From Colonisation to Nativity

“Why do white (and ‘westernised’) people refer to indigenous people without referring to themselves?”

This question plagued me for over a decade. The answer is very easy for European descent Americans and Australians - but not so for Europeans. It led me on a journey that took me to some very unexpected breakthroughs of perspective . As ever with my work, there are no new words here, just a different way of using the ones we already have, to point to something that reveals a very different picture than the general social view of these matters.

Summary:

On this page I will share a different perspective, understanding and relationship between the following words than you will be used to:

Native, Alternative, Colony, Colonisation, Decolonisation, Culture, Nativity.

The benefit of this perspective is that many people who have explored it have found a softening of charge towards ‘white people’, others have found a dissolution of their ‘white shame’, others have experienced a homecoming of sorts within themselves, with a sense of ‘understanding how they fit’ in the world a bit better, with an ease of being that can follow.

I used to be excited to attend ‘alternative’ lifestyle events, and to think of myself as part of the ‘alternatives’ - so much so I have owned the domain ‘alternativeanswers.net’ since 2004!

Then I found something deeper: that alternative is a phrase used by those who seek to claim the ‘centre ground,’ or those who seek to avoid it.

The ‘alternative’ is not the main event. It’s the smaller, lesser choice. It’s ‘the other one.’

Over decades, I have lived, served and visited between various types of ‘alternative’ community – from permaculture projects to ‘sovereign’ ones, to medicine and various spiritual/’new age’, sound-related and philosophical ones.

I realised that a lot of these so-called ‘alternative’ approaches, were really a return to a more native way of living or relating – with each other, the world, and the many forces that move through and in it, and us.

I saw ‘alternative medicine’ was really a return to more native medicine.

Alternative agriculture, from forest gardening to permaculture, was a return to a more native way of growing and tending.

‘Alternative movement’ and sound and ‘spiritual practices’ are a quest to return to a more native and integrated way of living with the unseen but palpable and influential forces that surround and permeate us.

Across many aspects (but certainly not all) of the ‘alternative world’, I saw this same quality.

I saw a tender aspiration hidden in all these clunky ‘alternative’ scenes, to reclaim a lost sense of connection and relationship with so many things: our bodies, our selves, each other; the land, the animals, the plants; ‘the spirit of and in things’ and how it moves us in sound, movement and expression.

It all had the same marker : a being moved by a silent yearning within, from a sense of not fitting or things not being ‘right’ as they are/were.

AlterNative

All of a sudden, I saw the image of white collar and hippy men close-eyed and lost in expressive movement at a 5 rhtyhms session differently – i saw the yearning in it all more clearly, as well as the scale of disconnection they were starting from, before trying ‘alternative’ stuff.

Even in so-called ‘cultural appropriation:’ I see it now as a tender but unskilful effort to be connected to the realness that examples of embodied native-ness convey to those sensitive to ‘what is missing’ in their world.

This is why I refer to it as alterNative - I Saw a alterNative Intelligence moving through each example.

A alterNative Intelligence that was inherent, natural, sensitive and pervasive.

An Intelligence that was emergent, not imposed;

Syn(es)thetic and seeking to be whole-some, not disembodied and separate.

I realised that this was a natural decolonisation of the European Native Peoples: a healing, and return, for contrary to popular belief, the white european was colonised before they became coloniser.

colonisation is not just ‘a past event about land’ - it is something that takes place in each new life, as all humans are born wholly native and indigenous.

Colonisation happens afresh to each of us individually. And it can be undone by each of us individually, if so desired

What Is Colonisation?

When people speak of colonisation, they tend to refer to a form of invasion (or the occupation of uninhabited land.) This is land colonisation.

But when we speak of ‘decolonisation’, we speak of not land, but of people. So how does a person become ‘colonised’, and what does it mean?

As a stepping stone to understanding, let us consider bacteria in a petri dish…also called a colony. Other times a culture.

I’m sure science readers will be quick to correct me that ‘the culture is actually the medium the colony grows in’….. well… we’ll get to that! And you’re kinda getting ahead there! This is step 1 of a lay thought experiment… not a science fair.

So in human terms, what then is a ‘culture’?

A culture is a set of beliefs, perspective, values and ways of living and being – from the simplest everyday etiquette, to the most profound perspectives and ‘truths held dear’ of a people.

It is the groups answer (through their shared living) to questions such as :

What is a human being?

What should a human being be doing to be a good and contributory human, to its people, and to life itself?

What relationship do humans have with each other? Other earth life? the Cosmos?

What is our place in it all? What direction are we as a people ‘going in’?

What is our shared vision of living and being and doing and progressing?

What is the measure of a successful or worthwhile life? A successful or worthwhile relationship?

