this following extract quotes are taken from a piece i am currently working
on 'raw law' to be published later on sometime...these are some quotes i
have taken from ward churchill an aboriginal creek from the usa, sometimes
it is helpful to look back at ourselves from the outside, as a reading all
of ward churchill's texts are invaluable, 'indians are us' the struggle for
the land' 'when predator came' and many other articles and texts...
they found these issues were easier to talk with to those living in germany
than those who call themselves us citizens i understand we have the same
issue here, it is easier for me to gain support from us and europeans than
it is within our own homelands,
The following quote is taken from a speaking tour of Germany by M Annette
Jaimes, Bob Robideau, Paulette D'Auteuil and Ward Churchill. In answering
that same question 'what is it we can do to help you', the delegation
responded:
"You must understand," we stated each time the question arose, "that we
really mean it when we say we are all related. Consequently, we see the
mechanisms of our oppression as being equally interrelated. Given this
perspective, we cannot help but see a victory for you as being
simultaneously a victory for us, and vice versa: that a weakening of your
enemy here in Germany necessarily weakens ours there, in North America:
that your liberation is inseparably linked to our own, and that you should
see ours as advancing yours. Perhaps, then, the question should be
reversed: what is it that we can best do to help you succeed?."
In response the above statement some of the audience took exception to the
sameness of the struggle, wanting to emphasise the difference between being
colonised and being of the colonising group Churchill records the following
response made by his group;
We have been forced into knowing the nature of colonialism very well.
Along with you, we understand that the colonization we experience finds its
origin in the matrix of European culture. But, apparently unlike you, we
also understand that in order for Europe to do what it has done to us - in
fact, for Europe to become 'Europe' at all - it first had to do the same
thing to all of you. In other words, to become a colonizing culture,
Europe had first to colonize itself. To the extent that this is true, we
find it fair to say that if our struggle must be explicitly anti colonial
in its form, content, and aspirations, yours must be even more so. You
have, after all, been colonized far longer than we, and therefore much more
completely. In fact, your colonization has by now been consolidated to
such an extent that - with certain notable exceptions, like the Irish and
Euskadi (Basque) nationalists-you no longer even see yourselves as having
been colonized. The result is that you have become self-colonizing,
conditioned to be so self - identified with your own oppression that you've
lost your ability to see it for what it is, much less to resist it in any
coherent way.
It takes the form of an insight offered by our elders: 'To understand where
you are, you must know where you've been, and you must know where you are
to understand where you are going.' For us, you see, the past, present,
and future are all equally important parts of the same indivisible whole.
And we believe this is as true for you as it is for us. In other words,
you must set yourselves to reclaiming your own indigenous past. You must
come to know it in its own terms-the terms of its internal values and
understandings, and the way these were applied to living in this world-not
the terms imposed upon it by the order which set out to destroy it. You
must learn to put your knowledge of this heritage to use as a lens through
which you can clarify your present circumstance, to "know where you are,"
so to speak. And, from this, you can begin to chart the course of your
struggle into the future. Put still another way, you, no less than us,
must forge the conceptual tools that will allow you to carefully and
consciously orient your struggle to regaining what it is that has been
taken from you rather than presuming a unique ability to invent it all
anew. You must begin with the decolonization of your own minds, with a
restoration of your understanding of who you are, where you come from, what
it is that has been done to you to take you to the place in which you now
find yourselves. Then, and only then, it seems to us, will you be able to
free yourselves from your present dilemma.
And further on:
In effecting this reconnection to their own indigenous heritage, the German
dissidents will at last be able to see nazism - that logical culmination of
so much of the predatory synthesis which is 'Europe' - as being, not
something born of their own traditions, but as something as alien and
antithetical to those traditions as it was/is to the traditions of any
other people in the world. In this way, by reintegrating themselves with
their indigenous selves, they simultaneously reintegrate themselves with
the rest of humanity itself.
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