Mind poisoned by the colonizers

Page 6

Dear Editor:

What Mr. David Ahenakew stated was merely what he has been indoctrinated in to believing. I agree that racism is a vulgar practice that needs to be set aside before it plagues future generations, but to put this practice aside would mean the dissolution of the many nation states that insidiously practice racism in their ongoing game of colonization.

When the predators from Europe came to our lands, what do you think they were practicing to obliterate the peoples of this land? In the name of racism, a whole way of life was oppressed and subsumed in a campaign of genocidal slaughter.

Racism is still being practiced by the Canadian government through the department of Indian Affairs, where in some patriarchal, twisted mentality we are viewed as children, a less than 'other' that cannot think for ourselves in determining our own future.

With this mindset is it any wonder that when we use the tools of the master, we cannot take down the master's house? What does that mean when the peoples that are being "raced on" use race to further an issue?

Sure, it's OK for the mainstream to practice racism, for the form of racism that they practice is so embedded within the policies and laws that they have created that these policies and laws are seen as rational ways of keeping an unjust society just. Systemic or institutionalized racism is rampant within Canadian society, but it has been naturalized to the point of common sense.

However, what is not common sense is when the colonized use the tools of the oppressor. In this case it was Dr. Ahenakew and instead of the sympathy and understanding that should have been accorded to this man for his many years of public service, he was routed for speaking his mind, a mind that has been poisoned by the oppressive forces of colonization.

Those minds that routed him have also been defiled as an insult of colonization. This mind game is called neocolonialism.

A final message is, if you can read this English text then you too are suffering from some form of neocolonialism. It is this neocolonialist mentality that is now tearing our nations apart.

Who is more Indian than whom? Who has more rights than whom? You don't live on a reserve so you aren't Indian. Hey, you aren't really Metis because you have a status card. Ahenakew is a racist. Is he really a racist or one of our warriors that has had his mind poisoned? Are not all the statements that I have just written racist statements? Yet I hear them all the time from our own leadership and they are accepted as common sense.

I see them written in the Indian Act and it is the law. There are strange forces at work here in this 'just' society and these forces are working against us so why don't we get together and understand our oppressors, understand the roots of the oppression. It is then that we can unshackle our minds and return to the way that our ancestors thought.

Vincent Steinhauer