How Collective Amnesia feeds Colonialism

Dive into an exploration of collective memory, and the ways in which its erasure feeds the roots of colonialism. What does it mean to forget as a collective? And what might it mean to remember, not just with the mind, but through the body, the land, and ancestry?

You’re invited to trace the lineage of collective amnesia, from the systemic silencing of Earth-honoring cosmologies to the colonization of time itself. Through presence and deep listening, it’s possible to connect ancestral grief, embodied memory, and the unprocessed trauma perpetrated by the psychologies of empire and colonialism. 

This episode is a call to remember as an act of revolution and evolution, an opportunity to reclaim what has been buried, and to step into a new paradigm anchored in reverence and reciprocity through remembering.

Resources mentioned: My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem

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Intro & Outro Music: Coniferous Forest by orangery on Pixabay.

Transcript

Unknown 0:26
Hi, my friends, and welcome to this new episode of root and rise this space where we slow down and tune into what's alive beneath the noise, to The land and to the soul and to the body's unconscious memory.

Unknown 0:45
I'm Rohini Walker, and today we're diving into something that may feel a bit challenging, but that's also incredibly alive and ready to be explored, especially as we move through the turbulence of this great turning that we're currently in into a new paradigm and a new cycle of time.

Unknown 1:14
What I want to talk about today is something that wants to be remembered in our bones and in our cells. I want to talk about how collective amnesia feeds colonialism and maybe more importantly, what does it truly mean to remember?

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So let's just pause for a breath before we go on.

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Let it land you here, in your body, in your bones, in your lineage, in your place,

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because this conversation doesn't start in the history books. It starts with presence and with how our ability to stay rooted in the present

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gets severed when memory is erased.

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So what is collective amnesia?

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It's more than just forgetting. It's an organized, systemic wiping out of stories of peoples of cosmologies of grief.

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And even when it's not a total erasure, it's often a silencing, a marginalization, a pushing aside. It's the cutting of a cord that once tethered us to ancestral memory, to the earth, to land based, place based, ways of knowing and of being. And that's no accident. It's been a tool and a strategy. It's been a deliberate means of domination, because to colonize is about the theft of land, and it's also about distorting and reshaping memory and our capacity to belong.

Unknown 3:14
It's about convincing us that our past was primitive and that what came before was irrelevant. It's about colonizing time itself,

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replacing the cyclical rhythms of nature and of our bodies with a linear path called progress.

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It's about colonizing our relationship with time so that there's no relationship with it, but a sense of feeling victimized by it.

Unknown 3:48
Colonialism survives through forgetting, forgetting that we belong to the earth and that our bodies are of the Earth, forgetting that rivers and forests and rocks and trees, they're all alive, and that there's spirit in everything, that sacredness that's woven into the mundane and the and the everyday. It's a forgetting of that, and also it's the enforced forgetting of trauma, of the grief and rage that got buried so deep and passed down generation after generation because it was too heavy and too dangerous and too inconvenient For empire.

Unknown 4:38
This kind of forgetting is extremely useful to systems of harm, because if we can't remember that land was once tended to and sung to with care, and if we can't remember that our

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ancestors lived in reciprocity and in reverence. If we lose those ancestral stories that shaped our values and ways of being and relating to land and place, then it becomes easy to believe the lie that domination is normal, that extraction is inevitable that there's no other way.

Unknown 5:23
We can't see and feel our way out of systems of power over into ones of power with

Unknown 5:34
so we end up accepting conquest as development, and we call it progress. We end up silently accepting that war is a path to peace and that there's no other way. And maybe even we forget that colonization and the colonial systems it gave birth to were and are acts of terror, and once we're that far gone, we become numb.

Unknown 6:05
We become disconnected from body, from land, and there's an underlying knowing anxiety, or maybe even dread, but we're unsure why it's there.

Unknown 6:19
So we grasp at consumerism, at distractions and addictions, anything to stifle that primal scream inside us that wants to say something is deeply wrong.

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And instead of facing it, the dominant culture gaslights us and tells us that this is just the way things are, we're forced to normalize the disease in our psyches and bodies, which are calls for us to remember, and we keep clocking in and clocking out, except these days, there seems to be less and less clocking out. We're always on and always plugged in and always consuming information and desensitized to the body signals we keep feeding a machine that thrives on our amnesia, because when we forget that our value is infinitely more than our labor, more than our productivity, more than the numbers and metrics that measure our worth and value, we end up complying with systems that drain the life force from us and without memory and without connection to the Earth's memory, we become isolated and untethered and cut off from deep time, from the ecology of larger cycles of time, and from the long arc of belonging, and Without that felt sense of larger belonging, we become susceptible to domination because we've lost the ground that we stand on, literally and spiritually.

