Colonization and Me
I am not ready to “decolonize.” Neither are you.
If you want to know why not, read this essay:
If I am not going to decolonize, then what?
Although I know I am not ready to leave Wisconsin (yet), I still want to question and interrupt my ongoing involvement in the colonization project.
While I know it is impossible, I wish I could go back in time and somehow stop the colonization of the Americas by European settlers. I imagine what it might be like to travel back in time to the 1400s and visit Wisconsin during that time, before everything changed.
What would it be like to meet the people who were here on this land? What would it be like to see the skies of Wisconsin darkened by the seasonal migrations of the passenger pigeon, the rivers full of fish, and the prairies home to millions of elk and bison? What if the Europeans who came into this place had arrived as respectful visitors and not as settlers?
How are we still reenacting the colonization narrative? If we can imagine interrupting colonization way back then, why couldn’t we do it now? I think I am ready to try to stop colonizing, but to actually “decolonize” would mean leaving for Europe, which I am not ready to do, so whatever I might do would not be decolonization.
I know the arrogance of a white European-ancestry guy presuming to write about the impacts of colonization. I know I write about it as if it is something new, but of course the impacts have been obvious from the beginning to anybody negatively affected by colonization. I guess I presume to write about it because it has not been obvious to me. My position in life has shielded me from the worst impacts of colonization, and I have been told implicitly that I should not question the colonization scheme, because I benefit from it. This is a half-truth that allows some people to benefit excessively and keeps most of us from questioning that system. I want to question the ongoing colonization project to stop harm and I encourage other white folks to do the same.
First, Return Land To Indigenous People
I don’t own land, but I do live on land that was taken by the US Government during the colonization project. We almost all do. A friend recently wrote on a list serve about his own process of coming to terms with the fact that the land that he has worked so hard to acquire and tend for over thirty years was originally taken as part of colonization. He raised the open question of what to do with that knowledge. It is not easy to imagine giving it back. For many rural folks, selling or passing on their land is their one shot at retirement or giving their kids a chance to afford to continue on the farm. And why should one person give land back, if no one else is doing it? We can all rationalize keeping the land.
I also know at least one Native person who suggests that we white people should seriously consider going home to Europe en masse. I can imagine the chaos and trauma of that sort of mass deportation. It would be a disruption on the scale of the original colonization; people only do that sort of thing if they are forced to. It would have been better not to colonize in the first place, but we don’t seem ready to give it all back, and we certainly aren’t ready for a mass return to Europe.
Short of actual total decolonization, I do think we white people could work towards giving as much land back as we can. Land back is a real goal.
The Colonizer/Taker Mindset
We “settlers” can interrupt ongoing colonization, whether it is people taking land, abusing treaty rights, or simply dominating a space that should and could Indigenous.
Colonization seems to be baked into the white American mindset, a mindset that I grew up with and still carry. I don’t think that I ever really questioned the concept of colonization until maybe in the last ten years. I’m ready to question it.
As a kid, one of my favorite games was Risk. In Risk, my friends and I would amass armies in countries on a world map and then do battle for world domination. When I would win a battle, I would move my armies into the country and use it as a staging ground for the next attack. Although it is a game, I don’t think Risk is that far off of the colonist mindset that pervaded my early thinking about the work of nations. If your country conquers or buys land, then you can do what you want with that land because you now own it. Wars are fought over access to land, like in Risk, and to the victor go the spoils. To question colonization would mean to play a different game, but what would that look like?
If I were to go back and try to stop the colonization, how would I do it?
What would have to be different to make the negative effects of settler colonization disappear? Was it inevitable as soon as the Americas were discovered? What would the world be like, if instead of conquering people and taking the land, the European explorers had set up relationships of mutual trade? What if first contact had come during a time when science had already discovered how to prevent some of the diseases that killed upwards of 90 percent of the original inhabitants of the Americas? What if Native people had had access to the type of weapons to make it a fair fight? What if the concept of private ownership of land never developed? What if European people had lived sustainably in the places where they were born and raised, and didn’t feel the need to go and take the land and resources of other people? There start to seem to be too many “what-ifs,” and it starts to sound impossible.
