Decolonize Me

As mothers are wont to do, mine has shared the news of this blog far and wide to friends and acquaintances.  An old colleague of mom's, an Indigenous woman named Mary, responded by sharing a poem that she felt to be a good metaphor for colonization: The grizzly bear is huge and wild.   He has devoured the infant child.  The infant child is unaware that it has been swallowed by a bear.   I sat with this for a long time and it has woven its way in and out of my thinking for a week. In her correspondence, Mary also wondered if the child could ever be reconstituted.  So, if they were rescued from the bear's belly and restored to the world of humans, could the child be put back together again despite the effects of bite marks and digestive fluid?  Would they ever see the world in the same way before they were eaten up?  Would it differ if the child had been inside the bear for just a few minutes?  What about a year, or ten years, or even near...

  I've decided to do a little more work today digging in to whiteness, especially how it is reflected in the higher education system where I work.  The image here shows the institution that became the model for higher education in colonized Turtle Island: Cambridge University (King's College, to be precise). The photo is from a visit I made to Cambridge in 2011 when I was giving a conference presentation in a nearby town.  I remember feeling a kind of buzz there, like the reality of being in close physical proximity to this university made me an elite. I felt special just looking at the highly manicured lawn.  I felt like I could belong there--like it wouldn't be a stretch for me to become an academic in these hallowed halls if I wanted to.  The sensations I experienced were optimism, motivation, potential, and possibility.   At that point, I don't think I had considered the myriad ways the university system, based on what originated in Cambridge, had ...

It occurred to me during a discussion with a colleague just now that, although I've been processing my privilege for quite some time, the idea of explicitly considering whiteness is a fairly recent development for me.  Cognitively I know that I'm white, but I have rarely thought deeply about what that actually means for how I'm able to navigate the world as a result.   The authors of "Decolonizing Educational Relationships" (2023) invite us to identify representations of whiteness in our day to day lives so we can begin to better understand it in the context of who is implicitly welcomed to public spaces and who is excluded.  One of the tasks in this activity is to tour an area where you live or work and identify images of whiteness.  So, I spent my lunch hour taking a wander across the campus where I work, Royal Roads University.    I must begin by stating that this is not a critique of Royal Roads University, but merely an observation of what is....