How should men and women and children relate and treat each other?

How should we treat and relate with other life forms, and other forces and energies we encounter?

What conduct or activity should we as a people reward with Responsibility? Or Power? or Authority?

What should be a persons relationship and reference with the unseen or inexplicable forces they may experience in life be?

These are the bigger questions, but then there are all the minutiae of daily interactions that are ‘cultural’ – from property ownership to conflict resolution, education and training and work, to garments and social norms in the marketplace.

It is these big questions though that really tell us what is happening during the individual human colonisation process:

Colonisation is the effect of the imposition and immersion in a set of non-native values, beliefs, perspective & behaviours

It is a change in perspective, values and practice that results from that immersion, to be in line with that of the coloniser.

We are not born ‘colonised.’ How could we be? But we can be surrounded by those who have been. Over time, one set of values, beliefs and behaviours replaces what was there before.

The Colonisation that can give way to Decolonisation is not something that happens to the land, or the body : it happens to the mind of human beings.

This is what happened to the native europeans: white natives. Their beautiful and diverse tapestry of native tribes and groups met the brutal homogeny of the Roman war machine, its Church, and the States they produced.

The devastating colonisation of their native tribes was, in its own way, as brutal as that experienced by the native americans or australians at their own hands centuries later, although it was spread over more time.

I realise this last statement will be immensely triggering for some ‘invested people’ who REALLY want to blame ‘white people’ for all things negative around colonisation. The fact is that while the white European did become a coloniser, they were colonised first - they were not ‘first tier colonisers.’

Ask native Americans and Australians if they know any songs or stories of their people. Ask if they remember any of the old values, beliefs and understandings of relationships? Yes – they do. In both cases.

Have they been ‘allowed to keep them?’ Yes, though subject to immense pressure to give them up.

Ask if they have somewhere to live together on land, to try to maintain their values and ways and beliefs? Yes – both do, even though it’s the least fertile or hospitable land.

Ask the Europeans now. They have but fragments of threads of stories and songs, and very little of the old ways, values, perspective and beliefs.

Not only do they mostly not know their old native stories, songs and ways of living and being, but they have not one square inch of land to try to hold onto it in. Not even a single rock to stand on to be allowed to live in native ways.

By virtue of nowhere to hold onto their ways on, and with all the public keepers of such wisdom wiped out by the romans, the church, and the resultant States, we are left with hundreds of millions of native humans who do not even for a moment think of themselves when they speak of ‘indigenous people.’

I am not apologising for the deeds of European colonisers here at all, nor am I suggesting that Australian or American natives have been well treated. I am looking at the period that created them out of European Natives for the purpose of understanding the natural decolonisation we can see happening in some of the European descent ‘alternative’ scene.

I am also looking from the larger perspective at the unimaginable travesty of the countless millions of people who have no idea as to their indigenousness, their native-ness, nor what that even means, nor the tragedy of the consequences.

Those who live in the ways of the colony often end up hating themselves, harming themselves, harming others. They end up depressed, anxious, disconnected, addicted, mentally unwell and medicated, and even suicidal. Native peoples do not experience those things in the way the colonised do.

I experienced most of those things trying to fit into the colony. My journey took me from miserable in the colony, to a wild adventure in the Alternatives, until I found Native-ness when all those things started to heal and dissolve for me, and I saw the Natural Decolonisation unfurling all around me.

Natural Decolonisation

Not everyone subjected to colonial immersion is ‘successfully colonised.’

Land can be invaded. People bullied, reconditioned, coerced or treatised with. But not everyone will be ‘fully colonised.’

Some are rejected by ‘the colony’ and others simply cannot and do not ‘fit,’ doomed to be cast to the fringe and mocked or derogated because something about them doesn’t fit ‘colony values.’ For others, colonisation just doesn’t fully take hold.

For some, their innate, native relationship with the world keeps contradicting the set of values and beliefs of the colony (imposed culture), and at some point, there is a chance to choose one or the other. Tragically, because people are not aware of ‘what is happening’ in such a situation, they often live lives of turmoil and suffering.

The colony has the cheek to call such people ‘alternative’, when really, it is the colonised person who is the true ‘altered native.’

In this way, the colony gets to ‘claim everyone’ as they can just be called ‘fringe members of the colony.’ None the wiser, such people writhe in the contradiction between what is within them, and what surrounds them.

For some, true natural decolonisation is easier because they were never ‘fully colonised’, but for others, it is a profound world and life changing event.

In all such flavours decolonisation itself is NATURAL, and it is exactly what we are seeing in so many ‘alternative scenes’ as people are both returning to more native ways of living & relating and replacing the values, beliefs, perspective and behaviours of the colony with natively emergent ones.