I question the term “settler” to describe colonists. I understand it, but I think it misses the mark. When I settle into something, it means I am going to stay there for a long time. But the way that the colonists treat the land and resources is more like they/we believe that there will always be more of it.
If a person were to really settle, then they would try to figure out how to live within the boundaries of the resources that are available in the place. A better word for this mindset might be “Taker.” Taker fits better with my games of Risk. I win a battle and I take possession of the land and use it to grow my army. Wealth has been built by converting the taking of land and resources into money.
In the Taker mindset, wealth is needed to build armies, which are needed to take more land and resources and defend the land you already have. In the Taker world, the faster you can convert land into wealth, the safer you are as a country. Greed is good in the Taker world, because it creates safety.
Another game I played a lot as a kid was Monopoly. In that game, owning property is key to victory and growing wealth. There are endless debates about strategy in Monopoly, but you could never win without owning property. The game is predicated on ownership ensuring security.
When people talk about the “American Dream,” they are often talking about getting to a place where we own property. People will take on incredible debt on the gamble that their property will grow in value, and for many generations that has been a good bet. It has been such a good bet that one of the key ways that racism has functioned has been to exclude BIPOC from the benefits of property ownership. Beneath all of this focus on ownership is a hope that by extracting value from property, we will be safe and protected in times of need or crisis. The extraction of value and security from property is an extension of the Taker mindset that has been applied to the whole colonial enterprise from the beginning.
My friend Wendy describes the Taker mindset like a “smash-and-grab” robbery. In a smash-and-grab, you break the window and take as much as you can before moving on. What is left behind is an absolute mess, but you don’t care because you have moved on. When we look at American history through the smash-and-grab lens, things seem to line up.
American Takers
Early colonists extracted wealth through fish and fur and slavery. The cod fishery in the north Atlantic and the fur business in colonial times were both non-sustainable extractive business models. Slavery relied on forced labor and treated people as property. Owners got rich, and in many cases, moved on.
In Wisconsin, the fur business gave way to other extractive industries of lead, iron, and copper mining, old growth lumbering, and wheat farming. Wrapped up in these industries was also the policy of extracting wealth from the ownership of property. The government gave land to railroad companies, which sold the land to grow their wealth and build privately owned railroads. The government also gave land to veterans, homesteaders, and universities to reward them and grow the economy. American Takers take land, people, and resources and convert them into wealth, and then move on.
A piece of this that is key to understand is that after the smash-and-grab robbery, the thief moves on. By definition, they/we are not connected to the place or people they/we are exploiting. In our most recent modern day smash-and-grabs, the mining companies, drilling companies, and pipeline companies are almost all foreign owned. Big box stores and agricultural monopolies also come into rural communities to extract wealth. They are not from the place where they colonize, and they can move on once the wealth is gone. Moving on and disconnection is key to the Taker mindset. I think the disconnection in the Taker mindset might be emotionally linked to the original loss of home and community in the places in Europe where people emigrated from.
Disconnection Is Necessary For Short Term Profit
The Industrial Revolution and changes in the availability of food and medicine meant that populations in Europe shifted significantly from 1500 to 1900. There was a growth of rural populations and the beginning of mechanization that drove people off the land and into cities and emigration. There was a series of wars that displaced millions of people. All of this change effectively ended a settled agricultural peasant culture that had been in place for a long time.
The people who emigrated were one or two generations away from being dispossessed of their own connection to land and community. They left Europe looking for safety and security, and they were able to find it by claiming wealth through extraction of resources and private property, or working for people who had that wealth.
It is interesting to me that property has the most monetary value when you sell it or sell the resources on the land. In terms of short term profitability, the Taker mindset wins. This applies to hedge funds that take over corporations and fire people and sell off the assets. In the short term, liquidating assets provides shareholder value. Farmers in our area have felt a strong pull to lease to frac sand companies, who offer huge sums to radically alter the land and extract the sand underneath.
Governments do this too. In Indiana, when then Governor Mike Pence had a budget shortfall, he sold the Toll Roads to a Saudi corporation, which promised to do a better job of keeping the roads up. It was a short term win, but in the long term it transferred a public good into private hands. Short term wealth extraction makes future people, or the people who are left behind, pay.
