Jana-Rae Yerxa
The Unravelling of a Colonized Mind
Sure everybody struggles. But to be born an Indigenous person, you are born into struggle. My struggle. Your struggle. Our struggle. The colonial struggle. There are many layers to this struggle. For the longest time, I didn’t even know what the true struggle was about yet I couldn’t escape it. It consumed me. Colonialism, as I have been forced to discover, is like a cancer. But instead of the cells in your body betraying itself, the thoughts in your mind work against you and eat you up from the inside out. You’re like the walking dead and you don’t even know it because you are so blinded. You can’t see the truth. Here are some of the perverted ways colonialism infects the mind:
• With a colonized mind, I hate being Indian. • With a colonized mind, I accept that I am Indian because that’s who the colonizer told me I am. • With a colonized mind, I don’t understand that I am Anishinaabe. • With a colonized mind, I believe I am inferior to the white race. • With a colonized mind, I wish I was white. • With a colonized mind, I draw pictures of my family with peach coloured skin, blonde hair and blue eyes because I’ve interna