Our latest #UnlearningWithCoFED is about decolonization.
As a reminder, here’s how we define unlearning: a continuous process of questioning what and how we’ve been taught so that we can learn other ways of knowing, doing, and being that serve our collective liberation and help us dismantle all forms of oppression. Through our #UnlearningWithCoFED emails, we’ll be questioning and learning together how co-ops fit into the larger visions of food, racial, economic, gender and climate justice.
So, what is decolonization? Let’s start by sharing some definitions of colonization:
- the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area.
- the action of appropriating a place or domain for one’s own use.
- a process by which a central system of power dominates the surrounding land and its components.
- and/or, as defined in Indian Country Today, “In the context of Indigenous Peoples, colonization has come to mean any kind of external control, and it is used as an expression for the subordination of Indian peoples and their rights since early contact with Europeans. In North America, colonization took the task of subordinating Indigenous Peoples to the political power of Christian European kings. In Spanish colonies, with the appearance of the colonists, the land was immediately considered under the control of the colonizing nations.” [1]
