Articles on Culture & Creativity.
As an individual peers through the lens of cultural reclamation, global powers, society, community, religion, spirituality and identity change.
Gabriel N Elizondo
As the environment continues to die at the hands of major corporations and techno-feudalism gives way to fascism in the modern world, entire swathes of populations are beginning to question the foundation of what they’ve accepted to be their world.
Masked men with guns, rising global temperatures, food shortages, human rights violations, a renewed zeal for open genocide, and the wide-spread adoption of extremist ideologies has led to physical manifestation of existential threats. These existential threats, readily seen across social media and digital channels, force individuals to question their previously lived status-quo views on the world, society, community, and themselves.
At the center of this inquiry lies the essence of an individual in society, their identity and how they have come to define who they are and what they stand for. These major questions of identity lead to a single intersection between oppressed populations and the colonizers in power.
Individuals of oppressed populations, specifically indigenous populations, have begun to reclaim their cultural narratives and indigenous identity from colonizer institutions that seek to keep their position of power in the modern world. All across North, Central, and South America, individuals have been actively seeking to unearth their ancestral lineages and reclaim their indigenous identities from colonizer narratives.
This particular shift in identity and perspective is relatively new in modern generations. Prior to the turn of the 20th century, older generations maintained the relative status quo due to a lack of information and communication across regions. Digital technology made access to accurate historical records readily available and opened communications across the world for indigenous populations to share experiences of systemic oppression.
For many in 21st century North America, this expansive effort has given rise to new ideas on how to move forward as a community, shifting the way society perceives indigenous populations, and how indigenous populations can reclaim the world that has been stolen from them for centuries. Younger, digitally native indigenous generations have been able to create global networks that share real time information on oppression, institutional violence, and any future attempts at stifling indigenous culture.
Major communications in indigenous cultures have led to a cultural zeitgeist shift with many of the older generations joining their younger counterparts in throwing off previously held belief systems. It is worth noting that older generations of indigenous and oppressed populations have been fighting since their youth and are now helping educate younger generations on how to reclaim their heritage, cultural narrative, and identity.
For many individuals who are part of oppressed populations, acknowledging their previously accepted compliance with colonizer powers creates a major decision in life: further submit to colonizer power or reconnect with their ancestral roots and reclaim what was stolen.
In the midst of a global existential threat, the oppressed have nothing to lose and everything to gain, colonizers get nervous, and the opportunity for change arises with cultural reclamation as the catalyst.
An individual’s proactive effort to understand, research, and reconnect with their ancestral indigenous lineage is at the heart of cultural reclamation. This process requires the individual to challenge their world view and take on the arguments that colonizer-dominant society will present in the face of reclamation. These challenges arrive in a variety of ways but are often embodied in the people an individual encounters day-to-day.
An assimilated family will dismiss the individual and attempt to reinforce colonizer-dominant culture and practices. This can be seen in cultural gaslighting, where family members imply the individual is taking things too seriously, that they are “getting carried away with fake news”, or that they are simply too sensitive to live in the modern world. This confrontation is a deeply rooted form of colonizer settlerism and can force the individual to choose between maintaining the colonizer status-quo within the family or breaking away from family “traditional” belief systems (colonizer systems) and accepting a different position in the familial structure, often being dismissed.
Close friends, both colonizer descendant and assimilated indigenous descendant, may challenge the individual’s process for cultural reclamation. Holding the same colonizer-narrative dismissal, these “friends” may partake in the same cultural gaslighting as family members. Additionally, “friends” may openly condemn the individual for challenging colonizer belief systems, claiming they’ve fallen for “trendy” movements or the “overblown social justice thing”. Once again, the individual must choose between assimilating into colonizer narratives or breaking apart from colonizer regulated people.
Social structures are the next major opposition for the individual who is reclaiming their cultural narrative. As the individual begins to notice the various ways colonizer narratives oppress indigenous populations, social norms become unacceptable. The individual will not be able to ignore prominent stereotypes, prejudices, biases, and will no longer participate in any of the institutions that actively work to maintain the colonizer narrative status quo. The individual faces another major shift in their daily lives, removing themselves from these particular brands, corporations, sports teams, and anything else that actively works to oppress populations through culture.