Unknown 8:11
We even begin to internalize the soulless logics of empire, including things like scientific materialism, which is itself an expression of colonial psychologies, we forget that other ways, ways that don't cause this gaping existential dread and sense of alienation from self and from nature have always been possible.

Unknown 8:40
So let's talk about memory, and about whose gets preserved and whose gets erased. Because memory, like land, can be colonized.

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Our bodies remember a different rhythm of time, one

Unknown 8:57
aligned with seasons and moon cycles, that memory still lives in us, because we are nature.

Unknown 9:06
For women, especially our bodies are not designed to operate within the artificial linear constructs of time and always on productivity, we embody the cyclical and the non linear, and our bodies know and remember this, no matter how much we try to silence them and make them conform to hyper masculinized ways of living.

Unknown 9:33
But regardless of our gender, the body's memories of nature aligned rhythms of time have been paved over and replaced by linear time, where we're expected to be productive pretty much all the time or otherwise consuming in some way. This is how we measure success.

Unknown 9:55
We do this to the land as well, of course, to our larger body by degrading soil health and biodiversity through overproduction and chemically induced industrial over farming, because we believed the lie that regenerative ways of farming and food production would be inefficient, and our relationship with time has also been degraded and reduced to the 40 hour work week, the way in which every normal quote, unquote, productive person has to operate in order to be successful in this world, in order to keep the machine Running, although nowadays, 40 hours is often considered the minimum we're expected to give of our time.

Unknown 10:46
Most of us don't realize that the 40 hour work week was in fact, invented to keep the machine running by Henry Ford in 1926 for his factory workers, and then it was later made into law in 1938 it was 40 hours so that employees would have the weekend to be good consumers and start the same process all over again on Monday morning.

Unknown 11:15
It wasn't about balance and about the cyclical rhythms of time as governed by nature. It was about maximizing productivity.

Unknown 11:25
It was about creating just enough rest so workers could consume and reset before starting all over again. Human beings became reduced to workers this machine driven memory of time is what has been preserved, and the notion that our time and energy are only of value when they're being exchanged for labor, this is the unnatural normal that we're told to live by, and the more we override that deeper body knowing the more that primal scream inside us grows louder, which we try to numb out with all the endless distractions available to us.

Unknown 12:14
And let's take a moment to consider whose stories we see in textbooks, whose ancestors get statues, whose languages are considered proper, whose cosmologies are mocked as woo, woo and unscientific, rather than recognized as deep wells of wisdom.

Unknown 12:38
Colonialism isn't just about geography, it's internal.

Unknown 12:44
It shapes the psyche and we can feel this, and the body above all can feel this.

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It teaches us that memory begins with Empire, and that the sacred lives in dogmatic doctrine and not in the soil. It teaches us that civilization is about conquest and domination and Empire,

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instead of about kinship with nature.

Unknown 13:14
And here's something that we don't often talk about in all this, colonizers lose out in all of this too, because colonialism didn't just strip colonized people of their life ways. It also severed European settlers from their own ancestral memory.

Unknown 13:35
Many descendants of European settlers have no idea where their people came from and what they believed in before Christianity and the Holy Roman Empire colonized Europe,

Unknown 13:47
there's a lineage of unconscious, unresolved trauma from the terror of the mass burnings and inquisitions of their ancestors, who were all originally indigenous European pagans, there's no collective memory of how these ancestors, like indigenous people all over the world, lived in kinship with land and with time before being wiped out, displaced or reconditioned by religious imperialism.

Unknown 14:20
That trauma was never resolved, it was buried and was passed down through the generations via genetic memory.

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And when those descendants crossed oceans in search of freedom from the oppressions of European imperialism, they brought their trauma with them and projected it outward in the form of violence and genocide on the indigenous people of the colonized lands.

Unknown 14:50
That unprocessed ancestral grief and rage of the European settler is deep and often unconscious, and it shows up as defensiveness and fragility, which are essentially trauma responses, because when you've forgotten who you were before Empire, you cling hard to the only identity you've got.

Unknown 15:16
Let's just pause here and just Feel into that for a moment that truth, that unresolved, unconscious trauma begets more trauma, and how that has directed the course of human history.

Unknown 15:40
Intergenerational trauma didn't start on colonized lands. It goes back to the Holy Roman Empire and to the burning of witches and heretics and to the persecuting torture of inquisitions.

Unknown 15:58
It goes back to the forced conversions and cultural erasure of Earth, honoring people in Europe and to their land based, nature based, Goddess based traditions, which were branded evil and satanic.

