Page 132 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

(apparent) stability, the uncontested rule of law (28). The machine runs well: you get to work on

time, there’s money in the bank and food in the stores, no rioting in the streets. Peace.

A warrior, according to Alfred, is one who strives to bring about true peace: not the absence of

conflict, but a “culture of freedom” (29), a coexistence of diverse nations that is “hopeful,

visionary, and forward-looking” (28). As an Onkwehonwe activist tells Alfred,

The healthy ones, the bright-eyed ones, must accept their responsibility to restore those

in grief, temporarily in dysfunction, so to speak, to health, to accept, recognize, restore,

ameliorate, admonish, and provide the new mentor, model and inspiration. In today’s

context, this is the primary task and responsibility of the warrior (80).

“It is time for our people to live again” (19), Alfred writes. Instead of squandering their energies

negotiating terms with their oppressors, indigenous peoples must regenerate their cultures.

Much has been lost to them since colonization. Yet not all. To recover indigenous ways of

being, Alfred argues, Onkwehonwe must begin “living the rites of resurgence,” fostering “self-

transformation and self-defence” against state control (29). These rites involve the recovery of

indigenous story, language, health and community, and above all, a living philosophy or spirit.

This too must be the settler path: our only road away from the statist, capitalistic framework that

makes impossible a rooted relationship to earth and all its kin. Yet how do we non-indigenous,

who have no cultural connections outside of an imperialist system and thinking, recover an

indigenous consciousness? What does it even mean for us to come home to this land? To root?

First, Alfred says, as settlers we must face our denial of colonialism and our painful heritage as

imperialist subjects: “Change will happen only when Settlers are forced into a reckoning with

who they are, what they have done, and what they have inherited; then they will be unable to

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