government, or we can mobilize for revolutionary change.
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APPENDIX
200
Additional Resources
Heres a not-exhaustive list of other resources--more beginnings.
PDF Versions of all content in this sourcebook can be found at:
http://sites.google.com/site/unsettlingminnesota/home
A few Allies:

Black Mesa Indigenous Support (BMIS): http://blackmesais.org/ ([email protected])

Snag Magazine: A Bay Area Indigenous Youth Magazine. http://www.myspace.com/snagmagazine
Indigenous Environmental Network: http://www.ienearth.org/
International Indian Treaty Council (IITC): http://www.treatycouncil.org/
The Catalyst Project: http://collectiveliberation.org/
Six Nations Solidarity: http://sisis.nativeweb.org/actionalert/
Quiver Distro: http://www.anti-politics.net/
Library Thing Online Zine Bank: http://www.librarything.com/
Redwire Magazine: http://www.redwiremag.com/
Anpao Duta Journal: https://www.anpaoduta.net/
Decolonization News Sources:

http://intercontinentalcry.org
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/
http://indianz.com
http://no2010.com
http://indigenousaction.org/
http://www.turtleisland.org/news/news-sixnations.htm
Histories of Colonization:

The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians, Roxanne Dunbar - Ortiz. <http://www.monthlyreview.
org/0703dunbarortiz.htm>

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai

American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard

Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization by
Ward Churchill

A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present by Ward
Churchill

Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools by Ward
Churchill

From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii by Haunani-Kay Trask

500 years of Indigenous Resistance by Oh-Toh-Kin. <http://www.dickshovel.com/500.html>

One Dead Indian; the Premier, the Police, and the Ipperwash Crisis by Peter Edwards
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Decolonization & Anti/Colonial Mentalities
The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi
Decolonization and the Decolonized by Albert Memmi
For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook by Waziyatawin Angela Wilson; Michael Yellow
Bird
From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995 by Ward Churchill and Howard Zinn
Gustafsen Lake: Under Siege by Janice Switlo
People of the Pines; The Warriors & the Legacy of Oka By Geoffrey York & Loreen Pindera
Wasse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom by Taiaiake Alfred
Dakota Histories
In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century by
Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Waziyatawin Angela Wilson
Remember This!: Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives by Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and
Wahpetunwin Carolyn Schommer
Indigenous & Women of Color & Third World Feminisms:
The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
Welcome Home: Settler Sexuality and the Politics of Indigeneity by Scott Morgensen
Femme Sharks Communique #2: Against Intra-Uterine Cannibalism!!! by Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasihha <http://www.librarything.com/work/8541957>
DVD/Videos:

Broken Rainbow, a Black Mesa Documentary.

Frozen River, 2008. Directed By Courtney Hunt.
Haunani-Kay Trask: We Are Not Happy Natives, 2002. Edited by Jon Kikuo Shishido.
Where the Spirit Lives, 1989. Directed by Bruce Pittman.
Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story. Directed by Michael Apted.
Above the Law: deception at Gustafsen Lake
Kanesatake: 270 Years of Resistance. Directed by Alanis Obamsawin
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Course Schedule & Reading Syllabus

