We’d like to think that the age of colonization is over, and that the politics of despair and exploitation are over. This is a question I most specifically ponder these days as I teach my 4th graders about conquest and colonization. I was hired to replace a leaving teacher; the school had already designed this unit. The central idea is: Conquest and colonization was a strategy to expand territories and obtain more resources. As is evident, this unit is structured and designed from the perspective of the colonizers, only highlighting the positive aspects of this horrid human phenomenon, cultural blending and exchanges between the colonizers and their colonies.
This perspective is fundamentally unjust to those whose cultures were destroyed by colonizers, whose resources were plundered, whose languages were wiped out, whose religions were eradicated. Many societies have reclaimed the religion and culture of their colonizers by combining them with their unique indigenous symbols, images, and interpretation. They have given an indigenous flavor to the language, customs, and mannerism of the colonizers, that underlines the great ability of human beings to adjust to new situations. The irony today is that by resenting the colonizers as a whole one will refuse and reject an inseparable part of their own identity: a culture that has been passed along to them be it by force. But does that mean condoning the nature of their invasive and horrid acts?
Colonization in the form of sailing for new shores, stealing resources, enslaving people, and imposing one’s cultural/religious elements on a people might be over. But the arrogant, supremacist, survival-of-the-fittest attitude of colonization is far from over. To this day, in comparison with the amount of literature produced and examined by colonizers, the narratives of the colonized are missing. The narratives of natives of Americas are missing. The narratives of African slaves are missing. To this day, euro-centrism (since most contemporary colonizers have emerged from the West) dominates the history of colonization. There can be a balance between reconciling with the traditions of colonizers and treating and reclaiming them as one’s own, but criticizing and taking into question the lack of mutual respect, violence, and racism that colonizers have demonstrated with full force.
We are reaching the end of this unit in 4th grade English, and I look to nurture, spark and ignite a timeless and global sense of condemnation in my students towards any act of invasion, exploitation and disrespect towards any people. And it’s with great sorrow as an American that I have to use the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as clear contemporary examples of warmongering, exploitation, lack of respect and terrorism.
Globalism means mutual respect between nations, academic exchanges, sharing of economic resources, eradicating political restrictions on traveling, respecting international laws, breaking political monopolies, placing sanctions on individuals responsible for atrocities rather than sanctioning an entire nation and labeling them as the “axis of evil.” Globalism means recognizing no distinction between one’ domestic and foreign policies, it means treating others as one’s own people. Globalism means myriad politically autonomous territories, but only one border! I now wait exuberantly for my 4th graders to present their research on the effects of colonization on their country of choice.
Peace and resistance from Queretaro,
Aria
