Breaking Down Decoloniality: Learning from Professor Catherine Walsh
We, the summer Youth Visionary Collective (YVC), began our season with the Decoloniality Workshop. This was facilitated by Roots and Routes IC’s (R&R) Co-Founder and Executive Director, Juli Hazlewood, who also has degrees in Geography, Native American Studies, and Latin American Studies, with a focus in Tropical Conservation and Development. Hazlewood, however, has taken a step out of the academy to step up the possibilities for creating spaces to learn beyond universities and instead within Indigenous communities.
“I wanted to establish decoloniality as a foundational concept to joining Roots & Routes and to what we as an organization are doing in the world and facilitating within Youth Visionary Collective spaces”
Thus, Roots & Routes interns have been asked to delve into “decoloniality”, foundational to the organization’s core values and practices. R&R decolonial praxes (theories + practices) carve out new hopeful possibilities for ways forward in taking care of one another and the Earth.
Juli posited that we need to decolonize ourselves, our communities, our relationships to the world and the environment in conceptual, emotional, economic, political and relational realms. Without this we cannot dissolve the intersections of racism, capitalism, individualism, sexism and many other ism’s within each one of us and throughout our everyday lives.
“As I see it decoloniality is hope-in-action. Restoring the world, the core work of Roots & Routes, is vital and indispensable.”
According to their 2018 book On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, decoloniality is a form of struggle against colonizing ways of being in the world based especially on ethnicity and race, but experienced through structural matrices of power, as well as a fight for what Walsh and Mignolo refer to as re-existence.
Decoloniality is a school of thought that advances radically distinct perspectives and possibilities that displace Western and Euro-centric linear development-to-be-more-like-us rationality as the only framework of existence and thought.
Coloniality began with the purported discovery of the Americas, or Abya Yala, a term that comes from the Kuna people of Panama 529 years ago. After, as systems were put into place across the globe, coloniality took hold of all people in diverse ways, based on their intersections of power within their particular positionalities. The patterns of racism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, universal ways of thinking and being in the world, exploitation, and dispossession became deeply rooted in people’s everyday lives in fundamental ways. That’s why Walsh and Mignolo emphasize that decoloniality is not only the resistance of those structures, it is the regenerating, rebuilding and re-existence of other ways of living reality.
“It’s not just resistance or a posture of resistance,” Walsh said in the recorded panel, On Decoloniality – A Panel Discussion. “It’s for the ongoing creating of ways of thinking, of ways of knowing, of ways of sensing, being, and living outside coloniality.”
Hazlewood chose Walsh’s teaching because, as her neighbor in Quito, Ecuador for four years, Dr. Walsh (Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar) was, and still continues to be, a mentor to her on the topic and in general. Hazlewood knew that by reading Walsh’s book chapter and watching her lecture that the Youth Visionary Collective Interns would deepen their understandings of what it means to decolonize on many scales and dimensions of life. She thought it would allow the YVC interns to better be able to contribute to Roots & Routes mission to facilitate sharing compassion and diverse cultural knowledges en route to responsibly stewarding a flourishing living world, and our vision of establishing an Indigenous-led and youth-inspired educational exchange network.
Hazlewood facilitating a collective space of talking about the differences between decoloniality and settler colonialism as a YVC Intern takes notes. Present with her in this photo are youth from Finland, England, Germany, and Los Altos, California (USA).
Andean Indigenous thinkers such as Nina Pacari and Huanacuni Mamani refer to the word Vincularidad. Vincularidad is the awareness of the integral relation and interconnectedness amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos. It is relational interdependence of all beings in search of balance and harmony of life in the planet (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018).
Humans around the world internalize coloniality; it can be thought of as a colonial wound, (a concept that Mignolo has offered) and a social dis-ease from which we all need healing. An important thing that you can do to is learn from the Indigenous peoples who are the original peoples of wherever you are.
Listen to their historical and present-day struggles to find out how/if you may be able to contribute to their efforts to demand reparations and/or insisted on getting their lands back. Click on this link “Whose land am I on?” to find out the land you are on. Staying updated in the news and understanding that coloniality is all around the world in different forms contingent upon very particular histories, places, and actors. Settler-colonialism is the prominent version of coloniality that took in the Global North and in particular places in the South. And yet, beyond North America’s borders there are other very particular dynamics and trajectories that are distinct.
“I’ve had to see systemic racism in the context of education and the legal system, but also in the concrete practice of everyday lives. So, confronting this and working against it and also assuming a kind of responsibility to work against it, is part of a praxis that helps me begin to theorize then what decoloniality could be.”
Watch a full interview with Catherine Walsh here:
At Roots & Routes our central instruction is restor(y)ing the world. We urge you to join us in doing so! Colonial ways of being that prohibited Indigenous peoples from practicing their traditional ways of knowing, including cultural burns in California which are essential to reinvigorating certain landscapes and preventing out-of-control wildfires, are destroying the planet. As the world as we once knew it ignites into flames to regenerate itself, our hope at Roots & Routes IC and the YVC is to breathe into the embers of re-existence for all peoples so that we may learn from one another about how to better take care of Mother Earth and future human generations.
Citations:
Duke University Press. (2021). On Decoloniality - A Panel Discussion. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cT-c_Hqcgs&t=4043s.
Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.