The Greatest Threat to Colonization is the Indigenous Woman: Part 1, Black Liberation

To understand a world in the midst of racial, social, and environmental transformation we must look into the belly of the beast and work to understand where these negative forces come from, how it functions, and its agenda. The forces of colonization and white supremacy are those forces. And the greatest threat to that is WHO WE WERE BEFORE those forces came in. Here’s part one of how I’ve lived through and view this battle.

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What I’m about to share with you is what my eyes have seen, what words I’ve listened to, what life experiences have taught me about our humanity and the state of the world today. My views are a result of the guidance from many of my teachers and elders, schooling, educating youth, as well as my abilities to see things this way. I’m grateful fro all of those gifts and I welcome dialogue around this post.

MY LIVED EXPERIENCE

When I was in my mid-20’s I was dating a Black man. My father caught wind of this and give me the silent treatment for about 6 months. I had no idea what his reason was for the silence. Then my mother asked me one day, “Do you have a black boyfriend?” I confirmed. And the next thing she said shocked me, but didn’t throw me off completely. She said, “Well Dad’s not talking to you because he doesn’t want Black in the family.” My response was, “Wow, you both are racist!” I felt safe enough to continue with her by telling her, “I don’t get why you think this wouldn’t happen when you raised me here in the Bay Area.” Even though in the back of my head I knew racism was very much alive in the Filipino culture, and in particular, anti-Blackness. 

This was a “crucible moment” in my life that taught me that anti-Blackness was global. Because up until that point I was a brown girl navigating my life as a Filipino American. I wasn’t yet exposed to the histories and the stories of anti-Blackness outside of the United States. But it was clear to me in that moment in my parents’ faces, in their words, knowing their migration story, and the belief in anti-Blackness that it was an ideology they adopted from somewhere else. But where did they learn this? Back home in the Philippines? Or was it something they learned after immigrating here? I didn’t care to ask at that time. I was too disgusted and disappointed. 

We never resolved anything around this situation, but I knew that for myself, resolution was not even an option. I had to just continue on with my life however I chose because I chose my free will. 

OUR TRAVELING DNA

As a socially conscious educator and ecologist, my lens has always been one of curiosity and connection. I see things in terms of systems, inter-relatedness, and interdependence. So, personally as I went about my years teaching our youth, expanding my experiences, and getting to know me, who I am, and where I come from (because a lot of my work placed me in direct interaction with racism), I decided to take my own DNA test for ethnicity. This is where I began to understand my family’s history as well as our identity as it related to colonization. 

My initial DNA results

While I was waiting for my results to come in from Ancestry.com I began asking my parents how much they knew about our ancestors. To my surprise, neither of them could tell me much more past their grandparents’ names (my great grandparents). Not much was recorded. If I wanted to dig deeper into their stories I’d have to actually go to the Philippines, maybe go to the Catholic Church for records. What was also striking for me was to see that all of my relatives had Spanish names, not Malay or indigenous in origin. 

A sudden wave of emotion and information came to me and I realized

(1) they lost so much including the ability to retain indigenous names (i.e., because of assimilation), 

(2) what they endured compared to what I’m enduring in this life was so much more deeper and heavier on their soul and 

(3) what they endured brought me and my family to be here, now. I couldn’t help but be sad about this. But it also ignited more curiosity about ancestry, migration stories, and global race relations. 

Shortly after my results came in I picked up this book by Christine Kenneally, “The Invisible History of the Human Race”. It was common knowledge to me that all of us have that  <1% African DNA in us, but she confirmed it for me when she opens her Chapter 12 on The History of the World, 

“When you visualize the human tree, picture its trunk firmly planted in African soil. Modern humans emerged there several hundred thousand years ago and lived only there from 250,000 years ago for at least 150,000 years - much longer span of time than we have lived across the globe.” 

The chapter goes on to describe where this <1% comes from and how the band of humans that made the migration out of the land we know of as Africa remains in our DNA today. Kenneally goes on and says, 

“Around sixty thousand years ago a small band of them - perhaps not much more than one thousand to two thousand five hundred individuals- went traveling. We don’t know why they left or if they had any sense that they were going somewhere new, but we do know their decision kicked off one of the biggest events in the history of the human genome.

