Why Indigenous People’s Day
Change is difficult, and our world faces massive change from multiple fronts. It makes people uncomfortable because it shakes up the paradigms they grew up with and requests their effort toward something not of their choosing.
I celebrated Columbus Day all my life. I enjoyed the day off, observed the discovery of the new world, and grounded myself in my American story. I remember some of the first challenges to Columbus Day while at University. Some of my fellow students would tell me that Columbus was a murderer. Some would stand against the colonization of the Americas in the center square of campus, holding signs and yelling their truths for all to hear.
It wasn’t until I was faced with the need to understand these challenges from a personal perspective that I finally dug into them for myself. My wife began a Ph.D. program and chose to do her dissertation on Aloha. She wanted to explore the ancient indigenous root of this word and, in doing so, rediscovered her indigeneity for herself. She found herself in a place of massive cognitive dissonance as she worked to reconcile the world taught in school and the historical truths found in actively reaching back through her past.
It caused conflict in our relationship. It created dissonance in our household and often infuriated me to be challenged by counter-narratives I knew to be untrue. I wanted to stay married and honor my relationship with my wife even though we had been in contention for almost a year. So, I challenged what I knew to be true. I began to do my research in tandem with hers. I reach back to my ancestors, an act not encouraged by the culture I grew up in.
It was easy to find. I went to the source material. I read the journals of Columbus, the letters of Cortez, and the founding documents of the Virginia and Maryland colonies. With every truth I uncovered, the deeper my research went. I found the Documents of Discovery and the 1452 Papl Bulls they were comprised of. I began to see a self-deceptive pattern among those who called themselves discoverers. I got curious. I asked questions, and when I found an answer, I asked another question.
I looked for the source of race and discovered a pseudo-science that emerged from the Enlightenment. I reached back and found Constontine’s evolution from Emporer to Holy Pope. I went farther back to the transition from Republic to Empire in 50 B.C. as Julius Ceasar concluded his Gallic Wars and the destruction of the indigenous peoples of Gual. Jesus would emerge 50 years later, and a transition point that the entire world would turn on would appear before me. This moment in history marks the starting point of a new Epoch in which the indigenous of Europe would become colonized over a 300-year period, and the gospel message of grace would metamorphise into an Empire that would consume the world.
In the two millennia to follow, 90% of the world’s indigenous populations would disappear in the melee of colonization and disease. Colonization would replace an interconnected world of vast and ancient forests, pristine oceans, untouched skies, and bonded human beings, with 8 billion consumers bent on their personal brand of dominion, rapidly burning through the natural world in a race toward annihilation.
Colonization has given us the Disconnected Worldview. It is a society where we see the world as something outside our identity and experience. We are each the independent island from which we observe and interact with the world around us. We’ve forgotten the water that connects us all. Let us be honest with ourselves: our civilization is sick and making each of us sick. Suicide and depression rates are higher than ever. The gap between poverty and wealth is getting wider. Homelessness, opioid epidemics, and rampant corruption are all symptoms of a collapsing system.
Colonization is an ongoing process. Like the evolution of dominion through the centuries, it metamorphizes. We are no longer openly enslaving, but the practice continues behind a curtain of secrecy for over 12 million souls. We may not be pushing indigenous people off the land we live on, but we are in the Amazon, the Congo, and the remote Islands of the Indian Ocean. We have pushed any inclining of indigeneity and connection to our ancient ancestors into a category of pagan, savage, and undesirable. More importantly, we continue the process of self-colonization with every minute invested in handing over what personal sovereignty we have left, in exchange for a firehose of shallow content that leaves us empty and disconnected.
We may never return to the ways-of-doing of those indigenous ancestors, but our survival depends on us returning to their ways-of-being. We are not creatures living an experience within a world bound by consumption and greed. We are the members of the very life surrounding our tiny human construct. Our manufactured machine world is but a grain of sand in the vastness of the natural universe, and the mysteries it holds far surpass the conclusions upon which we’ve built our civilization.
We’re interconnected in ways that still ellude our understanding, but our ancestors understood them. We’re part of everything, yet we feel so desperately alone. Our ancestors knew they were never alone. We’re members of a community of eternal life, yet the fruit of our human endeavor only produces entropy. All things crumble and wither in this artificial world. In an interconnected world, we lean into the renewal of an everlasting spring; all things spiral into being and back out again.
How do we reconnect to our indigenous ways of being? We move out of consumption and move towards connection. We ask ourselves and each other questions, and we keep asking them. We reconnect with our ancestors even though they may be invisible to us. We bravely face the atrocity and trauma of their pasts and take accountability for our present. We forgive, and we never forget.
We develop a decerning perspective founded on inquiry rather than conclusion because conclusion inevitably leads to reinfornceing our bias and opinion. In an age of mass broadcasting and personal consumption of algorithm-driven content aligned with our prejudice, questioning that content’s validity becomes paramount. I encourage you to lean into inquiry and let go of perspectives you find to be based on flawed knowledge or teaching.
The Five Phases of Decolonization
Rediscover the Ancestors & Recover your indigeneity
Mourn our Collective Loss
Dream of a New World
Commit to a New Way of Being
Devote to a New Method of Action
Jeremy Tunnell is an author, facilitator and consultant with Co3 Consulting. Jeremy writes and presents on dismantling whiteness, personal and organizational resilience and our reality in the Unified Field. Together with his partner, Dr. Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, they lead teams and organizations in equity and inclusion through Healing the Colonized Mind and Whole Systems Leadership. Gerry is the principle consultant for Co3 Consulting and author of the upcoming book Evolution of Aloha. Together, they host The Plowline Podcast.
For More Information https://linktr.ee/co3consulting
