Page 131 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Although Alfred is addressing Onkwehonwe (original or indigenous) peoples and their situation

specifically, he also promises that “if non-indigenous readers are capable of listening ...[they]

too will be shown a new path and offered the chance to join in a renewed relationship between

the peoples and places of this land, which we occupy together” (35). This new path is nothing

less than the restoration of “indigenous consciousness and ways of being” (39). It is “a spiritual

revolution, a culturally rooted social movement that transforms the whole of society and a

political action that seeks to remake the entire landscape of power and relationship to reflect

truly a liberated post-imperial vision” (27).

For Alfred, indigenous consciousness is the only thing standing between Onkwehonwe and the

pervasive “delusions, greeds and hatreds that lie at the centre of colonial culture” (35). If

indigenous peoples do not claim and nurture this consciousness, their way of life as indigenous

will soon disappear. More broadly speaking, Alfred’s assertion applies to us all: if indigenous

consciousness isn’t resurrected and fostered, then empire will utterly consume this world.

A rooted, indigenous consciousness is fundamentally at odds with the mindset that makes the

wheels of our modern world turn. Having indigenous consciousness means that you’re ‘at war’

whether you realize it or not. You’re a target. You don’t fit into the system. And you should stop

trying to fit in, Alfred writes. Adapting to settler ways will not bring indigenous peoples peace

because in empire there is never peace—only domination and control.

Wasáse proposes “a real and deep notion of peace” (27) to counter the acquiescent passivity

we generally mistake for ‘peace.’ In imperial culture, we all learn to tolerate the intolerable:

poisons pollute our world, the state makes wars and lives are expendable—but that’s alright, the

stuff of daily news. Living in integral relation with other nations, without the dynamics of

oppression, assimilation and servitude, seems unimaginable. ‘Peace’ is confused with order and

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