One can barely put into words the devastation of the colonial violence we have all witnessed unfolding this year. From the barbarism of Genocides in Palestine, Congo & Sudan, the ongoing extraction and exploitation of indigenous people’s across the globe and the catastrophic consequences on our climate, it is hard not to be totally overwhelmed by the scale and urgency of our need to decolonise. After a year of escalating protests across the planet, discourse urging us to decolonize everything from our bookshelves to our relationships, practical decolonial strategy is often a blank page. Without a clear understanding of what it means to decolonise, we stagnate in liberal, hypothetical imaginings of a decolonized future that do not translate into meaningful change.
One common temptation in decolonial discourse is to romanticise a pre colonial past, a perfect myth of who we were “before”, an imagining of a “return” to a re-indigenised freedom far out of the reach of the now. While it is undoubtedly important to trace our lineages and reflect on the societies and ways of life that existed before colonisation, true decolonization must root us in where we are now as a planet and as a species in order to build. This romanticisation creates an addictive fantasy, an act of dissociation that drowns material calls to action. Indigenous cultures have never been static, but a dialogue between people and the land they steward. To re-indigenise, then, is an act of presence and response – something made impossible by the dissociative life in the west, to which we are all complicit. It is through solidarity with Indigenous movements that we see a more complex demand: not simply the erasure of colonial reality to some mythical return, but a material response to the now – a collectivist call to action, divestment and imagining a future that we can reach, touch and strategize towards.
This strategy then, must be one of emergence. As Adrienne Maree Brown explains in Emergent Strategy, “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions”. We see the fractal nature of how the colonial system is maintained and in turn how it can be undone: the micro of our passive daily choices reflecting the macro structure of colonial power. Decolonial strategy, then, is not a fixed end point but an ongoing process of becoming, of shaping new realities through the collective choices we make in the present. Emergent strategy invites us to understand that small, iterative actions—when aligned with a larger purpose—can create the conditions for transformation. Decolonization is not a singular, revolutionary moment, but rather a series of practices and interactions that foster a collective, liberated future.
But what does this look like? What does this mean for our everyday lives? First, we must understand the core tenant of colonial thinking: Individualism. Individualism is colonialism’s dominant philosophy, and so any liberation movement that centers an individualist approach is destined to jeopardise any true radical capacity for flaccid liberalism. This can best be understood through the gentrification of the climate movement. Many remember the popularisation of measuring one’s “carbon footprint” in the mid 2000’s, taking stock of one’s individual carbon emissions and challenged to make the changes necessary to go on a “low carbon diet”. But what was not commonly known at the time was that this rhetoric came out of a marketing campaign from the oil conglomerate BP. The intention was to take attention away from the damage done by Big Oil and put it on the weight of the individual’s conscience. It worked – the climate justice movement was shaped for over a decade through this lens that alienated the poor for not making the individual choices of an electric car or solar paneling their homes, shifting the blame onto the disenfranchised rather than those at the top. Only in the last few years has the climate justice movement tried to recenter into true decolonial practise rather than liberal purism, focussing on building collective resources that support communities with climate repair practices and attributing the blame to its core colonial roots.
This is truely how we decolonise: divesting from the individual ownership of our resources that keep us dependent on colonialist infrastructure by building communal systems of care and consumption that render this dependance redundant. On our own, divesting from the energy, fuel, food, clothes and technology that comes to us only through the violent extraction of colonialism feels insurmountable – we become paralysed under the weight of how much we need to change, how dependant we are on colonial brutality to meet our basic needs, how perpetually exhausted capitalism keeps us, how little energy we have to make these changes. But in divesting from an individualist approach we can organise from the strategic advantage of disseminating that work throughout a community, reconnecting with the land and each other through anti-consumerist permacultural practice to feed ourselves, work less, rest more, and fight fascism.
True community divestment is about building lines of material solidarity that you can rely on to turn first to our neighbours, friends and communities to meet our needs rather than looking to the capitalist machine to provide for us. Use a neighbours printer in exchange for a lasagne, organize a rota of free community child care between households, skill swapping and community swap shops: these are all examples of building community economies. Solidarity is relational and the strength of our communities is measured in how well we feed each other. It can be as small as bringing your neighbours into a free/swap whatsapp group or as big as starting a community garden- building these networks in our atomised and isolated culture takes time, but it will be these networks that we rely on as the capitalist model continues to fail us and the planet.
Once you have these material networks in place, you can start to dream bigger (did you know you can make your own fuel from alcohol? Build an indoor homestead with hydroponic gardening? Make solar panels out of copper wire and CD’s??). Many hands make light work of more ambitious divestment projects, but we must first come to normalise and depend upon our communities in small, everyday ways. Some of your friends and neighbours will be resistant and mistrusting at first, but the more we build mycelial solidarities into our lives, the more we begin to see a different way of being to be possible. The key to decolonising our lives is not a list of practices, but rather using a framework of indigenous thinking to rewire the consumptive norms of colonial extraction into the creative, responsive, collective resistance that can liberate us.
The power to liberate us from colonial infrastructure does not lie in the hands of the state, the state will not be bargained with. The capacity to save us lies only with us and what we choose to build from here. As Malcom X states, “we are not outnumbered, we are out organized”- the power to build emergent change lies in our hands moment to moment.
