The first steps to decolonization

This article is the first in a series exploring decolonization in northeast Oklahoma.

Written By: Rachael Schuit

(TVLSE, Okla.) For hundreds of years, colonizers have fought to erase or at the very least oppress Native people, culture and ways of life. While some tribes were destroyed, more than 500 tribes remain.

Over 8 million people in the United States identify as Native American or Alaska Native. Experts estimate nearly twice that many Natives were living on the land that would later become the United States, and seven times that many were living on what many Indigenous groups call “Turtle Island”, or North America, before colonizers came over from Spain in the late 1400s. Those colonizers were soon followed by expeditions and conquests from the Dutch, French, and finally the British. 

Fast forward to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, when tribes like the Muscogee (Creek) were forced from their ancestral homelands to west of the Mississippi River. Many tribes, like the Apache, Arapaho, Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita were already living in what is now Oklahoma. Today, the state is home to 39 tribes. 

The City of Tulsa sits on the intersection of three tribes: Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Osage Nation, and Cherokee Nation. Though Tulsa was once allotted land, a small fraction of that land remains with its original allottees following legalized theft systems established following the forced removal and exacerbated by the Crime of 1908.

Colonization has had significant negative impacts on Native people, in addition to the accounts of loss of life, land, and culture above. Those losses have also manifested in health disparity and wealth inequality many communities still struggle with today. And no clear end in sight.    

While decolonization efforts have been steadily building over the last several decades, in 2024, the systems of colonization still hold fast across Turtle Island.  

Dr. Ijeoma Nnodim Opara, a double board certified doctor and editor of the Racism and Health section of PLOS Global Health, says those championing the idea of decolonizing global health might need to rethink their course. 

In her article “It’s time to Decolonize The Decolonization Movement,” Opara writes the first step to authentic decolonization is breaking free of colonial frameworks. 

“We cannot decolonize global health using the same logics, dynamics, and paradigms that birthed it in the first place,” she wrote. “We cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.”

Opara’s decolonization framework through a global health space lens also provides a strong foundation for the first steps for decolonization in our communities, and one dependent on community involvement if that framework were to be followed: 

• Be flexible to multiple definitions and interpretations. Opara writes it is a colonial construct that everything has to be rigidly defined and have only one definition.
• Center Majority World leaders in all decolonization efforts.
• Integrate with other movements working to dismantle intersecting systems of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and others. 
• Conduct critical introspection of how power systems and people benefit from intersectional systems of oppression.

“Liberation begins in our own imagination, in our own individual and collective selves before it can be translated externally,” Opara said. “Decolonizing our minds and emancipating our imagination is key to our liberation.” 

Opara also provides the wrong way to decolonize, including: 

• Efforts devoid of a critical analysis of power, history, and sociopolitics
• Curricula that re-marginalizes, de-prioritizes, and minimizes the lived experiences, expertise, and epistemologies of indigenous communities
• Views of situations in binary terms and, therefore, in “tension” versus in multifaceted, intersectional, and in harmony
• The absence of a commitment to justice and engagement with community-led justice and liberation movements 

“Without healing from our own trauma, we are doomed to reproduce it among ourselves and reinforce the same systems of dominance in our problem-solving processes,” Opara said. “We need to be thoroughly purged from centuries of psychosocial conditioning and internalized colonization grounded in European and American myths and lies of who we are, where we come from, our abilities, value, contributions to the world, and how our current state of affairs came to be.”

What do you think about Opara’s framework for decolonization? Take the Catalyst News Decolonization survey and let us know if you would be interested in exploring these topics further as a collective.