One thing is for sure - decolonisation is not a proscribed set of deeds. It is not about shame or guilt or blame; nor is it about power contests ‘within the colony structures’.

Each of these are passed off as ‘decolonisation’ just now, and really, all such things are part of a war for power within the colony eg anything suggesting ‘white shame’ is an appropriate ‘decolonised position’, or that people alive are to be held accountable for the deeds of those long dead.

Such strategies still use colonised-mind psychology and perspective to achieve their goals for power within the colony in a most underhand manner. In a way, it is ‘third wave colonisation.’ The Romans and their church brought the first wave, the Brits, Spanish and Portuguese the second. This ‘shame and blame for power within the colony’ strategy appears to be a third wave takeover bid within the power structures of the colony - but with nothing to replace it with.

In it’s natural form, decolonisation is the effervescent and naturally emergent journey to return to a more native, and integrated set of values, beliefs and behaviours. It is a return to what is more real, what had primacy before we were colonised - not hundreds of years ago, but in this life.

Decolonising…But To What?

This leaves us with a few unresolved questions. Progressive natural decolonisation yields ever increasing ‘native-ness’ but what does that look like in native europeans when there is no native culture to be immersed in, no ready-made songs to just pickup and sing? No landed community to go join as a remembranced member?

Further, since there is an element of ‘natural selection’ when one set of ideas, beliefs and values overtakes another, which ‘native belief set’ is one ‘returning to’ after decolonisation? Does the one of Nigerian-American descent suddenly become a native Nigerian? `Does the modern Scot decolonise to a Pict, a Viking, something else?

Further, if we are talking about decolonising the colonising process that took place in our own lives, then what on earth are we decolonising to, or as? From the perspective of the colonised mind, ‘we weren’t anything before being colonised’ due to being infants and very young children. This is simply an ignorance within the colonised set of values, beliefs and perspective, not a truth.

This is where we have to look at what is really meant by native.

When most people use the term ‘native’ they usually mean ‘an uncolonised tribe’ or ‘someone born locally.’ The latter meaning has seen resurgence in the West as a means of differentiating locals from migrants in recent years.

When I speak of the nativeness that is the result of natural decolonisation, I obviously don’t mean ‘born locally.’ So if it is not reversion to a prior cultural iteration, for how could it be? Neither an act of shame-filled penance (time to stop the white shaming,) what is it?

And If I am suggesting that overcoming the colonisation that happened within our lives would decolonise to what existed before it - what the heck is that? We were all babies! What did we have?

This is where the fascinating term Nativity brings profound nuance to this understanding of nativeness, and a incomparable outcome of ‘decolonisation’ to those who’s version leads them to wage wars of power, shame, blame and competition, or those for whom the word means ‘locals.’

This is where we need Nativity as our marker that helps clarify how it is neither of these things.

To get the final piece of our puzzle of natural decolonisation, we have to look at the most common understanding of the word today. And most unusually, the word does not get used with a specific reference to a state or thing, but to a story. A very pervasive and impactful one: even in the colony!

I speak, of course, of the tale of the birth of Jesus as The Nativity.

Let’s summarise the tale for those who don’t know it: a young couple are refused access to an Inn (colony infrastructure) when the woman is on the verge of giving birth.

They end up with a child being born surrounded by animals (implied by the notion of being placed in a ‘manger’, an animal feeding trough), under the stars. That’s… a pretty native entry into the world, by any measure. It’s certainly not very ‘civilised’ from a colonial perspective!

Every Nativity scene shows the same thing : animals; straw and manger; stars…all implications of being exposed to the real world, with little resource.

Pretty native by any measure.

So what is the message in this story? And what does it have to do with us understanding what a native is in the context of a ‘naturally decolonising’ one?

Reclaiming Nativity

In English, all prefixes and suffixes have a specific effect on the word it is added to.

the suffix ‘-ity’ is like this.

It is often described in its effect as ‘denoting a state, condition, quality or degree of being.’

It’s actually more distilled than that: It denotes ‘the measure of the core word,’ with the top end of the scale of the measure being ‘the absolute state of the thing’ eg infinity

Examples:

Legality is the measure of ‘how legal something is’

Validity is the measure of ‘how valid it is’

Serenity is the measure of ‘how serene it is’

Opacity is the measure of ‘how opaque it is’

By the same function, the word Nativity is clearly ‘the measure of how native one is’

Each child enters the world native: undifferentiated, embodied, present, relationally connected to things in a state of integration virtually alien to the colonised.