Those who remained are the ancestors of most of the one billion people who live in Africa today. The small band that left are the ancestors of everyone else in the world, and the suite of NDA they carried was only a small sample of the variety of human genomes that existed in Africa at the time of their departure. Indeed, we know the migration occurred because even now we can see that the genomes of everyone in the world outside of Africa is a subset of the genomic variation still found in Africa.”

So basically what that book was telling me was that we all come from the land which we call Africa. Which means, WE ALL COME FROM A MOTHER FROM AFRICA. As trivial as it may seem, realizing it like this blew my mind!

ANTI-BLACKNESS

So, we all come from a Black mother. The DNA shows us that she is our most common ancestor, whoever that woman was on the land we know of as Africa. But this revelation always brought me back to this perplexing ideology of racism that globally, being Black, especially was bad. 

Why is it that you can find anti-Blackness around the globe and ingrained in the beliefs of many cultures? Because I couldn’t see that there were other examples of other races being seen as so inferior in the same way. Well, the first reason is probably obvious: colonization.

THE COLONIZED MIND

There’s no other way colonization can happen successfully unless you also control the minds of the people that come from that land. Not only in Africa, but in all colonized countries (most land masses) if you don’t have pride in yourself and the land you come from, you won’t fight for it. 

Colonization’s goal is to separate people from their connection to their land therefore severing a connection to themselves & their identity. This is how the colonizer can take all the power over that land and its people. 

For Africa, it’s our human origin. It’s where our expansion to create and populate the rest of the world comes from. 

There is a certain power that exists when you know you come from a story that began creating this world. 

And that’s the type of power the colonizer DOESN’T want you to have.

The second reason is our need to …

RECONCILE WITH OURSELVES

This one is the more spiritual and existential reason.  

It wasn’t until I had this frank conversation with a peer healer and Ancestral Healing practitioner, Dumbei Okonji, where I realized what the ultimate teaching was around anti-Blackness. I shared what I knew about migration, DNA, indigeneity, connections to our land and ancestry, and asked her frankly,

“But why Black? Why do we hate on Blackness so much and why is it uniquely global? I just don’t get it.” 

And her profound response, 

“Well when it comes down to it, we just don’t like who we are.”

Knowing this, I began to understand the deeply seeded weaponry of self hate. The more we choose to accept and adopt all forms of self hate, the more we perpetuate our separation from each other, fulfilling the colonizer’s agenda. 

BLACK LIBERATION

When the evidence showed me the origins of humans coming firmly from Africa, I began to understand the importance of Black Liberation. 

To support and advocate for Black Liberation is to connect us back to who we are as humans. 
And this can be a form of radical healing

Knowing the history of Black people over time, what they’ve endured, their ancestral story, and the impacts that continue to destroy and perpetuate destruction due to enslavement and colonization, lives within their bones, blood, and DNA of their descendants. WE are all their descendants. 

Over time, as our origin from Africa migrated out to populate the rest of the land globally, our lineages began with our own indigenous mothers, giving each lineage their own origin story. Each of our lineages have their own grandeur family tree deeply rooted and planted in the land that we each came from. This also helped me understand the importance of indigeneity as the greatest threat to colonization, but that’s for Part 2!

So, in partial conclusion, this exploration of my own individual identity has opened up so much learning and unlearning about who I am and how my identity can show up event in how we relate with each other.

I hope you’re able to gain a little bit more for yourself after my share.

Please comment and add to the conversation in the comments below!

In Part 2 we’ll go even deeper into the concept and cover:
INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY & THE INDIGENOUS WOMAN

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Nothing Left To Justify

Everyday, every week, more and more I’m connecting today’s current events as metaphors about ourselves and our place in this world, identifying them as our “moments of truth” . For instance, this summer the gruesome killing of our young princess, Nia Wilson gave me the most clear message about what this tragedy is telling us about ourselves. Let me break it down for you, based on what I experienced here as an Oakland resident:

A couple of days before her killing, a local restaurant posted a call for a community counter action march from their venue to an expected meeting by a right-winged group, The Proud Boys. As the the hype intensified and community began answering the call to hold a counter, peaceful celebration of unity, I felt a sense of sadness and disappointment. Because what I actually saw were people in the streets screaming in anger towards the police and the flared up rage against the system being played out once again here at home. The sadness and disappointment was really rooted in my fatigue of all the death and violence happening here and questioning when will we actually stop resisting and be still to think about an actual way forward? I’m tired of seeing the resisting, the fighting, and the clashing. I’m not empowered by that anymore.

