Who is postcolonial?

I don’t look postcolonial but I am.  At least, that’s how I see myself.  I am someone who lives in the aftermath of colonization.  Yeah, sure, that works if I think of myself as a global citizen.  The world as we know it was constituted by processes of colonization and decolonization.  Ask yourself, why is there an India and a Pakistan?  The answer, broadly construed, is colonization/decolonization.

Global citizenship is one thing.  Living in the United States is another.  It’s where I live and it’s where I’m from and it, too, is a place that was colonized.  We came, we settled, we displaced.  In the end, our revolution was a conflict between colonizer and colonizer.

In the meantime, ask yourself why there are reservations.  It seems obvious but I think we forget or overlook the reality of it, the profundity of the situation we’ve inherited.  I try to remember because my engagement with postcolonial theory began with the village and the reservation.  At 19, I was part of a short term missions trip to Alaska.  We traveled in and out of Native villages that were filled with darkness, with alcoholism and abuse, drug use, teenage pregnancy and suicide.  The despair was palpable.

Don’t get me wrong, I saw real beauty in Native ways.  I learned how to laugh at myself that summer.  I’ll tell you about it sometime.  It’s a story about an Athabaskan chief making fun of me for eating chicken.  I also learned to be quiet.  But the pain I saw still left me with questions I couldn’t answer.

Like bell hooks, I turned to theory to answer these questions, to put language to experiences I couldn’t otherwise understand.  That’s why I’ve come to see Alaska as a colonized and decolonized place.  The processes devastated their cultural and social infrastructures and left a bleak landscape in their wake.

The experience radically re-shaped how I think about missionary work.  That’s probably a topic for another day.  Suffice it to say, I don’t think missions work is malicious or bankrupt.  What I experienced in Alaska completely altered how I thought about what it should look like.

In the meantime, the experience prepared me to recognize some fundamental facts.  When a people are colonized, giving them back their sovereignty—which is effectively what reservations are meant to do—doesn’t solve the problem.  It’s all too easy in the aftermath of decolonization to blame the continued disorder on a failure of personal responsibility.  David Spurr writes about this rhetorical tendency in his book The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, using the AIDS crisis in Africa to illustrate.  In the eyes and words of too many Western journalists, the problem was created by a failure of responsibility and the inability of African governments to solve the problem is evidence of their inherent weakness (Spurr, 90-91).

The problems of the reservation fall under the same topos.  A drunk Indian on a street corner in downtown Hardin, Montana at 4pm on a Tuesday is a stereotype that becomes a symbol of the failure and weakness of the Indian community.  The drunk Indian on the corner lacks personal responsibility.  It’s a plausible conclusion and all but impossible to resist.

It’s a temptation that should be resisted, though, if we’re ever going to get a clear picture of the problem.  This rhetorical tendency is actually an extension of colonial discourse.  The internal disorder of the native is often part of the stated justification of the colonial enterprise.  In Spurr’s words, colonial writers place the colonial project “against the setting of emptiness and disorder by which it has defined the other” (109).   Naturally, order and disorder are defined from our own frame of reference, which may or may not correspond to theirs.  It doesn’t matter.  If they are disordered and we are not, then it is not only our right but perhaps even our duty to impose order on them.

The drunk Indian on the corner does lack something.  His lack is a symptom of the devastation of his community.  Whether or not there was genuine disorder prior to colonization, there is a certain level of disorder now that should not be reduced to personal responsibility.  It cannot and should not be understood outside of the historical processes that produced it.

Perhaps the most painful realization is that we are all deeply implicated in those processes.  This is a difficult thing to accept and it is certainly something I will take up again in greater detail.  For now, I will simply assert that in Alaska, I came to understand how a process like colonization could produce ill effects generation after generation—effects that are too long-standing and too pervasive to be reduced to personal responsibility or choice.

To put it another way, there is a greater evil at work in the world.  It is a magnifying evil.  When I was in Alaska, we called it demonic.  I still embrace that way of naming it.  It is not an unrooted, ahistorical evil.  We are no less implicated in abetting it.  And yet insofar as our great enemy is corruption and death, the visible ruin we saw, the wreck of humanity we encountered can be called evil, can be named as that which Jesus died to redeem.

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