Engage Civil Society 1st

Turner, 2006 Dale Antony. Associate Professor of Government and Native American Studies at Dartmouth - This is not a peace pipe: Towards a critical indigenous philosophy. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Alfred is right to make colonialism, and decolonization, a political problem for indigenous peoples. But it is not only a political problem. What do we mean when we say that colonial mentalities have taken a stranglehold on indigenous communities? In the language of postcolonialism, Alfred tells us that 'the colonial mentality is the intellectual dimension in the group of emotional and psychological pathologies associated with internalized oppression.'35 Colonialism is embedded in the very being of indigenous life, which for many indigenous peoples includes the spiritual dimension of their existence. It is the process of decolonization that I find difficult to imagine. As with the drive for indigenous forms of political recognition, in order to create the space for us to be free from colonialism, we must engage the dominant culture. We may not know what the process will look like, but we do know it has to be a dialogical one. Colonial discourses, and now postcolonial discourses, may or may not be ultimately useful for indigenous politics, but it seems to me that these forms of intellectual projects work with a view of colonialism that involves a complex, intercultural set of relations that are dynamic in nature. Colonialism has influenced virtually every aspect of indigenous people's daily lives: language, religion, sexuality, art, philosophy, and politics. Alfred is right to point out that colonialism has to end and that indigenous peoples can play a major role in bringing about that end, but we need to know how to go about doing so. Abolishing colonialism is the goal of many indigenous and non-indigenous peoples; finding a way to do it is the great dilemma. If a just political relationship has to be dialogical in nature, indigenous peoples will not be able to secure a 'postcolonial' political relationship without the help of non-indigenous people. But making sense of the meaning of colonialism, and especially addressing colonialism in 'philosophical thinking,' is relatively new territory for indigenous intellectuals.