#Decolonize Your Mind

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Rejecting the Settler Mentality to revive our Nations

Decolonizing essentially means to start thinking like an indigenous person.

When we think indigenous, we get rid of all the colonial and settler brainwashing that has been hammered into the heads of our grandparents and parents in boarding schools and by white society; we reclaim our indigenous traditions and go back to our roots.

Reclaiming tradition and decolonizing does not mean that we have to give up dressing in jeans and go back to dressing like our ancestors. But it does mean reclaiming our ancestral ways of governance and giving up the systems and procedures we adopted from our colonizers.

Decolonizing does not mean we have to go back to living in the woods. But it does mean reviving our ceremonies and traditions. It does mean restoring our cultural values. It does mean emphasizing group welfare—the welfare of people in our communities—and giving up the focus on individual welfare that we were taught by the settlers.