Unknown 16:14
And all that unprocessed, unacknowledged trauma gets carried forward and projected out is violence onto those who are different, in this case, the indigenous people of colonized lands, who were considered evil and savage and unholy, in the same way that the original European pagan ancestors of The colonial settlers were, and let's not forget the mass capture and displacement of African people from their lands and their languages and cultures and their enslavement by settlers in the new world.

Unknown 16:54
And here too unresolved intergenerational wounds and unconscious, repressed rage from the bodies and nervous systems of European settlers were taken out on enslaved African people. If we were to map this lineage of trauma, as res Muhammad Akim powerfully does in his book, my grandmother's hands the origins of the wounds inflicted on black and brown bodies by European settlers, which have then been unconsciously passed down through generations of black and brown bodies as genetic memory. The origins of these unresolved traumas can be traced back to the persecution and cultural erasure of European, indigenous pagans by Empire.

Unknown 17:49
So what now

Unknown 17:53
we remember?

Unknown 17:55
And remembering is an act of revolution and evolution. We remember, not just intellectually, but through ritual and mythology and through our dreams and our emotions and our grief, and most importantly, in and through our bodies, which hold the memories of generations.

Unknown 18:20
We invoke remembering by connecting with and listening to the ancestors, the ones who understood, on a cellular level, that land is not a resource but a relative. We remember this ancient, universal remembering through them, and we remember that time is not a straight line, but a spiral, and that we are never alone in this world, but forever participating in a web of kinship with all manner of sentient beings.

Unknown 18:56
And from this place of remembering, we begin to re member ourselves to stitch ourselves back into the fabric that the consciousness and psychologies of empire try to rip apart,

Unknown 19:13
but which our bodies held onto as Deep genetic memory waiting for us to consciously remember, and possibilities open up when we remember, because we begin to see and feel clearly, not just the trauma, but the beauty that infuses everything.

Unknown 19:35
We begin to see the beauty and wisdom of intact cultures, of indigenous, technologies of Earth, rooted ways of knowing that were never lost, just buried and forgotten.

Unknown 19:50
We become capable of reverence again. And reverence changes everything.

Unknown 19:56
It changes how we relate to land and to each other and to our own bodies and psyches.

Unknown 20:04
It allows us to move from domination into dialog and from extraction into relational exchange. We move from wanting to build empires to creating and stewarding ecosystems as we move into the mystery of this new cycle of time,

Unknown 20:27
let's compost this collective amnesia and call up the courage of our hearts and our bodies to remember And to embody this remembering in our choices and our words and our actions,

Unknown 20:45
let's not steward in what's emerging from a place of forgetting.

Unknown 20:54
So to close, I invite you to contemplate these simple questions and not to rush to find answers, but to slowly feel into the layers and let the answers be felt and known and revealed in their own time.

Unknown 21:13
Where have I forgotten?

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Where am I ready to remember?

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What am I ready to remember?

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And let that remembering be a slow and tender act of reclamation, not just for yourself, but for all of us collectively, because to remember is to return to remember in this way is to re root and rise.

Unknown 21:47
So as we near the end of this episode,

Unknown 21:52
let's drop into a breath again. You

Unknown 22:04
Rohini, thank you for being here. Thank you for being willing to listen and to participate in this conversation and to slowly remember our forgetting keeps empire and systems of harm and domination and violence in place in the world and in our bodies.

Unknown 22:30
And if this episode has stirred up any emotions and sensations in you, I encourage you to move the energy by allowing the body to move or to shake, dismantling the psychology of empire and reclaiming our sovereignty can happen in the subtlest of ways. So as always, I encourage you to feel into what's true and what's resonant for you, and to release what isn't regardless of what any external sources of information say, you get to feel what's correct and in alignment for you, and you may disagree with some or all of what I've spoken to in this Episode, and if so great, take that as a sign to explore deeper into what feels true for you, and whether you agree or disagree, I'd love to hear your reflections and insights. Ways to connect with me or go deeper with this work are all in the show notes.

Unknown 23:40
And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to share it.

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I'm not plugged into meta social media empire, ie Facebook and Instagram, and I'm not on the X and Tiktok behemoths either.

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Instead, I'm joining I've joined the small but growing rank of visionary heretics curious about experiencing life differently, doing life differently, and dissolving all of the survival based narratives and shoulds around the imperialism of these social media platforms. So your organic sharing means a lot to me, and of course, please subscribe and rate and leave a review if you feel called to

Unknown 24:33
so that's all for me. For today, as always, may your journey be rooted in soul, and your Rising be nourished by the Earth, until next time

Transcribed by https://otter.ai