How to decolonize your mind: Part I 🌍🔥⚔️
How to decolonize your mind: Part I 🌍🔥⚔️
How Indigenous Wisdom can help us understand the violent riots across the UK and rethink property, immigration and legal personhood
I remember the moment she said it, and I have to be honest—I laughed.
We were in a packed room full of 75 people at Startup Lisboa, hosting the first ReFi Lisboa event, and a Colombian woman took the microphone and looked straight at everyone and said “Stop owning shit. I challenge every single one of you to decolonize your minds.”
I didn’t laugh because I disagreed, I laughed because her claim seemed so impossible, so far fetched, and yet a part of me felt deep insecurity and discomfort in the presence of the anger and pain seared into the movements of her face. My body could feel the resonance of truth, but it was dripping with guilt and shame.
Planting quiet seeds of hope 🌱
Fast forward 18 months and I have now invested hundreds of hours working through a stack of books written by indigenous teachers who have not only opened my mind to the atrocities of our colonial past but also the essential nature of the kinship worldview that has cultivated symbiotic relationships between humans and the more-than-human world for centuries.
Indigenous communities make up less than 5% of the world’s population and are responsible for protecting approximately 80% of global biodiversity. It is here in this niche distribution and disproportionate responsibility that we find the keys to a regenerative future, but in order to access them we must first learn how to decolonize our minds…
The core belief of the colonial mind is “I am greater than you are; you are lesser than me” and it is the predominant driver of conflict on the world stage. It reveals itself most commonly in the collective “us versus them” mentality.
The techno-solutionist reckoning 🤖
After nearly two decades working in tech I’ve come to realize that technology alone won’t save us, in fact it’s causing a lot of the planetary challenges we face. Technology is fast-paced, capital-driven, sexy and powerful… but it is merely a vehicle for intention that emerges from our worldview, and in this case—the colonial “us versus them”.
On the other hand, Indigenous wisdom is like a quiet labyrinthine box of human possibility, tucked away beneath the mountain of genocide upon which our entire society is built. Indigenous wisdom is like a tiny seed that once planted begins to grow and provide shade, shelter and habitat for the diversity of life.
It is best expressed in the “We are all relations” of the Americas and the “I am because we are” of Africa. It is an entirely different way of seeing the world and of understanding the self in context to other, to land, to ancestors and to time.
Without indigenous wisdom and the worldview it creates, every technology we build will merely add more fuel to the flame of our extractive society.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World 🪶
One of my favorite books in the reading stack so far has been Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World. I’ve been reading works like this alongside titles like The Age of AI to help me apply indigenous thinking to the acceleration of exponential technologies and the planetary challenges they cause.
Yunkaporta defines five ways of thinking inspired by Indigenous traditions through symbols that can be easily drawn in the sand and explained to a child. In the essay below, we’ll use these five modes of thinking to understand the violent riots in the UK through the lens of these new thinking tools.
But first we’ll start off with a short synthesis of the riots in the UK based on my experience living in Israel, Egypt and India (2011, 2012) as well as the UK (2015-2022).
Violent riots in the UK: How did we get here? 🔍
I first moved to the UK in 2015, a year before Brexit, and witnessed the first wave of the European refugee crisis hit British soils in dramatic fashion. We welcomed refugees into our home, lobbied local government to accept unaccompanied minors and built a directory of local refugee relief initiatives across Europe.
The latest riots in the UK are the culmination of the last ten years of cultural tension between British citizens and immigrants fomented by political leaders’ tactic to induce fear through media in order to influence voters and ultimately gain power. Right-wing media and politicians intentionally cultivated voters’ antagonism toward immigrants as a primary campaign lever—filling headlines with fear-mongering narratives about immigration’s detrimental impact on British society, which continued on for the next 9 years until boiling over last weekend…
This kind of daily onslaught of “us versus them” combined with the algorithm-driven and machine-learning enhanced echo-chambers of social media created an inevitable pressure chamber for rising conflict and cultural tension. The cost of living crisis caused by Brexit fallout and pandemic quantitative easing added the final ingredients of a perfect storm. As with many conflicts, the bubble burst with the needle of a misleading claim on social media that a muslim immigrant was responsible for a horrific stabbing on the news, when in fact, this turned out to be untrue—but by that point the riots had already begun.
Elon of course didn’t help calm the situation by claiming that civil war is inevitable in the UK and has in fact been repeatedly commenting that civil war is brewing across Europe for years now...
While digging into Elon’s bizarre Interplanetary Transhumanist Utopia isn’t the scope of this essay, understanding the impact of influencers via in this unfolding conflict is central. Tobias Rose-Stockwell’s book Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent and Disrupts Democracy describes this dynamic perfectly:
“Social media algorithms, which favor contentious posts and articles because they generate the most responses, tap into users’ evolutionary impulse to rally around those who share one’s values (the ‘in-group’), thereby solidifying one’s allegiance to those ideals while increasing outrage toward dissenters.”
Recap
These recent riots are a mere manifestation of a multi-decade political narrative that pins British citizens against immigrants—a classic “us versus them” tactic in the colonial “divide and conquer” strategy. The steep rise in cost of living caused by a post-Brexit and post-pandemic economy added additional pressure to an increasingly polarized society. Misleading social media posts about a violent knife attack tipped tensions over the edge into these riots.
Takeaway
The derisive “us versus them” narratives espoused by leaders today will never serve us nor the planet. We need a new kind of leadership inspired by indigenous thinking that unites people across differences, reminds us of our common ancestry and compels us to work together to overcome the planetary challenges we all face as a species.
Yunkaporta’s Five Modes of Indigenous Thinking 🧐
With an overview of the underlying colonial drivers of the violent riots in the UK, I’d like to explore how Indigenous Thinking can help us move through these challenges and uncover new possibilities for reconciliation.
