It’s hard to argue with facts of Native American history – attempted genocide upon our people, our outrageous higher than average incarceration rates, our poverty rate, our low lifespan level, our every negative statistic you care to delve into – that is a given. I want to explore what it is that produces a mindset within our younger generations of the affects of colonization that permeates through their pores.

Colonization can be described as, according to Wikipedia, “an ongoing process of control by which a central system of power dominates the surrounding land and its components (people, animals, etc.). The term is derived from the Latin word colere, which means ‘to inhabit’. Also, colonization refers strictly to migration, for example, to settler colonies in America, [Africa] or Australia, trading posts, and plantations…along with ruling the existing indigenous peoples of styled new territories.”

What? There is no mention of slavery, ethnic cleansing or genocide committed by the white man against the Native peoples of the Americas. There is no mention of small pox, boarding schools or the reservation system put in place by the U.S. government that was so admired by Adolph Hitler. In fact, when I looked up colonization on the internet it was mostly celebratory towards the colonizers, not questioning them and their motives.