Dakota Decolonization: Solidarity Education for Allies
Preface: You can teach a version of this class, too! Use this syllabus from our original class, taught through the
Experimental College (http://excotc.org) as a guide. For more info, email us at [email protected]
March 3 May 5, 2009
Course description: This course is designed to create community, education, and organized networks for nonDakota allies to act in solidarity with upcoming Dakota decolonization struggles. We will listen to the desires,
demands, knowledge and goals of Dakota community members struggling for liberation and decolonization.
We will educate ourselves about Dakota history, perspectives on decolonization, white privilege, and racism,
through carefully chosen texts and in-class education with Dakota and non-Dakota people. Together, we will
build a communal knowledge base that centers decolonization within our ideas of anti-oppression. Dakota
Traditional knowledge and spirituality will not be shared and this is not a space for non-Dakota people to seek
appropriation of Dakota culture or an in to spiritual practices. For white people, acknowledging and owning
white privilege, as well as working to transform feelings of white guilt into action towards decolonization will
be crucial personal work required during the course. The end goal is to create active ally solidarity networks
that can be mobilized when need be--in answer to Dakota calls for solidarity from non-Dakota folks, based on
communication with and knowledge of Dakota needs. Class members will be asked to act not as individuals, but
as members of their own communitiesto act within their networks to further spread knowledge and mobilize
solidarity.
SECTION ONE: DAKOTA HISTORIES OF MINNESOTA
1: Intros
-Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Chapters 1 & 3.
2: Dakota Colonization, Genocide & War of 1862 narratives
-Waziyatawin. What does Justice Look Like?: The struggle for liberation in Dakota Homeland.
Chapter 1.
3: Colonialism: From Rome to Dakota Genocide today
-Waziyatawin. Colonialism on the Ground.
Chapter 2 & 3.
4: Chris Mato Nunpa: Colonizer Privilege & Resistance Histories
Chapter 4 &5.
SECTION TWO: PRIVILEGE & MENTALITY: COLONIZER / SETTLER / WHITE
5: Flo Razowsky: Colonizers in anti-colonial solidarity: Allyship & Solidarity.
From New Socialist Magazine special issue #58-Sept 06-Indigenous Radicalism Today:
203
-Coulthard, Glen. Indigenous Peoples and the politics of recognition.
-Day, Richard & Haberle, Sean. Anarchist Indigenous Solidarity at Six Nations.
-Gernstenberger, Rolf. Labor Indigenous Solidarity a Six Nations.
6: Waziyatawin: Dakota Liberation Struggle & Dakota Solidarity Struggle.
-Finish: Waziyatawin. What does Justice Look Like?: The struggle for liberation in Dakota Homeland.
-Revisit: Waziyatawin. Colonialism on the Ground.
7: Scott Morgensen: Heteropatriarchy, cultural appropriation, and the politics of belonging in settler states.
-Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Chapter 1 & 6.
-Smith, Andrea. Indigenous Feminism Without Apology. New Socialist Issue #58
SECTION THREE: CULTURES OF RESISTANCE & LIBERATION: SOLIDARITY, ALLYSHIP,
ACCOUNTABILITY
8: Film Screening: Kanesatake: 270 Years of Resistance
-online link to film: http://www.archive.org/details/kanehsatake
9: Building Settler Anti-Colonial Solidarity Brainstorm
-Communities on call brainstorm, writing
10: Offerings of Solidarity to Dakota Decolonization Organizers
-Small group solidarity offering creation
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Letter to the New Ulm Journal:

Cherusci, Dakota Both Resisted Colonization
Anpao Duta
This letter was written to the editor of the New Ulm town newspaper on the occasion of the Hermann Monument
Societys Celebration of the 2,000 year anniversary of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.
September 15, 2009
To the editor:
We must tell our children and our childrens children the story of the heroes of every land and every time who
have given their lives that liberty and fraternity and equality might survive among men.

