Decolonizing Post-Secondary Education
While Skoden has provided facts and information, the hope is that you also learned a great deal about yourself and your relationship to Indigenous people and land through this experience. We also hope you are taking away a desire to look at the ways we are all still impacted by colonization.
Colonization is not an event. It is a structure. It is not something that happened in the past. Colonization is a complex system that is currently working to negatively impact each and every one of us who live on these stolen lands. Colonization has led to the environmental destruction of the land, the attack on human lives, and the economic inequities experienced predominately by racialized people. It has caused, enforced, and protected acts of slavery and genocide of Indigenous People, Black People, and People of Colour. It is a local phenomenon and a global phenomenon. Colonization can be found on street names that honour white colonizers, in textbooks that wipe out Indigenous history, and in the dominating European powers that have planted themselves around the world. To deconstruct colonization, we must collectively engage in a process of decolonization.
Decolonization can mean different things to different people. For non-Indigenous people, the process of decolonization could mean interrogating your beliefs about Indigenous people and unearthing your responsibilities to local Indigenous communities. It requires a dismantling of power imbalances that uphold white superiority and dominance over Indigenous children, families, communities, and land. It means learning about and supporting Indigenous ways of being. It means showing up for Indigenous people when they fight for land back, for their rights to fish, for equitable healthcare free from discrimination, for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, for clean drinking water on reserve, for First Nations children to grow up safely at home, for closing the gap in Indigenous education, for no pipelines, and a myriad of other issues that Indigenous people across Turtle Island are fighting for.
Decolonization is for everyone.