Each decision to abstain from colonizer-narratives and challenge colonizer belief systems requires an in-depth understanding of evidence-based historical facts, the understanding of institutional power, and the fundamental ways colonizers leverage economic systems to produce disproportionate positions of power over oppressed populations. These arguments require the individual to research, learn, and retain an immense amount of historical facts and evidence to invalidate colonizer arguments that are based on widely accepted lies. To challenge a colonizer fact (or widely accepted lie), individuals are required to prove their point on a myriad of fronts that would otherwise not be required in a colonizer-aligned perspective.
Cultural reclamation requires an individual to learn about and acknowledge the various ways European-centric power has shaped their culture and how it’s played a major role in their lives. Each region of indigenous oppression has their own story of colonization and assimilation.
This article is exploring those experiences of indigenous cultures in the Americas and focuses on that experience. However, it is worth noting that on a global scale, indigenous populations have endured their own unique forms of torture at the hands of colonizing empires and should be explored thoroughly out of respect and unity for the suffering endured.
For individuals in America, colonizer power would be labeled “white” culture and comes in the form of major cultural institutions rooted in colonial settlerism and nationalism. For individuals throughout Latin America this form of oppression comes in the caste system of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. For the American desert southwest, these two systems overlap, creating a dual system of racial discrimination from American culture, and cultural discrimination from Spanish culture in Mexico.
As the individual explores the various aspects of their world through the lens of cultural reclamation, global powers, society, community, religion, spirituality and their own sense of self begins to shift.
The perception of how nations engage in conflict with each other or their own population reveals the nature of the colonizers in power. What may have been “just another war” becomes a series of violent abuses of power that result in genocide and death. The individual relates to these victims and feels a personal connection to the suffering being shown across social media platforms. Scrolling past such atrocities no longer becomes an option and the weight of community emerges in the mind of the individual.
The individual’s society takes on a different set of parameters as they acknowledge the disparity between oppressed populations and colonizer populations. The inequity of institutions becomes apparent in the way a society’s systems are created to obstruct and discourage oppressed populations from becoming educated, financially independent, socially active, and prone to questioning colonizer narratives. The individual’s sense of belonging shifts and will require a new definition and standards to uphold their reclamation process.
What may have been a community that was relatively comfortable for the individual may shift during their reclamation process. Each realization of colonizer oppression brings new insights into how societies and communities engage with each other and the individual. As the individual becomes more educated on colonizer narratives, institutions, and tools of oppression, communities take on new depths of oppression or empowerment.
An individual may have been immersed in a community that proactively holds down oppressed populations, or passively ignores cultural oppression. Once cultural reclamation has begun for the individual, they cannot look away, ignore, or participate in oppressing other populations. The realization of how colonizer narratives operate forces the individual to confront the mechanisms of oppression.
An individual may discover new communities that actively defend and advocate for oppressed populations. These new communities bridge the gap from established actions to the individual who is looking to initiate change beyond the self. These new communities offer support, education, advocacy, and acceptance of decolonization and cultural reclamation, creating space for the individual to be proud of the changes they’ve decided to establish in their world view.
All of these major shifts in perspective lead to the evolution and reclamation of cultural identity for the individual. Self-views (identity) changes as the individual begins to evolve from their deeper understanding of the previously mentioned factors. These shifts come with a new set of identity dilemmas for the individual as they must decide what to accept and reject from their own perspectives moving forward in society.
Cultural reclamation leads to conflict in both the internal narrative of the individual and the external narrative in which they live their lives. For the individual, their internal perspective evolves with every insight brought on by reclaiming their cultural identity from colonizer narratives. The external world continues to operate on colonizer narratives, aligned with colonizer power. This creates a perpetual tension that arises in social conflicts that may become personal over time.
