Oren Lyons is a faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Council of Chiefs, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) and a longtime international indigenous rights and sovereignty activist.
Accompanying article at ICTMN.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Colonial mindset doesn’t understand anything buy colonial mindset.
I was raised in the US, mostly in AZ (my dad was military), and there are always various indigenous tribes around that made me at least peripherally aware of other cultures. We lived overseas a couple of times growing up, which really highlighted the fact that not only did people speak differently, but actually thought differently.
I’m not sure how I didn’t grow up to be quite so blinkered (not that I don’t have my blindspots), but it’s mindboggling to me even as an insider, how people living here can be so…I don’t even know the words…voluntarily ignorant and actively learning avoidant.
I think the word you’re looking for is insular. America is founded on evil, any country founded on genocide is, and the insularity provided by the colonial-minded “American exceptionalism” provides one hell of a blinder for most people to hide behind.
In Canada, it was governmental policy to suppress and destroy aboriginal cultures and integrate all aboriginal people into white cultures, all, that is, who didn’t die in the process. We were proud that we didn’t have the bloody wars that the Americans did, but our approach was just as genocidal and racist.
As well, most of us whites have the same ignorance and insularity. It is only recently that we are learning anything other than the “noble savages” myths in school and that we are beginning to face what we occupiers have done to the Indigenous People of Canada. Before the last, say, 15 or 20 years, learning the truth was a private exploration of digging out resources and listening to survivors and others who knew the stories. For example, I am a Manitoban and only learned about what my provincial government did to the Sayisi Dene by forced removal in the mid 1950s to an inappropriate location where over a third died of starvation and disease directly from a Dene woman in the early 1990s, and promptly told the story to a bunch of other equally sickened, shocked, and ignorant white Manitobans. It’ wasn’t in any official Manitoba history we knew. I don’t know how to put links in here, but if you google “Sayisi Dene” and go the the Wikipedia article, that will start you on the trail.