- Governor David Marston Clough, Dedication of Hermann Monument, New Ulm, Minnesota
This is a letter to those who remember that before they were Americans, before they were Germans, they were
Chatti, Cherusi, Harii, Marsi and Suebia.
This is a letter to those who remember their own homeland and the ways of their ancestors; to those who remain
Tru.
This is a letter to those who remember that they too were once resistors of colonization.
This is a letter to those who remember Hermann Der Cherusker.
Two thousand years ago on this date, a handful of tribes were united for a brief glimpse in history. Deep in the
forests of Teutoburg, these few thousand warriors stood against three legions of the greatest empire of their
time. For three days, they fought for their existence as a People, driving the Romans out of their homelands, and
holding them at bay for 400 years until the Empires collapse.
Rome was the greatest colonizing force of its time, with armies that rode out and conquered much of the
known world. It brought thousands of Europes indigenous peoples under colonial rule through superior
weapons, tactics and numbers. Yet, as written in the words of the Romans themselves, Hermann der Cherusker
challenged the Roman people not in its beginnings like other kings and leaders, but in the peak of its empire.
Approximately 1400 years later, in a land called Mnisota Makoce, indigenous peoples would stand again to
combat the New Rome. Just as the Chatti, the Cherusi, and the Marsi tribes fought against an invading imperial
army, our People, the Dakota Oyate, fought against our own invading empire and defended our own way of life.
And once again, members of the Chatti, the Chersci, and the Marsi would be present for this battle, but only
after their own assimilation. The descendants of those who had once defended their lands against a colonial
power so many centuries before would decide to dishonor their ancestors, betray their heritage, and ally
themselves with the New Rome.
The citizens of New Ulm, descendants of Hermann der Cherusker, Uniter of Tribes, Defier of Rome, Resistor
of Empires, would become perpetrators of colonialism against those who should have been their relations in a
common struggle.
And so, the Dakota resistance came with much pain. Our women and children were force-marched to
concentration camps before exile from our homelands. It was through the town of New Ulm that GermanAmericans threw rocks and harassed these captives. Boiling water was poured from windows onto passing
elders and children. One young man was even pulled from the procession and severely beaten by the mob. His
older brother was killed in the process of saving him.
Tribute is rightfully paid to Hermann, and two statues commemorate his resistance. One on a hill near the site of
the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Another, 4,000 miles away in the town of New Ulm, in the heart of Dakota
Territory.
While it is an honor that a tribute to a hero of liberation stands amongst us, it is both sad and ironic that the
fields next to him stand empty, where a monument to the successful defenders of Dakota homeland should have
stood had another people remembered their own tribal past. That emptiness is now only filled with the painful
memories of the loss of our homeland, the genocide of our people, and the betrayal of descendants of a far-away
tribe.
Tonight, we put out tobacco for all the descendants of Hermann der Cherusker, for the descendants of all who
stood with him, and for our own ancestors who continued their fight. We do this in hopes that these descendants
might remember the commonalities between our two peoples and our two struggles.
It is up to you to also honor those ancestors and to continue their fight. Stand with us, as you stand with them,
and forever resist the New Rome.
In the Spirit of Hermann der Cherusker,
In the Spirit of Taoyateduta,
Unki tamakoce ka oni unkitawapi!
Anpao Duta dena unkiyepi
Granite Falls
206
Watershed
Nick
Twisted faces, crying out for lost history
Buried under years of thick white lies and textbook parchment
Parching the land, evaporating the tears and blood that saturate this soil
Eyes like deep wells now dried denied the right to cry
Lest mothers grieve for their children in this ongoing state of genocide
Lest children grieve for their mother
I wonder if our mouths can open wide enough to name whats been taken
Layers of ash and bone hold up pillars of conquest under concrete
Shuffling feet
Plugged into ipods dont touch the truth between slabs
