Waziyatwin
Matriarch Monday
Waziyatwin
Waziyatawin is a Dakota writer, teacher, and activist committed to the development of liberation strategies that will support the recovery of Indigenous ways of being, the reclamation of Indigenous homelands, and the eradication of colonial institutions. Waziyatawin comes from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Village) in southwestern Minnesota. After receiving her Ph.D. in American history from Cornell University in 2000, she earned tenure and an associate professorship in the history department at Arizona State University where she taught for seven years. Waziyatawin currently holds the Indigenous Peoples Research Chair in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Her interests include projects centering on Indigenous decolonization strategies such as truth-telling and reparative justice, Indigenous women and resistance, the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, and the development of liberation ideology in Indigenous communities.She is the author, editor, or co-editor of five volumes including: Remember This!: Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives (University of Nebraska Press 2005); Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities (University of Nebraska Press 2004); For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (School of Advanced Research Press 2005); In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century (Living Justice Press 2006); and, her most recent volume, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (Living Justice Press 2008).
Waziyatawin is also the founder and director of Oyate Nipi Kte, a non-profit organization dedicated to the recovery of Dakota traditional knowledge, sustainable ways of being, and Dakota liberation.
Towards a Turtle Island Without Canada or the US: Talking Decolonization with Waziyatawin
Editor’s Note: This interview with Waziyatwin was recorded by Healing the Earth on September 26, 2007. While the links on their website seem to be dead, we dug up the interviews on Rabble.ca. We are republishing it here, more than four years later, because it remains relevant and powerful. Enjoy.
Waziyatawin is Wahpetunwan Dakota from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe in southwestern Minnesota. She is the author of Remember This!: Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives, In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century, co-editor of Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, and is the co-editor of For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook.
In this interview she talks at length about colonization and decolonization – the physical and mental aspects of decolonization work for both indigenous and non-indigenous communities, how to recognize that there is another way to live that is radically outside of institutions like federal, state, and provincial governments, how to break through our identification with the colonizer, and so on. She also talks of appropriate ways people who are not indigenous to Turtle Island can work not only in solidarity with indigenous people, but in active decolonization in our own communities as well.
A decolonized world can be very difficult to imagine, given that the physical reality is so very different now than it was before colonization. For example, most habitat for wild animals is poisoned or clearcut, leaving us very little ability to live free of the capitalist system. We have been forced into dependence on the very system that is killing us and the planet, and it is the escape from and destruction of this conundrum that Waziyatawin explores in this interview.
Part I: Talking Decolonization with Waziyatawin
Part II: What Does Decolonization Look Like?
Source: https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/