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Growing Up Indigenous With a Colonizer's Face

Learning to Decolonize as a Biracial Native

By Evie DahlPublished 3 years ago 13 min read
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Growing Up Indigenous With a Colonizer's Face

Learning to Decolonize as a Biracial Native

Growing up, I remember thinking, "I'm so happy I'm Canadian because we're not racist like the United States." This was a common sentiment to the average person living in the early 2000s. Granted, I grew up in a small, predominantly white city. I was in my preteens by the time I had met someone of Asian descent. I was even older by the time I met a Black person. I was surrounded by the Mi'qmaq people of my area all my life; these people were my friends and family. I was embarrassingly far into my teenage years when I finally understood that First Nations people were people of colour. I had never seen them as different from myself. Dancing to Powwow drums and learning Indigenous crafts was a part of my daily life; it never occurred to me that it was a racial or cultural difference. It took me even longer to clue in that to every person who passed me by, I was white.

I know, that sounds strange. You might be asking, "How did you not realize you're white? Your white skin didn't tip you off?" You would think so, especially when combined with my blonde hair and blue eyes. I shake my head at my younger self now for their innocent ignorance. I come from an Indigenous family, raised in the city with regular trips to the reserve. I'm the second generation of mixed Natives in my family; My Miq'maq grandfather went off to Germany with the military and brought home a European wife and three daughters. Looking back at photos of myself with my family and community through the years, I laugh because I look like a tourist on the reserve. In a picture of the five generations of my family, my great-grandmother, grandfather, and mother are all very obviously Native. My son and I, however, glow in the dark in comparison.

Recognizing that I was white was a strange period of my life. As my peers and I entered high school, white friends began distancing themselves from me for spending time with friends from the reserve. Friends from the reserve started distancing themselves from me for my associations. I found it strange, but otherwise, I didn't immediately realize the racial issues between my two friend groups. I didn't see the acts of racism affecting my Native friends when I wasn't around, and I wasn't experiencing racism for being Native from my white friends. I looked at my Native friends and family, and the only difference I could see was that they held their tans way better than I did. I tan quickly to my family's Native skin tone, but it failed to occur to me that my skin fades back to its ghostly hue in the winter, while my Native family and friends maintained that golden brown tone effortlessly through the year. I began to spend time learning about my ancestry, but eventually, the guilt and shame of my white skin distanced me from my Native roots. After being told by someone who deemed themselves an authority on cultural appropriation that practicing my Native culture and traditions was wrong due to my being born with the wrong skin tone, I abandoned that side of myself altogether. I spent years feeling like I had lost my home. All I can think now is that the pain, sadness, and heartbreak I felt in those years utterly pales in comparison to the First Nations who had their rights, children, and land stripped from them, just to face the genocide and dehumanization of their people.

Eventually, I had the realization that it was time to start decolonizing my thought processes and becoming aware of the privilege that came with being born with this pale skin. I realized that it was a disservice to leave my Mi'qmaq ancestry in the dust; I was just erasing it like the colonizers had if I refused to honour them and educate myself. However, it is essential to note that, no matter the regalia I own, the Native crafts I make, etc., I won't be wearing them on social media or selling them for profit. I won't be the poster child for "But that white person does it, so why can't I be Pocahontas for Halloween/sell tribal print merch?" I understand that regardless of my Mi'qmaq heritage, my experience in life will never be the same as a person who is visibly Native. Some Natives are light-skinned and do wear their regalia, and I won't fault them for it. It simply doesn't feel appropriate for me and my position within the Indigenous community.

My First Steps Towards Decolonization

When I decided that it was time to decolonize, it was like coming home. I looked to my family for legends and history about our tribe and family. I walked local trails that had been carved and shaped for the sake of trading and travel along the water. I marveled at the trees, the way you could see where our ancestors had once cut the branches from the tree for easier access with canoes. Time was spent researching the lands and tribes of my province, learning about the languages, and slowly teaching myself how to read Mi'qmaq and L'Nu. I returned to dancing to the powwow drums in my living room or the grass, embracing the feeling of freedom and healing with every vibrant chorus of Indigenous voices, sobbing in relief as I let my body do what it had long known to do.

Enjoying the beauty of being Native easy when that's the only side of the coin you look at. But when you flip the coin as a white-skinned Native, the guilt and dysphoria are gut-wrenching. I would dance my heart out with my children, teaching them steps I learned as a kid until I felt whole again, just to turn to my reflection in the mirror and have a colonizer's face looking back at me. I could remember sitting in a ceremonial circle with a peace pipe, in awe of being in the presence of something so sacred, and bawling almost the entire way home from the sheer power of the experience. That memory was overshadowed by the thought of the white privilege I don't feel I deserve. While I felt the pain of the history, there was no way I could truly comprehend it.

Watching my community suffer in the last year brought all of those feelings to a head. For as much work as I had been putting into recognizing my white privilege, learning more about the culture and history of my own and nearby tribes, and returning to dancing and weaving, I had been avoiding the most challenging part of decolonization. I'd avoided the history of colonists in my ancestry. While I hadn't been consciously avoiding the history, I hadn't been actively reading into it the invasion and colonization of Turtle Island and the subsequent genocide and brutalization of the First Nations peoples.

As I finally delved into the history, I learned the Indigenous peoples violent past and the issues current Indigenous peoples face. I finally realized the fatal flaw in my Canadian pride; the United States may appear more violent, publicized, and outward with its racism, but Canada is hardly different. We're just not as loud about it. Our history of racism lies in whitewashed lessons and the attempted erasure of the past. The phrases "It happened so long ago. You need to let it go" and "It wasn't us that hurt you" are common in minimizing the generational grief and trauma experienced by today's Native people. When a Native refers to a white person as "Colonizer," there are claims that the Native is racist, because they don't think they've embraced colonialism. They say this as the government buys out Native soil, and companies push oil lines through sacred land and poison the waters with pesticides. Outside of Canada, Canadians and Americans buy up land to vacation in places like Mexico, making that land inaccessible to the country's people and driving up real estate prices so that the locals struggle to afford their own homes and land. Today's white population benefits from systems of oppression created and enforced by colonist ancestors, but don't recognize it.

