The colonial period of the past five centuries lead to untold devastation of Indigenous peoples through disease conquest. Conversion, forced migration and outsider settlement, colonization led to ideological control and suppression of people's relationship with land, plants and animals. Recognizing these unsettling historical encounters and practices, some of which continue into the present. Enables Indigenous people to acknowledge the impact of the past and subsequently to recover languages, political voices, and cultural life ways. Decolonizing strategies seek to restore self and community confidence for restoring relationships and responsibilities. So I'm guided here especially by this penetrating work of the Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith in her book, Decolonizing Methodologies. Where she affirms this exploration of the past by saying, coming to know the past has been part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges, we're going to explore the play between these phrases. Alternative histories and alternative knowledges, it's a subtle point but very important in understanding this decolonizing strategy. So we will highlight some decolonizing features that begin to mitigate the lingering effects of imperial and corporate colonization. Colonialism rather on Indigenous peoples. Decolonizing seeks to identify the economic and cultural burdens placed on Indigenous peoples to constrain and exploit them. Again, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Maori scholar says, of colonization and imperialism as a process of systemic fragmentation. In which there is a disciplinary carve up of the Indigenous world, bones, mummies, and skulls to the museum artwork to the private collector. Language, to linguistics, beliefs and behavior to psychologists. Fragmentation is not a phenomenon of postmodernism as many might claim for Indigenous peoples. Fragmentation has been the consequence of imperialism. Linda Tuhiwai Smith recognizes that the fragmentation imposed on Indigenous peoples during colonialism illustrates the modern drive to analyze. To separate through objectification and claims to expertise in all of these separate realms. Thus a turn by Indigenous communities from fragmentation to integration calls for decolonizing that mindset of separation, to one of connection and restoration of relationships. Again, we have in past lectures spoken of the whole in this symbolic world, the cosmo vision of native peoples. That fragmentation of that world and the decolonizing strategy is a restoration of these relationships, what does that mean? It's a restoration of land, rivers, culture, and customs that arises within Indigenous communities as forms of traditional identity. That reassert Indigenous knowledge, personhood, sovereignty, and reciprocities. As Indigenous peoples reflect upon their unsettling histories, they also encounter the stories told about them. Here we see in the New Zealand context of Maori people at Aotearoa, the name for New Zealand at the marae, gathered with an ancestor. Where the stories would be told and in the Peruvian context here in the ritual action at the base of the mountain. Where the glacier reaches down, the sense of entering into relationship with that which sustains the people. It's in these settings then that Indigenous people reflect upon their unsettling histories, and they also encounter the stories told about them. Colonizers proposed narratives about Indigenous peoples as discovered or contacted by non native explorers, who brought all the benefits of civilization. From the European perspective, this narrative of discovery and contact found legal expression in the doctrine of discovery. Which justified seizure of land not inhabited by Christians, this doctrine of discovery was based on papal bulls from the 15th century. Which granted Christian European nations rights of control and subjugation over Indigenous peoples. We see here, Alexander the 6th, pope at the time and a copy of a papal bull. Which was providing the basis for missionizing and forced conversion of so called pagan or Indigenous peoples, barbarous peoples, as they were called. One of the few European voices to contest this perspective was Bartholomew Las Casas, a missionary such as we have pictured here in the new England scene. But just to stay with the Las Casas, he argued that Indigenous people have souls. And thus were worthy of respect as humans and could be converted then to Christianity. Yet sadly here, even Bartolomeo Las Casas in the Meso American setting, realizing that economic forces that undergird conquest. Las Casas was resigned to the slave trade from Africa as relieving the enslavement of Caribbean and Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples. Later, European colonization drew on the doctrine of discovery for further conquest. For example, English setters in Australia used the idea, Terra Nullius meaning empty land. Or no one on the land to try to erase aboriginal peoples from their homelands. Here we see imaged in new South Wales, the planting of the flag and the Indigenous aboriginal person as a servant. In the sense here, you can feel the performative character in the European context of this arrival on the land. So similarly, the doctrine of discovery supported the Monroe doctrine of the early 1800s. Which asserted the hegemony of the United States over the Western hemisphere. These claims also led to the ideology of manifest destiny, justifying expansion westward to renew removed native Americans in North America. And this idea of manifest destiny was even carried to the Philippines. Where it created an ethos of Indigenous peoples as inferior and having no rights to the land. These forms of hegemonic domination have counterparts in various regions of the world. And here we see this painting in the latter part of the 19th century of American progress. And how pictured as the feminine influence on the nation, bringing the nation forward driving native peoples. And you notice buffalo biodiversity moving away, the sense of settler colonialists and in the background. And the benefits of civilization being brought by progress, changes in relationships to the land. These forms of hegemonic domination, as we've said, have done in different ways in different regions of the world. And in this way, Indigenous peoples, they have resisted imperialism and state power in Africa, Asia, and the pacific region. Moreover, these ideas of progress and modernization, they created other distorted views and narratives that subverted Indigenous life ways. These differing narratives of progress portrayed Indigenous people as in decline, both in terms of population and cultural vitality. These narratives ignored the deleterious effects of epidemic diseases that devastated native communities. Legal and commercial entities forged narratives that identified Indigenous peoples as obstacles to be removed, from the universal mythic drive of economic progress. Nation building policies emerged from these narratives of removal and subjugation. Indigenous peoples were often forced into acculturation, within dominant societies followed by assimilation of their customs and languages. Here we see the gathering in the state of North Dakota, the signing away of the lands of the confederated peoples of the reservation in the center of North Dakota. And the determined look on all of these individuals surrounding one weeping individual. The secretary of the Hidatsa of people who was coerced and forced, they could not force the chairman of these peoples to sign. But by threatening the children, they coerced the signature here of the signing away in this sense of the loss of identity. Is suggested even by the dress of this elder. Accompanying it, then we see Yakima women, the Yakima people of Washington state and the interior of Northwest North America. The Yakima women standing at some point in their tribal history, and standing in resilient regard of their place on this, on the land
