Graphic courtesy of the Native Students Union.
Colonization isn’t a singular event, or a concept simple enough to be understood through a small blurb in a textbook or article page; it’s an everyday experience and it’s complex.
I think, or at least hope, that many of our non-Indigenous readers already understand this or have come across this conversation.
It is important to read Indigenous history and authors. However no words on a page will be able to convey the feeling of having Indigenous historical traumas embedded into the gene codes that make up our biological processes (epigenetics).
I think about children, and how curious they are. Children have a very important role in communities across so-called ‘Kanada’ because they are expected to learn and carry knowledge taught to them throughout their upbringing, so it’s later taught to their children, and their children, and so on.
Young people are treated as the future – because they are – and knowledge is circular so it must go around.
This shared cyclical understanding ensured the survival of over 70 Indigenous languages carrying immemorial amounts of knowledge, history, lessons, cultures, and elements of our identity that are continuously stolen from in this country.
Humans learn easiest at a young age, and I believe this was well understood by Indigenous people long before the science behind it was discovered.
In 2022, a team of researchers based at Browns University discovered that children exhibit a higher concentration of y-aminobutyric acid, aka ‘GABA’, when using visual learning methods. GABA is responsible for solidifying information in the brain for later use, allowing children to learn more efficiently than adults even if underdeveloped.
For adults ages 18-35 years old, GABA concentration levels remained unchanged during and after the learning process, juxtaposed to children whose brains acted quickly to stabilize any new knowledge consumed.
This suggests that what’s previously unknown or not understood to developed people is more susceptible to being forgotten or not fully comprehended due to the consolidation of our previous experiences that we compare our ideas to, contrasted to a child’s lack thereof, at least in a visual context.
I guess the idiom: “it goes in one ear and out the other” is a little more scientifically based then one would like to think.
Given this study, I think it’s important to always be aware of what was taught to us as children and to always question that knowledge, never stop.
Ask yourselves: how has exposure to the colonial reality of so-called ‘Kanada’ really affected Indigenous and non-Indigenous kids during peak GABA concentration?
I think a consequential idea I see Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks regularly battle is the notion that ‘Indigeneity is far away from us historically’. That it is a step removed from what we are today. Yet every time someone mentions when the last residential school shut down, people are surprised how close events with generational consequences are to the present.
I’ve also witnessed reflections in Indigenous and non-Indigenous spaces on where our goals for the future come from. As students, a good chunk of us aspire to acquire a job post-grad that provides enough capital to hopefully own property some day or fund lifestyles we were promised if we laboured enough. But what is the root of this idea? Read John Locke’s On Property and see what he says about Indigenous people, then tell me if we should still consider his ideas as worthy of manifesting in our systems.
Scientifically-speaking, it is harder to re-learn what we must do to act better, to act right. But when we bring our new knowledge to the future generation, we can find solace in knowing they’ll learn it more efficiently, picking up the cycle that kept us surviving for decades into time beyond.
Everyone in this country will stumble upon Indigeneity and what happens when you do matters. So what do you know? What do you need to know? What will you say to the future?
To close this off, I’ll leave you with two values from my home community: Ohnîrhpa nîchiyek, Wogidâ ya/Don’t be discouraged and keep going.
