I Need Your Help! Let’s Decolonise Together!
Let’s create a living, growing article together on decolonising our minds!
What is this about?
This project is about having a growing list of words to help us rethink, relearn, and rediscover some of our vocabulary and worldview through a decolonial lens.
I hope to show that all of us colonised bodies who are finding our path outside of our colonised selves and histories are experts in decolonisation. Decolonisation exists in lived and living experiences, not ivory towers. It is an active thinking and DOING exercise. I implore you to not only read, but enact changes, from the list. If you would like to make an entry, please leave a comment! My ultimate dream for this project is to share an ever-updating list of words and associated thought exercises in different languages, from different perspectives, from which we can all learn from.
How does it work?
Below is a list I started and words/thought exercises that I thought may help to provoke unlearning. Feel free to add to an existing word or suggest new ones. To add an entry, you may either leave a comment and a link (for me to credit you) or send an email to bowiekung@gmail.com.
In your entry, you may write a few sentences, include a quote from someone, a photo, a video, a poem, etc. Ultimately, it’s up to you! I don’t want to dictate how entries should be written; a creative, collaborative, diverse process is decolonising!
Let’s decolonise our minds together! How do you read these words?
B
Borders. Nature’s borders look like mountain ranges, rivers, cliffs, where a beach ends and the ocean begins. Human’s borders are political and imaginary. Colonised continents have straight lines that divide states and countries. Colonial and neo-colonial governments dictate immigration laws.
K
Knowledge. How do we determine the kind of knowledge we value? Whether it is knowledge produced in a university? Published in a (text)book? What about oral history, indigenous stories, ‘folklore’, lived experiences, your own experience? Is it knowledge if it’s not been proven in a double-blind randomised study, peer-reviewed, not published in a major English journal?
L
Land. A source of all life. How can land be sold? How much does life cost?
Z
Zoo. During September of 1906, Bronx Zoo kept a young African named Ota Benga in an iron cage as an exhibition.
N
Native. What does it mean to be native? Writing about Turtle Island (now known as Canada and USA), Robin Wall Kimmerer asks ‘can a nation of immigrants… become native, to make a home?’
‘For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.’
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
V
Value.
P
Private.
Property.
People.
Progress.
Power.
C
Community.
Commons.
F
Freedom. Our society feeds us an illusion of freedom. For example, we get to choose what brand of ketchup to buy, but in reality it’s all made of the same ingredients — high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavours, and food colourants. In nature, every being’s freedom is limited by the amount of resources (space, food, water, air, etc). Is it such a good thing to have unchecked freedom? Author Juan Solano Abadía poses an interesting thought exercise on freedom.
‘Imagine a room with a certain number of individuals, where each of them is inside a balloon and all the balloons are of the same size. Then, each balloon is progressively inflated with the same amount of air, all of them increasing equally in size, until they occupy all the available space in the room. If we consider that the air inside each balloon is the freedom of each individual and that the room is a finite community, we can then visualise how the freedom of each individual is limited, both by the freedom of the other individuals (inflated balloons) and by the size of the community (room).’
— Juan Solano Abadía, Sapiens? The Other Face of Humanity, Translated from Spanish
G
Gratitude.
Gender.
Gift.
Growth. Growth requires energy and resources. What does growth mean to us? Endless growth is malignant.
E
Economy.
Elder vs. Elderly.
Energy.
Extraction.
S
Success.
Self-compassion.
H
Healing.
Health.
Y
Yield.
M
Medicine.
Migration.
I
Immigration.
Individual.
D
Death.
Development.
X
Xenophobia.
A
Anthropocene.
Anthropocentrism.
R
Relations.
Race.
Q
Question.
T
Truth.
Teaching.
W
Worth.
O
Origins.
U
Unlearn.
Ugly.
J
Judgment.
Justify.
Justice.
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