Introduction

By: Seth Martin

I.
The songs, interviews, essays, letters, pictures and works of art and poetry in this volume overflow with rage, joy, and liberating truth-telling. There are voices from many lands represented here. However, the heavy focus on the interwoven struggles for decolonization and liberation in Korea and Indigenous North America reflects my own relationships with lands, people, and struggles. I am deeply grateful that so many loved ones responded to this call by offering these gifts to fan the flames of our resistance and solidarity. Also, I am by calling a musician, not an academic. The emphasis on music, art, and “real voice” types of textual presentations such as long interviews was intentional. What is decolonization, incarnation, and liberation if honest tongues are not loosed and heard, vibrant colors are not unleashed and basked in, and prophetic, pulsating music is not there to soak and reinvigorate dry and withered hearts? I am humbled and grateful beyond words to have been given the honor and responsibility of guest editing this volume. The voices and perspectives presented below are richly diverse, and at times one might even feel they contradict each other. Yet all are filled, I believe, with the spirit of liberation we need, and each has something to offer in the struggle to decolonize our minds and bodies and the lands and narratives that give us life. The trees clap their hands. The Earth groans. May Creator guide each reader to what their heart and hands most need.

-Seth Martin (Seth Mountain, 이산)

November 1st, 2020

All Hallow’s Day



II.
From the original Call for Submissions, released in June 2020 (written in a voice primarily to and from self-identifying Christians):

Long before I ever heard of Christ, or saw a white man, I had learned from an untutored woman the essence of morality. With the help of dear Nature herself, she taught me things simple but of mighty import. I knew God. I perceived what goodness is. I saw and loved what is really beautiful. Civilization has not taught me anything better! 
-Ohíye S'a (Charles Eastman), The Soul of the Indian (1911) 

We want to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym. -Eve Tuck and Y. Wayne Yang, "Decolonization is not a metaphor" (2012) 

Let us admit it, the settler knows perfectly well that no phraseology can be a substitute for reality. 
-Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)

To seriously advocate for decolonization in any way, shape or form, is to take a fiercely moral stance. It is to declare allegiance in a very real war at this moment. But allegiance to what? And to whom? It is to acknowledge and protest not only the continuance but the thriving of past forms of colonization through the nations, institutions, religions, power imbalances, behaviors and dominant narratives that now take on different names. These colonizing forces remain protected by silence as they continue to make war on all living peoples, lands, cultures and ways of thinking that conflict with their universalizing missions. 

Decolonization demands we take a side. It is to choose solidarity amidst chaos, with suffering people and land, against comfort and death. For any coming from the dominant culture, it is to choose to die in order to live. "Unless a grain of wheat should first fall to the ground and die..." Yes, but it is also to know and act upon the knowledge that no real "self" can be found while living and pursuing a dream that necessitates the perpetuation of false history and the silence or death of all who do not fit in the dominant narrative. It is a refusal to continue "imagining autonomy on stolen land" (Adam Lewis, 2016). 

Furthermore, for those of us identifying as radical persons of Christian faith, we also see and acknowledge that, when held up and viewed through a lens of decolonization, much of what we continue to embody and even fight for as Christians reeks of—and perpetuates—the evil of the colonizing mindsets, structures, and violent legacies we openly claim to abhor and resist. 

We lament the colonization of our minds and actions, and seek to decolonize. This is not only for our liberation but in solidarity with all who the Church's past actions and inactions have continued to oppress. We seek liberation and incarnation together, and understand that to do so by calling for decolonization demands at the very start something akin to repentance. It begins with acknowledging that colonization remains in and around us, and that uprooting and destroying it will certainly mean uprooting and destroying things in ourselves we have learned to cling to and protect as essential to our identities—as people of a colonizers' faith tradition and as willing and unwilling participants in the legacy of spiritual, mental and physical colonization. 

We firmly believe that decolonization of land, mind, and body are necessary for true liberation and justice to grow in and through all of us. But how do we get there? And how is the call for decolonization a distinct form of liberation from other forms of transformation? We come to this issue in a posture of shame, rage, sorrow, and repentance, to learn and follow, not to teach and lead. 

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Seth Martin

(Seth Mountain, 이산) is an anarchistic poet, essayist, and folksinger. He comes from Irish and Italian immigrant settlers and Cherokee people, among others, and is a tribal member of The Cherokee Nation. He grew up as an immigrant settler on Cowlitz Land in the (US) Pacific Northwest, and now lives in Korea with his partner, Lee Nan Young. 
Seth can be reached through this Journal or through his website:  sethmartinandthemenders.bandcamp.com