Awakening the Horse People originates from the occupied Indigenous lands of Turtle Island, or the Island Hill – known also by its colonial name of “North America”. These lands are under active and sustained resistance to the settler states of the United States, Canada, Mexico. Several Caribbean island nations are also still affected by the colonial rule of France, England, and the Netherlands.
Awakening the Horse People seeks to share practical tools, understandings, and resources that can aid healing movements of decolonization, ancestral recovery, and re-indigenization for white people of european heritage no matter what land they may live upon.
Decolonization requires an honest conversation with life. To be authentic, decolonization must engage deep and revealing conversations with self, with ancestors, with spirit, with past, present, and future, with mystery, with place, with other people including Indigenous people whose lands we may occupy, and with the living world around us. This project aims to inspire, inform, and provoke these conversations.
These conversations are grounded in recognition of three key understandings:
- Decolonization on Turtle Island is led and defined by its Indigenous peoples, ultimately resulting in the return of Indigenous lands and lifeways regardless of settler futures on this continent. Therefore, decolonization on Turtle Island must be centered on the values and needs of its Indigenous peoples.
- People of european heritage have the innate right to decolonize our own lands and lifeways and to recover ancestral cultures as an act of re-indigenization and for the benefit of all life. However, if one is a settler on stolen land, these actions should not be used as an evasion to the previous understanding at the risk of resettlement, enforcing white supremacy, or turning decolonization into a metaphor.
- Settlers who live on stolen Indigenous lands of Turtle Island (or elsewhere) should avoid claiming decolonization for themselves if we are not simultaneously working under the guidance of Indigenous peoples to decolonize Indigenous lands from colonial settler systems.
The tools, understandings, and resources on Awakening the Horse People are not the defining answers, but insightful observations and honest questions in these conversations. They are also not a system, and should not be objectified, packaged, commercialized, or commodified.
Because it is every person’s natural heritage to know their ancestors, ancestral culture, and places of origin, these resources are freely shared for all people. In addition, Awakening the Horse People will never attempt to sell sacred teachings, ceremony, or appropriated cultural ways from other people.
You can also read a more complete list of our project protocols (guidelines).
We grow by remembering that decolonization is not simply reading a few articles or posters, but comes about through deep reflection and lively experiential action that may unsettle us in both disturbing and exciting ways. Decolonization is alive.
Last, but certainly not least, the authors recognize the attempts at co-opting european Indigenous ancestry, cultural symbols, and icons by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascists. We reject this racism, white nationalism, and fascism in all its forms.
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