OF COLONISED INDIANS

A traditionally-trained Chippewa Cree guy who used to stay with me said that 'Native Americans' refer to themselves as 'Indians'. It was just the white people who call them Native Americans. So now I refer to them when I can as Indians. And sometimes you will get taken to task for that by whites who think you are being disrespectful. It happened to me recently, from someone has a bit of Indian blood in them, but is very identified with that, even though they had never met an Indian until recently. No discussion was possible, she was fierce about it: saying 'Indian' was like using the 'n' word about black people.

Personally I'd rather call people by the name they call themselves, rather than one invented by guilty whites, and then adhered to dogmatically by an imaginary Indian.

Another word I'm wondering about is 'colonised'. In this case it refers to the dominant, conquering culture taking away the identity and culture of the conquered people and telling them who they should be in terms of the values of the dominant culture. Any process of telling people who they should be at a formative age is 'colonisation': an Indian teacher told me I had been colonised by my early boarding school experience.

Indians often need to go through a process of 'decolonisation' to reclaim their original culture. The word brings in the connotation of 'colonialism' as an unmitigated evil. There was nothing good, for example, about the British Empire in modern discourse, and academics who look for the good as well as the bad get shunned. As did Nigel Biggar for writing the book pictured below.

This may sound harsh, but 'colonisation' is where Indian-as-victim meets modern woke culture, which turns any number of people into victims, and demands that we as privileged oppressors bow down before them. Some Indians are in victim mode, some are not. The Dalai Lama could easily be in victim mode, but he never has been. He gets on with life, and does not attack the Chinese. It is not some form of 'denial'. He just refuses to bear a grudge and complain about what was a huge injustice, when to do so would be futile.

My Chippewa Cree friend told me it is often the warrior cultures amongst the Indians who go on and on about what happened to them, for it is a matter of wounded pride that they have been conquered.

But isn't colonisation what has happened throughout history, when one people conquered another? You'd better adapt to their culture - allow your mind to be colonised - or you will not flourish, you will be squeezed out. If Indians want to flourish, they had better adopt the white man's ways. It doesn't mean they can't also hold on to, and reclaim, their traditional ways: the conquering culture of the US is unusually liberal in that respect, by historical standards. It is great they can do so, for there is much in the traditional indigenous ways that we have forgotten, to our detriment in the modern world.

Even if you are not part of a conquered culture, you will be colonised: your culture will tell you, as a child, who you are. It may do that with greater or lesser degrees of liberalism, but tell you it will. It is not a victim thing, but a necessary thing that suits most people. Some of us may eventually find it to be a cage that we have to struggle our way out of, because we have something deeper of our own to find. But that is a minority thing, and that struggle for our own values, with opposition from the mainstream, can be exactly what we need to find them.

So yes, all of us may need to 'decolonise' our minds in some respects. The reclaiming of a sense of the sacred, for example, denied as it is by materialist atheism. But don't get into blame mode about it, or you will perpetuate the colonisation: victimhood easily becomes a religion in itself. That is why I think the current narrative about slavery is as much about stirring up ancestral grievances - from something that ended generations ago - as it is about justice. Think Dalai Lama.