In the End “The Hope of Decolonization”

Abstract

For hundreds of years, the peoples from Europe who have raped and pillaged their way through Indigenous nations have perfected not just the instruments and practices of dispossession but also a whole archive of doctrines and rewritten histories that purport to justify what they have done. They are in fact what may be termed “mythtakes,” deliberately concocted falsehoods to justify a process that is actually unjustifiable. Indigenous Peoples still live with the fact and practice of those mythtakes. To decolonize is to recognize that colonization is a deceptive lie as much as a crushing oppression. However, in the end, decolonization simply means having faith that we can still be brave enough to change an imposed reality. In that quest, there is always hope in knowing that whenever our tīpuna fought or necessarily adapted to survive in the darkest days of oppression, the resistance was never futile and the adaptation was never acquiescence. A first step in rekindling that hope is perhaps to be clear about what colonization was, and is.