Then as I woke up the next morning to the horrific news that another young black life was violently taken at a BART station by a white man, I realized that this became the real moment of truth. Because as the day progressed, speculations and headlines in media questioned whether there was a connection to Nia’s murderer and the visiting Proud Boys. “Word around town was that he was one of them”, some of the posts read. But what we would soon learn about the killer was that he actually was a local resident who’s spent many years in and out of jail and had some mental health issues, unaffiliated with the right-winged group. So presumptively,

racism wasn’t the justification. It was mental illness.  

(AND side note: I believe racism is a mental illness)

So can we even blame mental illness for this attack? It can’t be blamed AND serve as a way forward! Where does that blame lead us to anyway? Another hurt or attack on another, probably. So, the big takeaway for me, with respect to this particular story, was that we as a people HAVEN'T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO THE RIGHT THING. We aren’t listening to the core of the issue and taking action in the right way. Blame is NOT the name of the game, but the STILLNESS, finding the humanity of the situation is where we must be to open up a path forward with healing that leads to a solution.

Treyvon Martin’s parents spoke about what they’re advocating for isn’t a race issue, it’s an issue about right and wrong and that ultimately it’s about not hurting each other. When Nia’s family spoke during the press conference shortly after her murder, they gave us clues as to what we should be paying more attention to. At least, that's what my deep listening was telling me. They said, “stand down, don’t react”. They called on community to stand down and be still [while the suspect was still out there].

My intuition’s bottom line from all this? Well, since I'm an intuitive connected to Earth, the way I'm seeing this is...

The more we pay attention to REACTING to these incidents as we have been doing in resisting, the more and more gruesome the next incidents of violence will be

And violence in every form; whether between people or in the extreme violence of Mother Nature onto this planet. The pains and hurts caused by humans onto each other are not separate from the Earthly destructions happening on our planet right now. That the more we continue on the way we have been with each other, the more vicious our environment will respond with its own destruction. It's all connected, I believe. 

So when will we as a nation, as a community realize that we need to be present with these realities and awaken to it FIRST before taking action? When will non-resistance be the expected next step after harm? To me, being present means going INWARD to “see”, to “listen deeply” to what our community leaders are telling us, requesting of us even, to do. Going inward means really opening up in a way where you can see these heinous crimes and the people who commit them as sharing something in common with you. Going inward means seeing the destructive natural events as connected to your own rage or exploitation of resources.

Because if we can't reach that connectedness with ourselves, the people around us, and the land we live on, 

There will be nothing left of ourselves to justify our actions towards one another

There will be nothing left of this planet to justify our misuse and disconnection to our planet and all its beings

There will be nothing left for us to LOOK TO, to justify why things happen the way they do

There will be nothing left to look at but each other

So in conclusion,

what are the first steps in your awakening or awareness of our interconnectedness of ourselves and our place in this world? I realize its a journey, as it has been for me. That some of the beginning steps include

• taking that difficult look at yourself and asking where the hurt exists?

• what kind of hurt is it?

• and what's available for me to begin the healing process?

Because when we begin to heal ourselves, we begin to heal those around us and the land in which we walk on.

The time is NOW, to understand our world more deeply. The time is NOW, to understand ourselves more deeply. The time is now because the world in which we know it is having its veil lifted. The systems and ways of thinking that are misaligned with the laws of nature are being broken down, so are the areas of land that have not been cared for sustainably. 

I truly believe the way forward begins with YOU.

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MEET THE COACH

Raynelle Rino, CPC

A long time social sector professional, Raynelle began her career in the sciences as an ecology field researcher then moved onto environmental education and social justice at the grassroots organizational level in the Bay Area. Her love for nature and youth development brought her to teach in unique settings like alternative high schools, environmental justice neighborhoods, parks, and juvenile justice facilities.

In 2016 Raynelle started Rino Consulting Solutions, a nature-based consulting firm that provides coaching and consulting services for professionals and other businesses. It’s mission is to support and inspire the leaders of today to live in the confidence of their identities as they move through a world in the midst of social, racial, and environmental transformation. Raynelle is a graduate of Humboldt State University with a BS in Biology, a Rising Leaders and 2042 Today fellow, and lives in Oakland with her husband and daughter.