Modern Day Canadian Colonialism and Racism

Going through school, most of our teachers taught a whitewashed history of the people who arrived on Native shores to be welcomed and befriended by the Natives. Conveniently, they skipped over the genocide and forced assimilation of the Indigenous people. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 wasn't mentioned in my classes, and the Indian Act was glossed over at best. The RCMP was mentioned when we learned about our judicial system, but with no indication of why the RCMP was formed to begin with. Buffalo Bill was merely a pop culture reference rather than a real man who tried his hardest to wipe out the Indigenous population. We never learned about the Sixties Scoop or Starlight Tours. When residential schools were mentioned, teachers actively avoided what happened within the walls of the schools and the involvement of both government and church in the atrocities committed. Lessons on residential schools seemed like they were hundreds of years in the past, ancient history. The reality is the last residential school in Punnichy, Saskatchewan only closed its doors in 1996.

We owe our Indigenous peoples better. As the Black Lives Matter movement grew in size and support, we watched our Natives come under fire in Canada. Barely two weeks after the death of George Floyd, we watched headlines spread about a wellness check gone wrong, resulting in the death of Chantel Moore. Just over a week later, Rodney Levi was killed at the hands of RCMP as well. These deaths aren't unique; We all watched as Colten Boushie's murderer was left to walk free. February 27, 2021, we saw the murder of Julian Jones at the hands of the RCMP, one of three Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations to be shot in the last year, the second to die from the encounter. Indigenous fishers in Digby, Nova Scotia faced literal acts of terrorism as they attempted to make their living. Right now, children's bodies as young as three years old are currently being found in unmarked graves on residential school properties. Survivors of these schools have come forward with stories of priests and nuns dropping bodies into lakes, stories of priests raping young girls, and those girls giving birth. Their children were taken from their arms and thrown into the furnace. We hear their stories of children's bodies being hidden within the school walls, or students helping priests bury bodies and look on in horror, but do nothing.

Through all of this, we still have Canadians complaining about Canada Day festivities being canceled as our Indigenous peoples grieve the horrors of genocide. We see the pope refusing to apologize to the people who had everything ripped from them within his lifetime and church. Worst of all, our Prime Minister refuses to drop the lawsuits against Indigenous peoples. Our government tries to find its way out of its obligations to the Indigenous peoples and has long been minimizing and erasing First Nations voices for generations. All of this is happening while many reserves still don't have access to clean water. The numbers of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women continue to climb, with seemingly nothing done to find these people and bring their assailants to justice. While the Mi'qmaq fisherman of Digby were terrorized, the RCMP stood by as Native hauls were poisoned by white commercial fishermen, their storage centers set on fire, and Mi'qmaq fishers trapped in their vehicles by angry mobs. However, when Natives led peaceful protests trying to protect their sacred land, RCMP did not hesitate to resort to rubber bullets. In hospitals, new Indigenous mothers have been sterilized without their knowledge or consent or had their children removed from their care under vague, false pretenses when there is no imminent danger to the infant.

From Colonizer to Ally

Half mast flags are all well and good; we're a grieving nation. But, it isn't enough. First Nations people need better from us. It starts with apologies from the church and government, but it doesn't stop there. The government refuses to address generational trauma and systems of oppression still enacted in the modern day to benefit everyone who isn't Indigenous. These systems that make it easier to abuse, imprison, and oppress the First Nations peoples need to be dismantled for equality to be achieved. Schools need to update and revise the history they teach, including the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and not just the beginning stages when everything was nice and peachy between colonists and the Indigenous. Sure, we were taught that treaties were signed, but the youth also need to be taught about the government breaking those treaties.

On a per-person basis, we need to be looking at the way colonization impacts our everyday life. We need to pay attention to the way we speak of the First Nations people and make a conscious effort not to tone police the people who are now painfully and angrily speaking out. This is not the time to be telling Indigenous people to "get over it." It is up to us to be educating ourselves on what our schools skirted around in our lessons, not relying on people who are angry and grieving to do the emotional labour of educating us. It's for us to be standing with our Indigenous people, supporting them as they handle their grief, and continue their ongoing battle for their rightful equality. There is no lack of resources available to educate ourselves without putting that burden on an already suffering minority.

If you are a mixed-race person like I am, it's important to learn about your roots. It's fine if you don't join a tribe or begin practicing in the traditional ways of the tribe you may belong to; knowing the plight of the people you resulted from is a significant first step in decolonizing our current society. Not every Native has regalia; we don't all tan hides, bead, or hunt. Being conscious of appropriation by non-Indigenous retailers and creators and supporting Indigenous artists means supporting tribal members in their path to success. At the very least, we owe them support as they climb each new hurdle coming their way as more schools are still being searched, and corporations continue to try to invade Native land. The culture is not a costume to be worn for Halloween. It is a community in pain that deserves the equality and freedom they were promised before the government broke the treaties. Their people were forced to assimilate under the threat of death. If we want to see the plague of white supremacy and institutionalized oppression end, it is up to us to stand with these marginalized communities who have been suffering for generations, and learn from history once and for all.

Humanity
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About the Creator

Evie Dahl

Welcome to the one place where I write whatever I want.

I am a writer for a living, fulfilling other people's requests. When I write for Vocal, I write for me. There's no consistent topic, so pull up a seat and explore with me!

~ Evie

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