True Connection Fights the Taker Mindset
Our culture penalizes people who do not extract wealth from property. It makes it hard to hold onto property if you don’t use it in some way. In my own life, I remember when our family decided to log the forest where we had our extended family’s cabin. The annual property taxes were so much that we decided to liquidate the asset of the forest to cover the expense of having a cabin. It was sad to me, but it felt necessary to our family. Several years ago, we sold the property, partly because not enough of us were going there to make it financially worth it to pay the taxes and expenses to maintain it. We moved on.
I think the colonist mindset is tied to the ability to move on after wealth has been extracted. Paradoxically, one way to challenge the Taker mindset is to give up the idea of being able to move on, and instead start treating a place like a home. For example, I think many people (of privilege) imagine that if there are impacts of climate change, that they/we could just move to a safer place, that if coastal areas flood, we could move to higher ground, or if droughts get worse, we could move to a place with more rain. But what if we couldn’t move? Then we might be more interested in stopping climate change in the first place.
A Relationship Model Of Interacting
This past fall we invited several local Native Americans to educate us about whose land we are on. This was a humbling experience and I am grateful to our teachers. One of the lessons I learned was that each of our teachers focused on relationship.
The focus on relationship included human relationships, like asking about how we were connected through mutual friends and places and organizations. It also included a focus on our relationship to the plants and animals of our place. Meeting with each of our Indigenous experts was like spending a period of time outside of the Taker mindset that looks at the land as a source of resources to be converted into money. It was a shift in the center of gravity of our value systems.
“Your Wants Are Affecting Our Needs”
One of our teachers asked us to consider how our wants are affecting her people’s needs, and she used the example of a mine that opened in a sacred place to her people in Northern Michigan. The mine extracts minerals needed for our cell phones, among other uses. She asked us to look at how we are complicit in the extraction that is done in the name of satisfying our wants.
I don’t want to say that our Native teachers were magic or anything like that. It was good for us to get to know them as people during the planning process and see our connectedness and our shared struggles. They are people just like us. But I do want to point to the way that they presented a different worldview than the Taker mindset. I know that I continue to hold onto my own Taker characteristics, even as I want to remove colonization from my mind and actions.
The Emotional Work Challenging Colonizer Patterns
The essence of their worldview is on the other end of a continuum from the Taker mindset. Few among us are uniquely Taker. During the space of a day or an hour, I know that I can move around on the continuum, but I also know that I am closer to the Taker mindset than I like to acknowledge.
Challenging the Taker mindset is a process, not a destination, and it will have to be based in self-acceptance and emotional work. I think that the colonial Taker mindset is based in fear and insecurity. That insecurity might go all the way back to the initial dispossession of our ancestors having to leave home and community in Europe.
The Indigenous folks who came to teach us embodied a connection to community and place that spoke to the strength and safety that comes from being part of an interdependent community, even one as affected by trauma as most of the Indigenous communities here have been. The interdependence is not just between people, but also between people and the land, and the plants and animals of that land. That is a different way to measure wealth and a different way to face fear.
Treating This Place Like Home
All of this discussion entirely skirts the issue of decolonization, which would mean a significant rematriation/repatriation of this land.
In response to one of my recent essays, a friend told me about a conversation they had with one of their Native friends. The friend basically said that Native people have been waiting and wanting white people to go home to Europe. It hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t look like we are decolonizing any time soon, and since we seem intent on staying, the Native friend suggested we act like it. That hit me.
We, white people, are still acting like we are ready to move on. Our first goal should be to give back to the descendants of the original inhabitants significant land and access to resources. After that, a second goal could be to treat the places we are living as if they were going to be our homes for many generations.
We come home to the place where we live. That means a deep dive into the plants and animals native to our places. It means practicing a type of farming that improves the soil, air, and water. It also means becoming familiar with the culture and stories of the humans who have lived in our place for a long time. There is wisdom in the experience of a place over time. We get to listen to the elders in our community.
This process of coming home might mean both listening to the voices of the white people who have been here for several generations, as well as listening to the Indigenous people who have been here millennia. We may actually need to learn another language to come to truly understand this place, because indigenous languages evolved in this place, and languages inform how people think. This means deep personal observation of the land, as well as paying attention to scientists and farmers.
