When talking about US racism the words colonialism and assimilation are often used interchangeably.  Fair enough.  After all, the goal of State colonialization is that people, all people,  integrate State values as their own.  Oppressed and privileged alike learn to accept US ideology, laws, values, and religion as if they are natural.  Colonialism is the practice of assimilation—subtle and forced.

Thankfully, over the last decade and a half the conversation of decolonization has gained traction.  Many have written on decolonizing culture, language, and laws.  Yet, decolonization is more than a matter of legal and structural justice.

Decolonization is a movement toward natural.  A return to nativity.  When we understand the State has a hand in the framing of our mindset, we have the ability to reclaim our natural identity.  Allowing body and soul to reconnect with nature and the ancients.

Natural identity, our connection with nature and the ancients cannot be found in place of commodity and profit.  Little wonder a people who have been taught profit, savings, bigger is better, never making mistakes as virtuous, struggle with knowing the natural world of their birth. 

To decolonize is to move our mind and soul toward the native.  To know the fullness of life in the space around us.  Whether our space is urban or rural, decolonizing breaks down frameworks that have hidden the natural and normal from our eyesight and hearing.

Nativity calls us to recognize who we are in this moment is not who we were at birth.  As a babe we were more than happy as long as we had adequate food, shelter, companionship, health, and love.  Yet, even if we were guaranteed adequate food, shelter, companionship, health, and love for the remainder of our lives, how many of us would give up profit, cars, phones, malls, movies, world travel, restaurants so others might have the same?

Decolonization and the restoration of natural identity lies in our ability to recognize native, to know the natural, and to know nature.  A path toward that end is living toward an aesthetic of beauty.  To engage our place, urban or rural, as kin.  As one who occupies place, bell hooks talks about this aesthetic as “a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming.”  Learning the life of place, especially non-human life, is to know beauty and wellbeing in ways we have forgotten.

Deepening relationship with our place allows us the beauty of recognizing our ancestors.  To know wind’s voice in the neighborhood, barrio, pueblo, valley, canyon, block and recognize its relationship with buildings, sidewalks, trees, grass, mesas, plateaus, streams, creeks, ponds, deer, cattle, rabbit, hawk, bluebird, beetle, worm is to become place.  When we find kinship with place we begin to inhabit space as ourselves.  Done well is to dwell in place as ancestor.

Though decolonization is needed for physical wellbeing today.  And though it is required to have a just system that serves all our siblings.  Decolonization is also a first step toward becoming whole and well in a way we have forgotten.