THE TRUTH ABOUT COLONIZATION
Brown-skinned people are enslaved
To add colour to white people’s lives
To create bureaucracies to administer
Poverty, grief, delinquency, and
struggle,
To give white people a worthwhile cause
To carry forward in the next century
All those Indigenous, Aboriginal,
natives
Who dared survive life inside
The boxed-cage created by grief.
Brown-skinned peoples’ true history
erased,
Title and rights set aside
To make way for
Vivid, romanticized, more appealing
Convenient tales of the noble savage
Who fought and lost valiantly
To the great white founding forefathers
Of this stolen land;
“Indians” as backdrops to the grand
exploits
of explorers, discoverers,
colony-builders
of a history that only just begun in
1492
on this ancient land of our ancestors.
Brown-skinned children stolen,
stripped,
Torn-down, ripped apart, emptied out
Fashioned into colonizing tools of
self-hatred,
Taught to be ashamed to be brown
By a brown-skinned colonial education
That ensured the belief that white is
right,
That brown-skinned people
Belong at the end of the line
To ensure privilege
To colonizers, settlers,
And future generations
A sense of entitlement
in their colonized world.
Brown-skinned people’s sacred
ceremonial
Beliefs, objects, medicines, rituals
Stolen, filtered, processed, packaged,
sold,
Swallowed up by a New Age Movement
Of lost souls searching for something
better
Than Christianity to believe in;
Waya waya waya ho,
Twist and shift its spirit to fit
Waya ho, waya ho, waya ho,
With explicit instructions of how to,
For a high price, even if you’re white,
Become a medicine man, pipe-carrier,
shaman,
They adorn mantle places and makeshift
alters
For white people to comment on and play
with.
Brown-skinned peoples’ lives
Bound to its’ history and the earth,
Thrive on resisting the evils of
genocide,
Become more resilient, determined,
Refuse to die,
Makes supreme life sacrifices
In prisons across the land,
Birth activist babies
Who in turn
Raise up their fists in recognition, to
the sky,
In unity give the warriors’ cry,
There is no end to resistance
And that is the truth about
colonization.
JUSTICE
I am a product of colonization
In this land called Canada
I am the result of cultural oppression
By church and government
I am a survivor of forced assimilation
And genocide
I am First Nations, Aboriginal, and
Indigenous
Person of this land.
Yet, I do not speak the language
Of my ancestors
I know little about the customs and
traditions
Of my people
I have never fasted up in the mountain
I have no song, nor dance
No Indian name to define me
And for most of my life
I could honestly say
I don’t know who I am.
When I look around my world
I see my people
In this land of riches
Confined to small spaces
Forced to fight every day to protect
Traditional territory
Living lives of poverty
Similar to third worlds
I find my rage stirring inside me
I feel robbed
A sense of injustice.
When I look around my world
I see the hearts and backs of my people
Breaking beneath burdens
Of unresolved grief
Nightmarish memories
Of childhood trauma
Residential school, foster
And adoptive homes, TB sanatoriums
Generation-to-generation
Physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual
Abuse and shame
I feel the rage stirring inside me.
When I allow my ears to listen
To voices of other people of this land
Who have no mercy
No love, no compassion, no
understanding
Of its’ unjust history
Who come for freedom, opportunity,
Adventure, riches,
I feel my rage stirring inside me,
Who stand on the graves of my ancestors
And carelessly say:
“why can’t those Indians get it
together?
They live off our tax money you know.”
I feel my rage stirring inside me
Camouflage for powerlessness and shame
Anaesthesia for grief
A sense of injustice.
I feel unsafe in the white world
To speak my views out loud
Or to share my culture
Uneasy, mistrustful,
Afraid those white people
Will steal the very words I speak,
steal the
Ceremonies,
The sacred circle, sacred stories,
songs and dances,
Wear our names
Copy our art and sell it
I get nervous when they write things
down
So I tell them straight
“you can’t write it down.”
I fight hard inside myself
To see the human beings that they are.
I am a product of colonization
The result of cultural oppression
A survivor of genocide
I carry the burden
Of all the unresolved grief
Of my ancestors
In my heart, on my shoulders, in my
gut.
In this lifetime
I have committed myself
To fight for Justice.
My brother tells me
“It is injustice that is our enemy,
not white people,
remember we are fighting on the same
side as
Geronimo, Mandela, Ghandi and King.”
We take responsibility for our rage
We fight on the same side
For justice.
When I See Injustice
When I see injustice
In this world
When I see child abuse
Women violated
Genocide
A fire rages inside
That wants to burn free
That wants a voice
Loud and
Aches to break through fear
Break through every fist
Every cruel word, vile look,
Every panting evil sin
That crawled inside my soul
To silence me
© Vera Manuel
Selected by Emalene Manuel &
shared with permission
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