Internal narratives are how an individual sees themselves in their world. It is the story in which they are the main character operating on behalf of their internal wants and needs. This story is what they tell themselves, positioning their place among society from an internal viewpoint.
Shifts during cultural reclamation creates a heightened awareness of the individual’s position in society, how they are perceived, and how they are understood within their daily interactions. This new sense of self creates tension and conflict as they navigate a newfound depth of cultural responsibility and advocacy for themselves and their ancestral roots. For the individual, this internal narrative changes, challenging the way they once saw themselves in society and forces conflict by repositioning their sense of identity in their lives.
For example, an individual may have never questioned why a group of co-workers felt so comfortable making racist jokes around them. Once the internal narrative shifts, the individual has become a different “main character” in their internal story, and this change exposes a new perspective on how they see themselves at work and around their co-workers. This creates an internal conflict as the individual’s sense of self changes.
External narratives are how the individual perceives the outside world perceiving them. This social awareness creates a new set of conflicts in which the individual has to choose to speak out against colonizer stereotypes and narratives, challenge status-quo thinking about their ancestral roots, and take on a position that asserts a correct, evidence-based perspective on society.
Returning to the example above, the individual may feel empowered by their cultural reclamation to challenge their co-workers behavior and comfort with racist jokes. This choice to advocate on behalf of an oppressed population, or themselves, creates external conflict by bringing their new position out into the world. This external conflict shifts the way co-workers perceive the individual, creating a new external narrative.
These new dimensions of self and society, that derive from internal and external conflicts, force the individual to realize the difference between cultural resistance and cultural reconciliation. An individual must find a way to reconcile their sense of self during cultural reclamation but find a point of contention once the reconciliation process turns outward towards society.
An individual might attempt to reconcile what they’ve learned about their world, the colonizers in power, and the impacts in which colonization has had on their lives with their growing reclamation of identity. However, the dilemma that results from this process manifests in a rising confusion within the individual. If the individual attempts to maintain their ties to colonial narratives, choosing to accept the injustice of the colonizer institution, while at the same time attempting to find a place for the evidence-based truths of oppression, they reach a fundamental social dilemma.
The eventual conclusion is the same for any oppressed population: there is no reconciliation available. One cannot willingly accept the injustice of a colonial force and maintain their ancestral connections to identity. One must choose between colonizer narrative and reclaiming their own cultural narrative.
Cultural reclamation leads to resistance against colonizer forces, institutions, and colonizer narratives because of the evidence required to establish the process. Every decision the individual makes to exercise their own autonomy over their understanding of the colonizer world and their place within it is a form of resistance to colonizer narratives.
This resistance comes in a variety of forms including learning one’s ancestral language, taking up ancestral belief systems, honoring ancestral heritage by practicing traditions, and speaking out against colonizer institutions and narratives that threaten reclamation or attempt to inhibit oppressed populations fighting for their place in a colonized world.
Cultural reclamation entails accepting the ongoing process of learning about one’s own history of oppression and discovering a unity between themselves and all other oppressed populations. The universal truth that scares colonizers is the unforgivable history of genocide and fear colonizers have leveraged against the world for centuries
The understanding of this power dynamic, its attempted justification and rationalization, and the destruction it caused, does not escape the colonizer’s comprehension. Colonizers fundamentally know and actively participate in oppression for the sake of power with a marked sense of desperation.
Power structures are breaking down as the world reaches its threshold for colonizer-narrative greed and injustice. The results are further expansions of movements that seek cultural reclamation and the rejection of colonizer-backed “reconciliation” for their crimes. Once again, colonizers are attempting to escape the consequences of their actions.
Individuals who have reclaimed their cultural narrative and identity from colonizer power will not allow colonizer forces to escape these consequences. Specifically, individuals who have reclaimed their cultural narratives refuse to forgive, forget, or allow colonizers the benefit of attempting to correct their centuries-long injustices. This is why colonizer forces are terrified of a growing movement in cultural reclamation. Individuals educated on the atrocities of the past will not let them ruin their future.
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