Walkin tall so as not to step on cracks
Or feel dirt between toes
Cover the truth in a slick status quo
A layer of thick white construction between what was and what is
Still a thin layer that crumbles without constant maintenance
Twisted roots crying for air
Parched land sighing for water
Generations of tears not yet shed
Centuries of repression built up like a dam wall between power and its captives
Between colonized mind and liberated self
A thin shelf
Concrete erected vertical
Waiting to release the waters of grief, truth, and justice
Tears of dignified rage held up like a guillotine
Quivering with the anticipation of five hundred years
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Decolonizing Ourselves:
The True Face Behind Minnesotas History
Ly
One of Minnesotas more overtly colonialist institutions, the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) does not allow
the public access to the true history of how our fair cities came to be. In late July, several white people committed
to exposing the lies of Minnesotas official history attended a Civil War/ War of 1862 tour at the MNHS flagship
attraction Fort Snelling. The mere act of understanding the real history that we are all very much a part of is an
integral part of fostering change within our movements. If what we truly want to accomplish is revolutionary social
change, we must begin with these simple actions that foster a true story to be told. But what story was told at Fort
Snelling on that day?
The lead tour guide, Fort Snelling Program Manager Kevin Maijala, began the white settler narrative by talking
about the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Scott fought in the courts for his freedom from slavery under the premise
that he had lived at Fort Snelling from 1836-1840. During this time, the stolen land that would later become
Minnesota had not yet been incorporated as part of the U.S. Nowhere in the tour guides presentation on the case
did he condemn slavery, racism or white supremacy inherent in the founding of the state. He referred to Minnesota
as the frontier and basically in the middle of nowhere. Did he forget that this was the homeland of the Dakota
people, or did he choose to ignore their history on purpose?
After discussing the Dred Scott decision and, briefly, slavery at the fort (many people at the fort paid to have
servants, whom he admitted were black people shipped in by the U.S. government) the predominately white
tourist group visited the oldest standing structure at the fort, the round tower. Here Maijala told the tale of the brave
Minnesota men who fought and died for the glory of our country during the Civil War -- at Bull Run, Northern
Virgina and Gettysburg. Think of all the families in, say, Hastings, that would be forced to deal with that even
today, he says. Nowhere during the tour does he make an even vaguely similar statement about the families of
Dakota people killed by the U.S. troops during the same time period, many within the walls of Fort Snelling.
Leaving the fort proper, the tour wound down the hill into Fort Snelling State Park, towards a memorial of the
Sioux Uprising Sioux being a colonial term given to the Dakota during the beginning of their colonization.
Maijala stops halfway to discuss the genocide or as he tended to call it, the U.S. Dakota conflict. The war is a
really complex, painful topic which is never easy to talk about, he says. He calls it the most significant event in
Minnesota history and says it seriously affects the Dakota people even today. This is the closest he comes to speaking
the truth about the Dakota genocide. Still, he fails to mention yet again the fact that the Dakota were systematically
slaughtered in order to fulfill the standards of the state.
Maijala talks in general terms about the first treaties between the U.S. and the Dakota, saying they are as binding
as treaties today with other nations, and states that the native tribes held the same status as sovereign nations today.
The white truth-tellers in the group pointed out the fact that the treaties have never been upheld. Maijala becomes
defensive. They should have had legal standing, he says, but adds, Im talking about how they were established
and their purpose. He admits the U.S. did not live up to its treaty obligations. One of the truth-tellers mentions to
the amnesia-stricken Maijala that the purpose of the treaties, which were not actually ratified by a significant
representation of the Dakota people, was to control land. The tour guide deflects the statement, and says that the
208