They arrive with their native intelligence intact—an innate and synesthetic way of sensing, relating, and orienting to life. Able to learn to walk just by observation, and to learn to operate vocal chords just by watching and listening, able to learn a language just by hearing it. We all have that. And did that. And those are just ‘the absolute basics,’ and yet we have no idea how we did that, nor even how we do it now. No one shows you what you actually do with muscles, or vocal chords or how to control a bladder or bowel. Yet we did it.

That is Native Intelligence, and it knows. It was t/here first. Just because an infant is unable to act on that relationship in a way recognisable to the colonised, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t, and isn’t, t/here. Naturally renewed, ready for evolution, with every new life. In me. In you.

Natural Decolonisation is not a campaign , nor is it ‘a rejection of ‘the West by the Rest,’ nor some wacky ‘alternative fringe ideology’ seeking to escape colonial social responsibilities.

It is the restoration of, and acting on, the natural, personal emergent connection and conversation the unseen Forces in life are having within and around you, including the Divine.

The same ‘conversation’ that’s been underway your whole life, just drowned out by colonial noise, demands and activity that’s been underway since birth.

Nativity, and natural decolonisation, is the complete and total reset of all iterations of previous belief and value sets, to make room for what is emergent. For ‘The Needs of The Now.’ Not what the colony thinks - not its academics and intellectuals, but what life itself brings through individuals in mysterious ways inconceivable to the colonised.

And this is what we see in the alternative scene referred to earlier - values, relationships, beliefs, success markers: all the big questions above have an emergent answer unfolding right now, if we can get out of the ‘colonised mind.’

Piece by piece, belief by belief, value by value, we see the ‘alternative’ lot either restoring or reimagining these in a way that I Iike to call Emergencey. I left the ‘e’ in so you wouldn’t confuse it with the colonised use of the word ‘emergency.’

Some of those values and beliefs will be akin to what is seen in other native cultures around the world, past or present, others are truly newly emergent.

This is where it is fascinating to me that the sole remaining use of the word Nativity is a pervasive story about someone who had a personal relationship with the colonised notion of ‘The Divine’ – and acted on it.

The lived message of this person was that one can integrate and restore that personal, undifferentiated relationship, that personal conversation within and without, that Nativity, to the level of ‘my father and I are One’ (Jesus said this.). In this, he was referring to true integration. True nativeness. True Nativity. All connections intact and restored.

And this Natural Decolonisation, this emergent journey to Nativity is happening: spontaneously & irrepressibly wherever alternative intelligence reawakens.

The blood and genes and spirit of humanity does not forget this, as we are now seeing in the stirring of the bloodlines of the European Natives in their journey from Colonisation to Nativity that is irrevocably underway for those who have gone alternative.

While we cannot truly forget, we can be distracted. We can be drowned in so much noise and pain and misdirected modelling that we seem to forget, and seem to be lost. But we haven’t forgotten. And we’re not lost.

We were just colonised.

To get back that which cannot be truly forgotten, one simply has to undo the colonisation process piece by piece as it is an illusory and noisy overlay that has us 'looking and thinking in the wrong direction and in the wrong way.’

The Good News is - it’s not permanent. We can undo it.

Conclusion

In Human Rights and in Indigenous Rights, there is the interesting notion of ‘The Right to Self Determination’ and the notion of ‘(Security and) Liberty of the Person.’

Though in truth these are unrealised, they reflect some of the essence of Nativity, which, in the context of these Rights is the realised right to decide ones path as a product of the conversation life, the divine, the seen and unseen, is having with one, both from within and without.’

With one ancient guiding principle: everyone is afforded security and liberty of the person, unless such a person encroaches on the security and liberty of others (which is really the essence of most law.) And in pagan parlance ‘an it harm none, do as thou will. shall be the whole of the law.’

In time, I will be taking action based on these Rights, and from my Nativity. If you are interested to see what that is, and where that goes, subscribe to the newsletter below and I’ll share updates as we go!

Thanks for reading. There are aspects of Nativity not addressed here as this is simply an introduction to the subject.

Natural Decolonisation is not a past cultural iteration that is reverted to, but a newly emergent, evolutionary, healing process that is exploring a new set of values, beliefs and sense of relationship in and with the world and each other. It is a newly emergent sense of rich living and what is important in life – of what is valuable and has value, of a different direction and way.

While some of those resurfacing values and behaviours may have existed before, what has never existed is Native bloodlines who have integrated and ‘healed’ colonisation. The new levels of sensitivity, awareness and insight being brought to bear by pioneering, naturally decolonising alternatives are bringing not a old native culture, but a new one.

One born from within, from experience, from sensitivity, from listening to the world and from courageous listening to what speaks to us in truly mysterious, yet intimately personal ways.

All the work on this site is to help with the hacking and dismantling of the colonised mind within you, to enable your own Native Intelligence to shine through, and from it, YOUR Nativity.