I recently listened to a white midwestern author named Sarah Smarsh speak to a group of farmers about the idea of coming home. She speaks to the way that modern life has set people up to believe in a binary world of things like good versus evil, wealth versus poverty, American versus immigrant, Black versus white, and urban versus rural. This binary worldview sets people up to feel like they don’t belong.
Sarah Smarsh describes herself as a “homecomer.” She has lived much of her life in a place where she has felt excluded from so many of the communities she was connected to. Her journey has been one of coming home to a sense of connection to place and people, and it is through that sense of connection that she sees a way forward. Her podcast features interviews with people through the lens of coming home.
Replacing the Taker Mindset
We need new paradigms and new games to go with those new paradigms. There are board games out there that are not about domination, “Taking,” and ownership. I think about Dungeons and Dragons as an example of a cooperative quest-based game (although there is still some domination and conquering). There are plenty of new card games that are out there too.
We need ways to imagine a present and future outside of the taker mindset, and that also means new stories. The old American story centered on a rugged individual. But that rugged individual never actually did anything alone. They were surrounded by people who supported them, and they were buoyed by extracting resources from people and the land. We need a new set of stories and heroes. The new stories will get to focus on connections. Some of the new stories are actually the old stories, the stories that are counter to the Taker myth.
We get to imagine a way forward through the multiple crises that we face that creates a new/old concept of wealth through relationship. We can also remove the taker mindset from our personal relationships. We can find evidence of the colonial mindset in the patriarchy. Traditional male domination mirrored the idea of the Taking and the ownership of land. We can reframe the idea of wealth in personal relationships through connection and mutual respect.
I think of this process as deeply tied to things like the Transition Town movement or the anti-climate change movement. Both of these are about community solutions for living sustainably and shrinking our carbon footprint. Most of the ways we use carbon are linked to the emotional distress tied to the Taker mindset.
If we adjust our minds, we will be more ready to accept the community level solutions to climate change, and less locked into a pursuit of individual comfort and the false security of ownership and domination.
Sovereignty
It must be noted that a possible opposite of colonization is something called sovereignty. Sovereignty can be defined in many ways, but I see it as a sort of community level sense of respect, self-determination, and liberation that reaches down to the personal. We can treat Indigenous people as members of sovereign nations. We can look to our personal relationships and recognize the sovereignty of each person. We can encourage acts of economic sovereignty in our communities.
I think of every other liberation struggle, and it is hard to find a time when people in the dominant position willingly gave up power. I recognize my own place on the Taker continuum, and I can see that it will be hard for me to adjust my own mind and actions, especially if I am thinking in terms of dominance and ownership.
This Work Is Liberation Work
I can see that my own liberation is linked to this work. I can see that the global colonization scheme is now beginning to impact white Americans like me more and more. People from other countries are buying up American farmland. I have already talked about how multinational corporations are effectively colonizing rural areas and extracting wealth. These corporations are continuing the smash-and-grab, only now it is white people who are also being affected by polluted air and water, climate change, and reduced access to goods and services.
We, white people, need to see solidarity in this fight. There is a chance for solidarity, if we see that for others to be sovereign does not necessarily interfere with our own sovereignty. Our liberation does not depend on the oppression of others. In fact, our own liberation and sovereignty is deeply connected to the sovereignty of others.
We white people are mostly the descendants of dispossessed emigrants. We generally rely on money, our jobs, our property, and our stuff for safety and security. This is a bucket with a hole in the bottom. It makes us crave more and more in order to fill our perceived needs and wants. This need for more and more fuels the extractive economy and the continued Taker mindset.
To counteract this, we need to give up Taking, and sit with the discomfort, fear, and insecurity that comes with giving it up. But we don’t need to get left out in the cold. Instead, when we let go of the colonist mindset, we can embrace relationship, connection, and sovereignty. This includes relationship to our own families, friends, and coworkers, relationship to the place where we live and the plants and animals of that place, relationship to the people who live around us and, only if they are willing, to the Indigenous people who have the “original instructions” of how to live in our place.
While we absolutely can take on our own settler colonist patterns of thought and action, we also need to continue to support actual, Indigenous-led efforts to get land back and decolonize.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-decolonization-is-and-what-it-means-to-me
