HOW TO DECOLONIZE YOUR MIND

Decolonization is “a continuous process of anticolonial struggle. Image credit: *DOLLAR GILL* on Unsplash.

By CHANDRAKANT SHAH, MD

When I visited India in 2000 after a five-year hiatus, I spent a few days with my brother-in-law in Mumbai.

There, I witnessed something which perplexed my academic and social mind. My nephew’s wife, a woman in her late thirties, preparing lunch for the family, moved between the kitchen and the living room frequently with her mobile, keeping an eye on the television, watching the Mumbai stock market and trading!

As I had left India some forty years ago, I could not believe my eyes that a woman in my family would be trading in the stock market. What a palpable change!

This forced me to look around and I found a new kind of vibrancy in Indian society. Everywhere, people were self-assured, self-reliant and proud of their culture and heritage, even though many have adopted Western ways. Working with the Indigenous people in Canada, who were colonized just like people in India, I remembered the following statement made by Lord Macaulay in his address to the British Parliament on February 2, 1835:

“I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief, such a wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation which is her spiritual and cultural heritage and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become, what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

I realized that Indians in India were not only colonized in terms of their land, but the British Raj had successfully colonized their minds. I also realized how Macaulay’s principle of colonizing the mind was applied to the Indigenous Peoples in Canada by the British. Through treaties, residential schools, the Indian Act, the sixties scoop and our many administrative policies, we, the settlers, had collectively destroyed their culture, traditions, belief system, language, and connection with lands and in turn had colonized their minds. As they did not have written language, they had to depend on their oral culture.

The term decolonization, according to Indigenous scholars,* is defined as “a continuous process of anticolonial struggle that honours Indigenous approaches to knowing the world, recognizing Indigenous land, Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous sovereignty – including sovereignty over the decolonization process. I argue that decolonization is an ongoing process of becoming, unlearning, and relearning regarding who we are as researchers and educators and taking responsibility for participants”.

Thanks to a few resilient and visionary Indigenous People, some of the traditions and culture have been retained. For them to achieve the goal of decolonizing their minds and be a self-reliant proud people, we all will have to be their true allies.

While Indigenous prophecy says that to achieve this, it will take seven generations, I hope and pray that with the reconciliation efforts on the parts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, it is sooner!

* Denzin N. K. Lincoln Y. S., and Smith L.T. (2008) Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications

SENIOR MOMENT

HOW TO DECOLONIZE YOUR MIND