Kinship-Mind
Kinship-mind emphasizes relationships and interconnectedness. It recognizes that we are all relations and that these connections define our identity and create our experience of life. Jews and Muslims are descendants of the same father—Abraham. Isaac and Ishmael were brothers. This kinship has been overshadowed by early family trauma that cast Ishmael and his mother Hagar into the desert and the centuries of conflict that ensued. Acknowledging this kinship and the resulting pain can be the first step towards compassion and reconciliation. Understanding and nurturing these familial bonds can help us see the humanity in each other, even amidst strife.
Story-Mind
Story-mind is about the narratives we create and share. These stories shape the unconscious landscape of our beliefs and ultimately our identity. The trauma passed down through generations of violence has created narratives of “us versus them” for centuries. We have the opportunity to retelling these stories with a new lens on the shared challenges we face as a species and the values that bring us together. By intentionally re-writing our inner narratives we can reshape our understanding and pave the way for reconciliation. Stories of collaboration and peacebuilding, rather than enmity, can transform the dynamics of these conflicts.
Dreaming-Mind
Dreaming-mind involves envisioning possibilities beyond our current realities. It encourages us to dream of a better future. Male-dominated hierarchical societies have perpetuated these cycles of greed and violence, but we can dream of a symbiotic society where equality and mutual respect prevail. Community ceremonies, sacred medicine, somatic therapy, and mutual aid can guide us toward this vision. Dreaming-mind allows us to imagine a world where these religions and peoples navigate through conflict with wisdom and compassion.
Ancestor-Mind
Ancestor-mind connects us to the wisdom of those who came before us. It recognizes the cyclical nature of time and the importance of learning from our past as well as long-term thinking for our descendants. The trauma and conflicts of our ancestors will likely repeat through us if we do not do the work to cleanse this trauma from our bodies, our hearts and our minds.
We can learn to ‘love our enemies’ and ‘love our neighbor’ by processing our pain, reconciling our mistakes and recognizing the sacred nature of all life. This perspective draws us to a bigger picture of the universe and utlimately what it means to be human, transcending the immediate conflicts and connecting us to a timeless wisdom.
Pattern-Mind
Pattern-mind sees the recurring themes and connections in our war-torn society. World leaders perpetually create an archetypal ‘enemy of the people’. The impact this has on society is crucial and unmistakable. The recent vilification of Islam began with Jihadists but has now extended to immigrants as a whole. By identifying this destructive narrative pattern, we can deconstruct them and move beyond their antagonistic prerogatives.
The systemic implications of climate migration🗺️
The UN estimates that climate change could create up to 1.2 billion climate migrants by 2050 due to rising sea levels, extreme weather, and resource scarcity.
We as Westerners need to recognize the central role we’ve played in creating this climate catastrophe and commit to reconcile the wounds we have inflicted upon first peoples and their descendants, otherwise we may delude ourselves into thinking “these people have no right to be here,” when in actuality—neither do we.
Wait… if this land is NOT our land—then whose is it? 🤔
If we peel back the pages of the history we will remember that much of the land of Western nations were inhabited first by indigenous, aboriginal peoples. The Sami in northern Europe, the Picts and Celts in UK, the Cherokee, Lakota, and Navajo in the United States, and Aboriginal people of Australia.
The notion of cyclical time helps us to better understand the past, present and future as one entangled web with recurring themes and patterns.
Reimagining property, immigration and personhood
By humbling ourselves in the big picture of history we realize we have to radically rethink the concepts of property, immigration and personhood to accommodate for the planetary age in which we now live.
These three legal constructs are products of the colonial mind whose extractive tentacles extend into every aspect of society. As the complexity and tension in our world continue to accelerate we will be forced to reexamine the very foundations of our civilization and in doing so we will be pleased to discover:
This is not the only way. Look to the communities, leadership and governance of indigenous peoples for answers. Use technology to bring these new insights to life and redistribute power back to the people and channel resources back to the land—the source of everything we need to survive.
Moving Forward 🏞️
By applying these five ways of knowing, we can begin to better understand these metacrisis moments we see in the news today. We need to humble ourselves before the bloodlines of colonial history and ultimately to strive to ‘love our enemies’ and ‘love our neighbor’. We must recognize the sacred nature of all of life and the cyclical patterns of time. This can help us see the bigger picture of the universe and what it means to be human. At the end of the day thinking is only valuable insofar as it leads to action. We each need to play our part.
Within this view, several takeaways for leaders around the world become clear:
Political leaders need to take responsibility for the polarizing narratives they have been using to gain power.
Lawmakers needs to regulate political campaigns and social media platforms to systematically reduce polarizing and violence-inducing content.
Health officials need to regulate the therapeutic use of sacred medicines and introduce somatic modalities for treatment of trauma, anxiety and depression.
Community leaders need to host sacred ceremonies for grieving, healing and reconciliation.
For everyday people, small, simple actions can go a long way:
Smile at the next store clerk you meet and ask them how they and their family are doing
Take a few minutes to get to know your waiter or waitress. Ask their name, get curious about their life outside work. Tip them generously and wish them well.
Get outside into nature and enjoy a few hours without technology. Feel the presence of these peaceful more-than-human beings.
Breathe deeply, smile and consider all the blessings of your life. Extend your gratitude to the people you love and those you don’t…
In conclusion, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk offers invaluable insights into how Indigenous thinking can guide us through rising cultural tensions with more compassion and understanding. By applying the wisdom of kinship-mind, story-mind, dreaming-mind, ancestor-mind, and pattern-mind, we can learn how to navigate the complexities of our modern world with discernment, paving the way for a more peaceful and abundant future for generations to come.