Dakota used the treaties to reserve for themselves reservations.
Those reservations, however, comprise less than one tenth of one percent of the total land base of Minnesota.
Dismissing the groups concerns, Maijala grudgingly states, You come in with some prejudices that arent necessarily
true. I dont think you understand what the purpose of the program is.
(Apparently the purpose of the Fort Snelling tour program is to maintain the lie that the Dakota made the choice to
remove themselves from their ways of life. Up until last year it was illegal for Dakota to live in their homeland. Their
place of genesis is at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. The fort and many other monstrosities
were tactically placed there to trample out this powerful symbolism for the Dakota. They are still standing to this
day. Currently the Dakota people, despite the fact that they reserve[d] reservations for themselves under these
treaties with the U.S. do not have sufficient access to land and/or resources to maintain their livelihoods or
traditional ways of life. The fort is a constant reminder of the stronghold that exists against the Dakota people and is
a symbol of the colonization and ultimately the genocide of their nation).
Speaking of U.S.-Dakota relations, Maijala continue by stating that the assimilation [of the Dakota] is not talked
about enough. The U.S. worked to divide the Dakota into factions. After the treaty of 1958, the Dakota gave up
most of their northern lands, he says. Soon there was a drought and the Dakota were not receiving enough food.
The money that was supposed to go to them for food instead illegally went to traders. How that happened is long
and complicated, he said, glossing over the crimes of white settlers with those short, simple words. In 1862 many
Dakota were starving and angry, and in August, their payments were late. It seems logical that they would choose
this time to fight back and gain back their land, he says. But then, he skips over what actually happened during
the war to silence the Dakota dissent the forced marches, the slaughter of women and children, the tortures by
military men and common settlers alike --, saying that the conduct of war is less important than the end result. He
says several hundred military men were killed in addition to, an unknown number of Dakota. Thirty-eight of those
unknown Dakota were hanged in the largest mass hanging in U.S. history in Mankato, Minnesota although
hundreds more set for death were saved by the benevolent President Lincolns decree as if the murder of thirtyeight is itself pardonable simply because of the pardon of others.
The tour guide then states that while the men were sent to Davenport, Iowa, the women were held at Fort Snelling. They were continuously attacked by whites, Maijala states. After being challenged that what actually occurred
was rape, he argues that the word rape is too strong to use in the presence of the children on the tour. Later, when
asked about the charges against the thirty-eight Dakota hanged in Mankato, he says they were tried for, among other
things, raping children. This failure to acknowledge the sexual violence committed by white men against Dakota
women at the fort furthers the colonial control between white and American Indian men. The mere fact that the
Dakota were tried and murdered under these pretenses but never in one case was a white man found guilty of such
a crime reiterates the cultural genocide that occurred during that winter of 1862. This connection was not made by
this self-proclaimed neutral tour guide.
The tour group then descended down the hill to the memorial for those who had died within the forts walls.
Currently, the commemoration of the Dakota genocide is centered alongside a parking lot just north of the
Mendota Bridge. The Minnesota Historical Society believes the actual location of the camp is underneath the asphalt
of the parking lot -- yet another symbolic blow against allowing the Dakota to heal from their traumatic history as a
people. The effects of genocide are still prominent amongst the Dakota people in Minnesota. To this day, a large
percentage of Dakota remain incarcerated, live below the poverty line, and/or suffer from substance abuse.
Compared to any other ethnic group in this state, Dakota people experience shorter life spans. Much like in the late
209
1800s, Dakota women today live in a world where their experiences with sexual and physical violence are not
legitimized; rather, they are used as a tool to further colonialist control over their identities.
The Dakota language has no word for a white ally. The one word the Dakota have for a white person is Wasicu (taker
of the fat). As white people living on Dakota land, we must begin to own this name and recognize that our aim must
be to enable the Dakota to find another word that can name us as allies. I am Wasicu and a 4th generation Swede. I
am a perpetrator of denial, apathy and guilt in regards to my own history of this land. I should be held as accountable as the MNHS, the U.S. government and the state of Minnesota in mine and my ancestors role in the Dakota
genocide. Despite our intentionality as white people in Minnesota, whether we are radicals, activists, or simply just
Minnesotans, I see myself and other white settlers as part of a larger culture of lies that helps to further feed the
thriving bones of this colonialist body.
The genocide that occurred in the 1860s has expanded well beyond the violent physical realm it has been
integrated into our modern cultural and historical perceptions as well. To this day, there is a war being waged on the
Dakota with the appropriation of their culture, language, spirituality and the root that started it all their land. If
we as white settlers wish to foster social change in our home of Minnesota, we must understand that the root of the
problem began with the colonization of this land. We have dug up, cultivated, raped and pillaged holy Indian land
all around us and it will take more than an afternoon of truth-telling to make reparations for the damage our
ancestors and ourselves have caused. We must begin to hold ourselves accountable to those that we have taken so
much from. To open lines of communication, to ask what we can do for them. To redress the crimes of genocide on
the Dakota, land reparations (of state, federal public and private land) must be made to the Dakota people. If we do
not understand this simple concept, giving back what has been stolen, we will never learn to go much farther
beyond the actions of those that pulled the lever on the largest mass hanging in U.S. history.
210
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Unsettling Ourselves:

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

texts and guides from:

Reflections and Resources

a sourcebook compiled by the Unsettling Minnesota collective

about the imagery

Cultural Appropriation: Beginning Reflections from a Settler Standpoint

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

In remembrance that this land is Dakota land,

Wicanhpi Iyotan Win and Scott DeMuth

-Wicanhpi Iyotan Win

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Unsettling Minnesota Points of Unity

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Desire to Belong: reflections as a

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

What is White Supremacy?

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

This is how it seems to me:

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality

Mirroring Colonial Power Structures in