From the outset, the Spanish colonial presence in the Antilles islands in the Caribbean over 500 years ago were always intended to be vicious and brutal. Exploiting, displacing, usurping, and terrorizing the Indigenous peoples was always the intent. The ability to overrule and subjugate the illiterate grunts in servitude to the Eurocentric masters of these globalized conquests, did so by keeping their conscripted soldiers and invaders illiterate so they could control them and make it easier for them to believe in what they were doing as justified and noble. It was these conscripts who comprised the massive waves of violent marauders who came henceforth- swallowed, obeyed, and replaced the oppressive policies of their forebearers with their own brands of Imperial procedures in dealing with Indigenous peoples as colonial efforts spread across the oceans and continents. The idea that each successive wave of migration that have arrived to those shores, came here as benign and as conquered peoples from other lands, falls short of their true vision and intent, and that was to annihilate the Indigenous presence as quickly and cheaply as possible, and to exploit the wealth of resources that would feed the insatiable demands of markets in other parts of the globe. These efforts are no secret, and yet the multitudes of incoming migrant populations continue to assert their innocence and want to h ave no part of the affects wraught on in whole or in part of the colonial experience. Instead the media, Eurocentric oral histories/folklore, and the power of mass media, and a great deal of literature and film help reshape, engrain, and rewrite part of these conjured histories that colonialism so ingeniously supplanted- intergenerationally and transcontinentally. There is nothing benign or innocent about Colonialism. It never ended. Its power has never waned, and is in no way threatened- at least not in the same brutal way it has entrenched itself on the land and in our imaginations. You are colonized. I am colonized. Our competing tales of history are colonized, and the myth of altruism is also colonized by some oppressive force beyond your and my own reckoning. Thinkers like Chompsky, Edward Said, Cole Harris, Thomas King, Gloria Steinem, Joseph Boyden, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, and a great multitude of artists delve into these human inequalities and massage out a feast of ideas that challenge and thwart the gaze of colonialism and put it in the small place and honour it with as little respect as possible- and deservingly so. To quote Cole Harris in his book Making Native Space: Its hard to recognize the momentum of colonialism, when you are a cog in the wheel. We must listen to the hum and rhythms of the earth. She is telling us that it is time to change.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 19:11:16 +0000